MOSCOW, July 20. /TASS/. No evidence exists verifying any attempts by the Taliban (outlawed in Russia) to cross Afghanistan’s border with Uzbekistan or Tajikistan, Special Russian Presidential Representative and Director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Second Asian Department Zamir Kabulov said on Tuesday.
"There is not a single iota of evidence demonstrating that the Taliban’s units have crossed the Tajik or Uzbek border or have even attempted to do that," Kabulov said at an online discussion at the Valdai international discussion club.
"You have mentioned over 100 Afghan government troops who abandoned their positions and crossed the border into the territory of Uzbekistan but were forced back later. In Tajikistan… at least 1,600 [Afghan] servicemen fled their positions and crossed into Tajik territory," the Russian diplomat said.
"It’s one thing that they would have crossed it, and the situation would somehow have quieted down, but the problem is that after crossing the Pyandzh River they started to bombard Taliban units already from the other side, from Tajik soil. This is what the Taliban told us in Moscow, answering the same questions that you are asking. They said that they had received a command from their superiors not to respond [to the shelling]. At that time, these Afghan troops were brought back to the territory of Afghanistan, and some of them attacked a flank of the Taliban forces. This is what actually happened," the Russian envoy clarified.
Russia’s Central Asian allies have the potential to monitor this situation at a close distance, Kabulov noted.
"They clearly see that the Taliban forces are engaged in infighting amongst themselves, so to speak. They are just seizing control of territories from the government troops and have no interest in neighboring countries as they have been telling us over the past seven years. So far, we haven’t seen a single iota of evidence that would refute these assertions," the Russian diplomat stated.
The Taliban "is giving assurances that they are engaged solely in the domestic agenda." "So far, we have no grounds to doubt that," he pointed out.
Spokesman for the Taliban political office Mohammad Suhail Shaheen earlier told TASS that the Taliban had no plans to attack the Afghan-Tajik border.