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Afghan Warlord: GOP Loss a Win for Militants
In a rare video message, Afghan insurgent leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar claims that American troops will be forced out of Afghanistan like the Soviets before them.
The leader of the Hezb-e-Islami militant group also touts the Republican Party defeat in last month's U.S. midterm elections as a victory for militants fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"It seems that every bullet that mujahedeen had fired toward the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan has turned into a vote against Bush," Hekmatyar said in the undated video statement received by Associated Press Television in Pakistan.
"There is no doubt that is a great victory and success for Afghan and Iraqi mujahedeen," he said. "I am convinced that the fate [the] Soviet Union faced is awaiting America as well."
The bespectacled and bearded Hekmatyar, who wore a neat black turban, speaks in an undisclosed location in front of a rattan backdrop. He is wrapped in a light gray shawl.
Story Continues Below It was not clear where or when the three-minute video was made. But the reference to the mid-term elections, when the Republican Party of U.S. President George W. Bush lost control of the U.S. Senate and Congress to the Democrats, indicated it was recorded after Nov. 7.
Hezb-e-Islami is active in eastern Afghanistan along the Pakistan border where U.S. forces are deployed. Western security officials suspect Hekmatyar is hiding in the border area. This year has seen an escalation in the insurgency led by the former ruling Taliban.
"Very soon we will see that, God willing, American troops will leave Afghanistan and Iraq with their heads bowed down," Hekmatyar said in the video. Hekmatyar was a leader of the mujahedeen that fought the Soviet occupation of the 1980s and was briefly Afghan prime minister during the civil war of the early 1990s that cost tens of thousands of lives.
© 2006 Associated Press.
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics: Inside Cover Stories
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