Taliban Warns Turkey, Japan Not to Join the US Crusade

Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit

Kyodo News, Japan - November 1, 2001

http://home.kyodo.co.jp/all/display.jsp?an=20011101227

Taliban attacks Japan's dispatch of SDF

ISLAMABAD, Nov. 1, Kyodo - Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban ambassador
to Pakistan, attacked countries, including Japan, which plan to
dispatch troops to Pakistan and surrounding areas to support the
U.S.-led military assaults on Afghanistan.

Asked about the moves at a press conference in Islamabad, Zaeef said
those who ''support Afghanistan's enemy are also its enemies.''

He also said the fundamentalist Islamic regime now holds ''a few''
citizens of the United States, but he said he has no information
about their identities, where they were picked up or when.

In responding to a question about Turkish and Japanese support for
the U.S., Zaeef said any country supporting the U.S. must be
considered an enemy.

Turkey is rumored to be sending around 90 special forces troops to
Afghanistan to help train Northern Alliance fighters who are trying
to wrest control of the country from the Taliban.

Japan, after passage of a special bill in parliament last week, is
dispatching warships to waters off Pakistan to assist with search and
rescue and logistic missions for the U.S.-led coalition that has been
bombing Afghanistan for more than three weeks.

Zaeef also rejected any suggestion the Taliban would seek
negotiations with the U.S. over the attacks, saying the Taliban has
been ''open'' to talks from the beginning, but the U.S. has
consistently rejected them.

''It is up to them,'' Zaeef said.

The U.S. began bombing Afghanistan after the Taliban refused to
deliver Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden into U.S. hands.

The U.S. claims bin Laden was behind the Sept. 11 suicide attacks on
New York and Washington, while the Taliban says it has not been
furnished with proof bin Laden was involved.

Bin Laden, a hero of the Afghan war against Soviet occupation in the
late 1970s and 1980s, lives in Afghanistan as a Taliban ''guest.''

Others suggest, however, bin Laden actually controls much of the
Taliban leadership and supplies one of its top brigades fighting in
the battles against the Northern Alliance.


 
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