'Taliban will be a threat to Central Asia and the world'
Darpan News Desk IANS, 27 Aug, 2021 10:35 AM
The Taliban militants that have captured Kabul and most of Afghanistan "will be a threat to Central Asia and the world", a senior member of the Panjshir Valley-based National Resistance Front of Afghanistan (NRF) told The Moscow Times.
"Russia should be concerned about the rise of the Taliban. The country will become a terrorist hub that will endanger Central Asia and Russia itself," Fahim Dashty told The Moscow Times by phone from the Panjshir Valley, where his resistance group has gathered as the country's last holdout against the Taliban.
The Panjshir region is famous for having successfully fought off invasions by Soviet forces in the Soviet-Afghan war from 1979-1989 as well as by the Taliban in the 1990s.
The NRF is currently led by Ahmad Massoud, the son of Ahmad Shah Massoud, a powerful guerrilla commander who led the resistance against the former Soviet Union.
Dashty was a close ally of Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was assassinated in a suicide bombing instigated by Al Qaeda and the Taliban on September 9, 2001, an attack in which he was also injured.
He now acts as spokesperson for the slain commander's son.
On Wednesday, Russia's Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said the greatest threat posed by the Taliban was the "enormous" amount of arms the groups had captured as American troops hastily exited the country.
"The first and major threat is that the Taliban received an enormous amount of weapons. Enormous," Shoigu said, adding that he believed the Islamists now had hundreds of armoured vehicles, aircraft and helicopters.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control last week warned the Delta variant of the virus is so contagious, vaccinated people who do get infected could be just as big a risk to others as people who aren't vaccinated.
The new requirement, which will be phased in over several weeks in August and September, is the most aggressive step the city has taken yet to curb a surge in cases caused by the delta variant.
The findings have the potential to upend past thinking about how the disease is spread. Previously, vaccinated people who got infected were thought to have low levels of virus and to be unlikely to pass it to others. But the new data shows that is not the case with the delta variant.
President Joe Biden is calling on states and local governments to join those that are already handing out dollars for shots. New York, the nation's biggest city, started doling out $100 awards on Friday.
The internal documents also cite studies from Canada, Singapore and Scotland showing that the delta variant may pose a greater risk for hospitalization, intensive care treatment and death than the alpha variant, first detected in the United Kingdom.
