The U.S. military is reducing troops in Afghanistan from 8,600 to about 4,500 by early November, the head of U.S Central Command said Wednesday, hours after he announced the withdrawal of more service members from Iraq this month.
U.S. President Donald Trump has said the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan will be reduced to “anywhere from 4,000 to 5,000” troops by November this year.
The US Embassy in Pakistan announced Thursday that Afghanistan’s political leaders are close to starting negotiations with the Taliban about the future of the country, the Military Times reports. The development follows a peace agreement signed between the US and the Taliban in February this year. As part of the deal, US Peace Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad is in the region to help facilitate intra-Afghan negotiations.
The Taliban in Afghanistan still maintains close relations with the terror network al-Qaida, despite having signed a peace deal with the US agreeing to tackle militant groups, a United Nations report released on Tuesday said.
U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper says the peace process in Afghanistan is not going as quickly as expected, with the Taliban failing to reduce violence in the war-torn country.
Islamic State–Khorasan (ISIS-K) claims it carried out Thursday’s rocket attack on Bagram airfield, the largest US base in Afghanistan. There were no casualties or injuries. Bagram’s NATO-led US military mission, Operation Resolute Support, confirmed in a tweet that five rockets were fired at the base early in the morning on Thursday.
The U.S. is cutting aid to Afghanistan by $1 billion and will cut even more unless the country’s feuding political leaders can resolve their differences and form a government that can implement a peace deal with the Taliban.
President Trump said Tuesday he had ‘a good, long [phone] conversation’ with the leader of the Taliban and that the group wants to ‘cease the violence.’
The US signed a peace agreement with the Taliban on Saturday in an effort to end 18 years of war in Afghanistan and allow US troops to return home.
The Taliban appeared confident Monday it will sign a peace agreement with the United States by the end of this month in the presence of international guarantors to close the 18-year-old war in Afghanistan.
A group of Christians in Pakistan accused of killing two Muslims in 2015 in riots that followed Taliban suicide bombings on churches were acquitted last week after paying ‘blood money’ to the victim families.
President Trump is reportedly planning to withdraw 4,000 troops from Afghanistan as part of a pledge he made this summer to end American involvement in conflict in the area.
President Donald Trump paid a surprise Thanksgiving visit to Afghanistan, where he announced the U.S. and Taliban have been engaged in ongoing peace talks and said he believes the Taliban want a cease-fire.
A four-member Taliban delegation has traveled to Tehran for talks with high-ranking Iranian officials — the second such trip by the militants to a foreign country just days after U.S. President Donald Trump announced that peace talks with the United States had collapsed.
President’s Trump’s split with former national security adviser John Bolton could foreshadow an effort to revive the Taliban peace talks that delivered the final blow to the pair’s strained relationship.
President Trump said he canceled secret peace talks with the Taliban after the group was credited for a car bomb that killed two NATO and American service members in Kabul last week.
A Taliban suicide car bomb rocked Kabul on Thursday, killing at least 10 civilians in a diplomatic area that also includes the US Embassy — the second such attack this week that underscored Afghan government warnings that a preliminary US-Taliban deal on ending America’s longest war was moving dangerously quickly.
The U.S. is closing in on a deal with the Taliban that is designed to wind down America’s 18-year war in Afghanistan, but the best indication of how risky the pact maybe is this: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is declining to sign it, according to senior U.S., Afghan and European officials.
The United States would withdraw almost 5,000 troops from Afghanistan and close five bases within 135 days under a draft peace accord agreed with the Taliban, the chief U.S. negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad said on Monday.
President Donald Trump says the United States will continue to maintain a military presence in Afghanistan even after a peace deal with the Taliban is reached.