Trump ready to offer Kabul more support
KABUL: US president-elect Donald Trump has assured Afghanistan’s leader in a phone call that his administration stands ready to up support to the country if necessary, a Kabul statement said on Saturday.
“If Afghanistan needs more security assistance, his administration, after assessing the needs, will focus on providing more security support,” the statement released by President Ashraf Ghani’s office read.
The statement cited a phonecall between Trump and Ghani on Friday, the first official communication between the two since Trump’s November 8 election. “President elect Trump praised the Afghan forces’ defence of Afghanistan and its people and emphasised that the US will continue to remain with the government and people of Afghanistan during his term,” it said. Fifteen years and hundreds of billions of dollars after the US led an invasion of Afghanistan to oust the Taliban in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, the security situation in the country remains unstable.
Afghan police and army units took over providing security for Afghanistan from NATO in 2015.
Their first year was something of a disaster, when they sustained more than 5,000 fatalities and saw the regional capital Kunduz briefly captured by the Taliban.
Around 8,400 US and NATO troops are still engaged in assisting Afghan forces in the war against a resurgent Taliban militancy. BEIJING: At least 38 people were killed in two separate Chinese coal mine blasts this week, according to death tolls reported by state media on Saturday.
One blast occurred late Tuesday at a private mine in Qitaihe City, Heilongjiang province, trapping 22 workers, Xinhua news agency said.
Twenty-one were confirmed dead Friday night, it said, citing provincial authorities.
Rescue efforts were hampered by debris from the blast in some of the tunnels, according to an earlier report.
In a separate incident, a mine in Inner Mongolia was struck by an explosion that left at least 17 dead, according to figures from local authorities. An unspecified number of miners were still buried under the ground and rescue efforts were underway, Xinhua said.
China is the world’s largest coal producer and deadly accidents are common.
A further 33 miners were killed in a colliery explosion on October 31 in the southwestern municipality of Chongqing, and in September at least 18 were killed in a mine blast in the northwestern Ningxia region.
Officials say the number dying annually in the country’s mines has fallen substantially in the past decade, to fewer than 1,000 a year.
But some rights groups argue the actual figures are significantly higher due to under-reporting in a sector with poor oversight.
Meanwhile, Chinese police on Saturday arrested four persons, including the owner of the private coal mine and three managers, the emergency rescue headquarters said.