US may not target Taliban after Jan. 2: Official
Iran Press TV
Mon Dec 22, 2014 9:11AM GMT
The US may not target senior Afghan Taliban leaders, including Mullah Omar, and other militants across war-ravaged Afghanistan after January 2, 2014.
Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby said that the US-led forces would not attack senior Taliban leaders after January 2 in Afghanistan unless they posed a definite threat to the US.
"Being a member of the Taliban doesn't mean that the United States is going to prosecute operations against you for that reason alone," Kirby told a recent news briefing in Washington.
The US military official also said non-combatant Taliban members would be spared.
However, Kirby noted that any member of the Taliban who acts against Afghanistan or the US renders himself vulnerable to US attacks.
The remarks come as the US and its allies have put forward a proposal to remove Omar's name from the UN Security Council's terror blacklist.
Meanwhile, senior officials in the US and Britain have floated the idea of making peace with the Taliban - the militant group whose uprooting was ostensibly one of the main objectives of the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan.
Omar, the founder of the Taliban, was Afghanistan's de facto head of state from 1996 to 2001, when he was unseated in the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.
JR/HJL/HRB
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