Turkey shrugs off Taliban warning over Kabul airport
Flights to evacuate Afghan interpreters will begin by the end of July, the White House said today.
Ankara is signaling that the Taliban’s warnings against plans to leave Turkish security forces at the Kabul airport after NATO withdraws from Afghanistan are not being taken seriously.
BBC Turkish cited an unnamed security official this morning as saying that the Taliban’s latest threats to treat remaining Turkish forces as enemy occupiers are being interpreted as little more than posturing.
"It is true that they see the American soldiers as invaders. However, we have contact; they know that we do not have an invasion purpose. These are symbolic statements,” the official told BBC.
Turkey’s government has offered to leave its roughly 500 troops at Hamid Karzai International Airport to secure international diplomatic missions in the Afghan capital. US officials and their counterparts in Ankara are still hammering out details of the arrangement, but a deal is not far away, officials have said.
