Islamabad A recent statement attributed to Taliban leader Mullah Omar warns of a new suicide-bombing offensive against afghan and foreign troops.
In a statement to the Associated Press, Omar says young Afghans are signing up as suicide bombers for a new wave of attacks in the coming months. A US-led military offensive toppled the Taliban from power in 2001.
But as CNN reports they appear to have created a new stronghold, just across the border in a lawless part of Pakistan called Waziristan.
The Taliban appear to have taken effective control of much of the rugged Pakistani tribal area called Waziristan and this is the result, the brutal system America went to war in Afghanistan to destroy recreated just across the border in Pakistan.
These men executed, their bodies dragged through the streets, the chilling scene, the Taliban claims recorded by their own cameraman.
Ahmed Rashoid, author, ‘Taliban’ says: "It is very similar to what was going on in the period of Taliban rule in Afghanistan. They are executing people and torturing people who they consider un-Islamic."
And, in a video as slickly produced, as it is gruesome flaunting their brutality verses from the Koran.superimposed on dangling corpses. ‘The fate of unbelievers,’ the narrator intones. ‘Jihad against bandits.’ ‘Allah punishes the oppressors.’
"Judging by this documentary they have made what they are boasting about what they've done. It seems that they have a fairly comfortable position. They don't feel threatened. They are pretty much in control,” Samina Ahmed, International Crisis group said.
Reinforcing that impression the video, initially acquired by the online journal, Asia Times was shot not in some remote mountain hideout but in Waziristan's main town, Miram Shah and shows events, which reportedly occurred just in the last couple of months.
This is the bazaar crowd gawking at the bodies of those on the receiving end of justice Taliban style.
Some things in the video are so gruesome, which can’t be shown. They include beheadings Taliban carrying the severed heads of those they have executed through the market before placing those heads on a pole for all to see.
So pervasive is the Taliban's grip that 70 thousand Pakistan troops have been unable to dislodge them despite fierce battles like this. Instead, Waziristan has not only become, in many ways, a miniature Taliban-style state.
It is also a key staging ground for the jehadi fighters responsible for an increasingly effective guerrilla campaign against American troops across the border in Afghanistan.
"I think it is very important as a base because you have there not just Afghan Taliban, but you have Arabs, cent Asians, Chechens, Africans the same kind of groups of people that you had in Afghanistan before 9/11, " said Rashoid.
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