The Foreign Office has rejected reports that Taliban leader Mulla Omar is in Pakistan and said he is probably leading the Taliban resurgence from Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, Reuters reported.
A Taliban spokesman captured in Afghanistan last week claimed that Omar was living in Pakistan under the protection of Pakistani intelligence. Foreign Office spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam rejected the claim and said Omar was most probably in Kandahar. “We have very regular meetings, intelligence sharing with the US, to some extent with Afghans. Nobody has any information about the whereabouts of Mullah Omar,” she told a weekly news conference in Islamabad. “But, generally, the likely scenario is that he is in Kandahar where he’s marshalling his fighters.”
Staff Report adds: She said Afghan allegations that Pakistan was supporting the was an attempt to “shift the blame for failures inside Afghanistan”. She said over 1.2 million movements take place monthly across the 2,560-kilometre Pakistan-Afghanistan border. She pointed out that despite all its resources, the United States had failed to stop movement on its border with Mexico, and it would be naive to expect Pakistan to fully control the movement of so many people across such a porous border. She said Pakistan had taken a number of measures, such as the introduction of a bio-metric system at the Chaman border check post, to control illegal movements.
Aslam also said terrorist activities were originating in Afghan refugee camps near the border and asked the international community to help relocate them inside Afghanistan. “We have 3 million Afghan refugees and we also suspect that the refugees camps which are close to the border, three or four, are the hub of these activities, undesirable activities,” she said. |