Mullah Abdul Latif Mansoor, the acting minister of the Taliban’s Ministry of Energy and Water, stated that Al-Qaeda is “not a terrorist group, but our brothers.” Mansoor made these remarks during a public gathering in Kunduz on Saturday, October 21st.
Referring to the September 11th, 2001 attacks in the United States, which resulted in the deaths of nearly three thousand people, he said, “They [Al-Qaeda] were Mujahideen and our brothers who reacted to America’s oppression. We did not call them a terrorist group at that time, and we don’t call them that now.”
He emphasized that some other terrorist groups, which aided them in their twenty-year war against the previous Afghan governments and American forces, are also “brothers of Taliban fighters.”
Mansoor further claimed that the Taliban did not receive military support from any country, including Pakistan and Iran, during their two-decade-long war. He stated, “Now, the Taliban are no one’s slaves, and they don’t act on anyone’s orders.”
This statement comes in accordance with a recent report by the United Nations Security Council’s sanctions monitoring committee, which mentioned that the Taliban have deepened their ties with the Al-Qaeda network and Pakistani Taliban.
According to the report, the Taliban have created favorable conditions for the increased activities of various terrorist groups, and the terrorism threat in Afghanistan is rising under the Taliban’s administration.
