The Taliban has declared that it has now gained 85 per cent control over Afghanistan’s territory as the US completes its troop pullout from the country.
The revelation was made after a visit by a senior Taliban delegation to Moscow to assure that the terrorist organization’s advances in Afghanistan are not a matter of threat for Russia or its Central Asian allies.
The 85 per cent claim is significantly higher than the Taliban’s previous claims of controlling more than one-third of the country’s 421 districts.
In the last couple of weeks, the Taliban has also grabbed control of Afghanistan’s key border crossings with Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Iran.
However, the Afghanistan government hasn’t responded to this assertion yet.
Hundreds of Afghan soldiers were coercively forced their way across the Afghanistan border to Tajikistan by the Taliban earlier this week.
Russia has a military base in Tajikistan. Hence, the Moscow officials have apprehensions of the Taliban’s growing dominance destabilizing the central Asian countries lying in the north of Afghanistan that was previously under the control of the Soviet Union.
“We will not seize provincial capitals in order not to inflict death on Afghan citizens,” Taliban’s representative Mawlawi Shahabuddin Delawar was quoted in a report by the Associated Press.
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