KABUL: Afghan President Ashraf Ghani on Sunday announced a cease-fire with Taliban insurgents from Monday to mark the Muslim Eid Al-Adha holiday, despite the heavy fighting seen over recent days in the central city of Ghazni.
“The conditional cease-fire will start tomorrow and it will continue as long as the Taliban preserves and respects it,” he said in an Afghan Independence Day ceremony in Kabul.
“We call on the leadership of the Taliban to welcome the wishes of Afghans for a long-lasting and real peace,” he said.
A senior official in Ghani’s office said the “conditional” cease-fire would run for three months.
It was not immediately clear whether the Taliban had accepted Ghani’s call for a truce during Eid, the annual Islamic feast of sacrifice, which officially begins on Tuesday.
This month the Taliban fought an intense battle with Afghan forces to control the strategically important city of Ghazni.
At least 150 soldiers and 95 civilians were killed in a five-day siege, which eased last week when Afghan soldiers backed by US forces pushed back the heavily armed rebels.
The Taliban said in a statement that they had control over half of Afghanistan.
Blasts, suicide attacks and clashes between hard-line Islamic militants and Afghan forces killed over 1,600 civilians in the first six months of the year, the highest number in the past decade, the United Nations said in a statement on Sunday.
Ghani’s cease-fire announcement was limited to the Taliban and excluded other militant groups such as Daesh.
Afghanistan announces Muslim Eid holiday cease-fire with Taliban
Afghanistan announces Muslim Eid holiday cease-fire with Taliban
- “We call on the leadership of the Taliban to welcome the wishes of Afghans for a long-lasting and real peace,” President Ashraf Ghani said
- Ghani’s cease-fire announcement was limited to the Taliban and excluded other militant groups such as Daesh
German authorities arrest five men suspected of planning Christmas market attack
BERLIN: German authorities have arrested five men suspected of being terrorist militants planning an attack on a Christmas market in southern Bavaria, police and prosecutors said in a joint statement. There has been a series of vehicle ramming attacks in Germany since a militant rammed a hijacked truck into a Christmas market in central Berlin in 2016. Last December several people were killed by an attack in Magdeburg.
Three Moroccan nationals aged 22, 28 and 30, an Egyptian national aged 56 and a 37-year-old Syrian were detained on Friday at the Suben border crossing between Germany and Austria, according to the joint statement late on Saturday.
Investigators believed that the men intended to drive a vehicle into a crowded market in the Dingolfing-Landau area with the aim of killing or injuring as many people as possible, the statement said, adding that authorities suspected a militant motive.
