Taliban flaunts anti-aircraft missile in video
but would confront any attacks by Hadi loyalists on battlefronts which stretch across much of the impoverished country.
The Houthis say their campaign is aimed at defeating al Qaeda militants based in Yemen and accuse Hadi’s forces of supporting the group.
“Any military violation of the ceasefire from al Qaeda and those who stand with it ... will be responded to,” Luqman said in a statement published by Saba news agency.
The Houthis’ acceptance of a truce came as Saudi ground forces conducted air strikes, fired artillery and launched at least two dozen rockets on Saada province, a Houthi stronghold on Saudi Arabia’s border with Yemen.
Riyadh has urged civilians to evacuate the province, a call that has drawn criticism from the United Nations.
“The indiscriminate bombing of populated areas, with or without prior warning, is in contravention of international humanitarian law,” the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Yemen Johannes van der Klaauw said in a statement.
Meanwhile, a ship chartered by the UN’s World Food Programme has docked in Yemen bringing fuel to boost aid deliveries. ISLAMABAD: A militant video purports to show Taliban fighters with a surface-to-air missile, claiming they used a similar one to shoot down a Pakistani helicopter carrying diplomats.
The video includes a message from the Pakistani Taliban claiming they fired a missile from a distance of 3 kilometers to down the helicopter Friday.
“The missile hit the tail rotor,” a written message in Urdu says at the video’s start.
The crash killed the ambassadors to Pakistan from the Philippines and Norway and the wives of the ambassadors from Malaysia and Indonesia, as well as three Pakistani crew members. Twelve passengers, many of them diplomats, were injured.
The helicopter crashed in Pakistan occupied Kashmir.
“God willing, we will carry out (more) such attacks,” a Taliban statement said Sunday.
Military officials could not be immediately reached on Sunday. Previously, Pakistan said a technical failure caused the crash and dismissed an earlier Taliban claim as opportunistic.
However, the surface-to-air missile shown in the video appeared real. In the video, a masked militant discusses the missile’s parts, while another portion shows what appears to be a hand-drawn picture of how a missile can strike a helicopter’s tail rotor.
The video was released late Saturday via militant websites and corresponded to other messages distributed by the Pakistani Taliban, though the AP could not independently verify it. Militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan do have access to surface-to-air missiles.
A later Taliban statement Sunday said fighters’ missile hit the rotor as the helicopter NEW DELHI: Suspected Afghan Taliban fighters and a suicide bomber, launched a coordinated attack on a compound of Afghanistan’s intelligence service in Kandahar on Sunday, a media report said.
The suicide bomber detonated his explosives at the gate of the compound of the National Directorate of Security shortly after 7am, government spokesman Samim Khpalwak said.
A second attacker was killed by security forces. The spokesman did not provide details but reports suggested that three soldiers were killed during the attack.
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turned, saving it from being destroyed in mid-air.
“No matter if the Pakistani government accepts it or not, it doesn’t bother us,” the statement said. “God willing, we will carry out (more) such attacks.”