Al Qaeda and Taliban militants are coordinating attacks on Afghan government troops and foreign forces and using increasingly sophisticated, and deadly, weapons, Afghanistan's defence minister said on Friday.The militants, who have launched a string of attacks, including 14 suicide bombings in recent months, were getting their equipment from abroad but Defence Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak declined to speculate on where it was coming from. "It is quite obvious that all the infiltrations to Afghanistan and all the equipment, some of it really technically sophisticated equipment, are supplied from outside Afghanistan," Wardak told Reuters in an interview.
The equipment included high explosive used in roadside bombs and remote-control mechanisms to set off blasts, he said. "We don't have this equipment readily available in Afghanistan," Wardak said.
| But Soviet-era stuff, they've got tons and tons. |
Wardak said he did not know the level of cooperation between al Qaeda and the Taliban, but said Afghan militants were able to help their foreign comrades. "It is a combination ... al Qaeda by itself will not be able to do much," he said. "There are Taliban, there are Haqqani's group, there are Gulbuddin's groups and there are other foreign militant organisations," he said.
Jalaluddin Haqqani is a pro-Taliban militant commander whose forces are active in southeastern Afghanistan. Militants
Wardak said he could not confirm speculation that al Qaeda militants from Iraq might be slipping into Afghanistan from Iran. The militants had lost the ability to confront Afghan and foreign forces, he said, and had changed their tactics to suicide attacks, virtually unknown in Afghanistan until recently.
While Wardak declined to speculate on where militants were getting their weapons from, President Hamid Karzai said he would raise the violence in talks during an official visit to Pakistan this month. "Bombs go off ... the children of Afghanistan suffer," Karzai told a news conference.
Afghanistan could not go on making sacrifices, he said. "This is an issue we will speak about. Both of us should find a solution," said Karzai.