Monitoring Desk

ISLAMABAD: The Taliban’s interim Defence Minister Mullah Yaqub on Sunday has claimed that the United States drones were entering the war-torn country through Pakistan.

At a press conference in Kabul, Yaqub and Army Chief Mullah Fasih Uddin talked about how the ministry had done over the past year. Yaqub said, “We hadn’t caught all the routes of the drones, but our intelligence told us that the US drones were coming in through Pakistan.”

“We demand that Pakistan not let the US use its air space,” he said, adding that the radar system of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) was destroyed when the US left the country in August of last year.

The defence minister also said that there are now 150,000 soldiers in the IEA’s national army, which is made up of eight border groups of 3,000 people each.

Yaqub also said that all neighbouring countries had to give back their helicopters and planes, and that no one would be allowed to station their military equipment on their land.

In response to questions, he said that the investigation into the death of Al-Qaeda leader Ayman-al-Zawahiri, who was killed on July 31 by a CIA drone strike in Kabul, is still going on and has not yet been finished.

“The United States is breaking the Doha agreement and Afghanistan’s sovereignty in a big way,” he said.

Before, Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, told the media that the war-torn country had complained to the US government about their use of drones in Afghanistan’s airspace.

The fact that the Al-Qaeda leader was killed by a US drone strike shows that the US has the ability to kill high-value targets from far away, and most importantly, without putting any US troops on the ground in Afghanistan.

His death has made people wonder how the CIA did what they did. After the US-led foreign forces left Afghanistan, the CIA has no base there or in Pakistan, where the US ran operations after the 9/11 attacks.

People thought that Pakistan might have had something to do with getting rid of the al-Qaeda leader. But a government source strongly denied rumours that the drone might have flown from Pakistan and that the US used Pakistan’s airspace.