The commander of U.S. Air Force’s Central Command in Qatar declared today that a pressure campaign against the Taliban “will persist until the Taliban reconcile or die.”
In a teleconference briefing from the Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base, Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian said A-10s, MQ-9s and HH-60s have been shifted to Afghanistan to “provide increased air support to the South Asia strategy, as well as ongoing counterterrorism efforts in Afghan-led operations.”
“This plus-up in air power is also producing tangible results as part of a deliberate air campaign that we kicked off in late November to decimate the Taliban’s primary revenue source, narcotics production,” he said. “Like in [Operation Inherent Resolve], where we destroyed the oil production that ISIS depended on to fund their operations, our aim is to choke off the Taliban’s ability to fund its deadly attacks, like the recent ones in Kabul.”
A Taliban bombing at the end of January — conducted with an ambulance as a car bomb — in central Kabul killed more than 100 people. The Taliban argued afterward that by targeting a government building they couldn’t have killed innocent civilians and claimed fake news was skewing casualty reports. They justified an earlier brutal attack on the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul by claiming jihadists “only searched for foreign invaders and left our countrymen alone.”
AAN Staff
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