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A UN Security Council monitoring team for Afghanistan has warned that the Taleban is well poised to make a grab for power in Kabul after the US completes its ongoing withdrawal in September.

Key Taleban leaders "oppose peace talks and favour a military solution", the report said.

The Taleban already has direct control over more than half of Afghanistan's district administrative centres, while contesting or controlling up to 70 per cent of territory outside urban areas, according to the report.

Moreover, the ultra-conservative Taleban, which calls itself the Islamic Emirate, and Al-Qaeda "remain closely aligned and show no indication of breaking ties".

There has been "no material change to this relationship, which has grown deeper as a consequence of personal bonds of marriage and shared partnership in struggle, now cemented through second-generational ties".

The Taleban swiftly rejected the report by the UN Security Council's Analytic Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team last Tuesday and made public the next day.

"Unfortunately, this report has been compiled on the basis of false information from enemy intelligence agencies," said Taleban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid.

"Representatives of the Islamic Emirate are also fully prepared for the inter-Afghan negotiating table, in order to make progress in the negotiations and implement all the clauses," he said.

The US invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to oust the Taleban for sheltering Al-Qaeda, which carried out the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in America.

President Joe Biden last month set a deadline of Sept 1 for withdrawing an estimated 2,500 American troops, along with those of Nato partners. The withdrawal is well under way.

But the 2020 Doha Agreement, which paved the way for this transition, states: "A comprehensive and sustainable peace agreement will include guarantees to prevent the use of Afghan soil by any international terrorist groups or individuals against the security of the United States and its allies."

Analysts watching Afghanistan agree with the UN report.

"It's a little late," tweeted Ms Farahnaz Ispahani, senior fellow at the Religious Freedom Institute and public policy fellow at the Wilson Centre.

"The Taleban have not given up on anything," Dr Aparna Pande, research fellow and director of the Hudson Institute's Initiative on the Future of India and South Asia, told The Sunday Times. "They don't believe in power-sharing and have shown no intention of breaking ties with Al-Qaeda."

Just last month, the Taleban warned neighbours against allowing the US to use their territory or air space for military operations in Afghanistan. This came amid plans by the Pentagon to reposition some troops in the region to carry out counterterrorism missions in Afghanistan even after the US exit.

Mr Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies, warned last Thursday that the Afghan government is "slowly but clearly losing ground to the Taleban".

The same day, the Taleban captured another district in central Uruzgan province, he noted.

Al-Qaeda's presence in Afghanistan has been confirmed by its own media wings; its Thabat newsletter has listed Al-Qaeda attacks since 2020 in 18 provinces, the United Nations report noted.

It said: "Al-Qaeda is resident in at least 15 Afghan provinces, primarily in the east, southern and south-eastern regions.

"Al-Qaeda, including Al-Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent, is reported to number several dozen to 500 persons. The group's leader, Aiman Muhammed Rabi al-Zawahiri, is believed to be located somewhere in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Previous reports of his death due to ill health have not been confirmed."

Al-Qaeda's near-term strategy has been assessed as maintaining its traditional safe haven in Afghanistan for its core leadership, and it maintains contact with the Taleban but has minimised overt communications in an effort to "lay low", it added.

"It will be important for the international community to monitor any sign of Afghanistan again becoming a destination for extremists with both regional and international agendas," the report warned.

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Taleban well-poised to take over in Afghanistan: Report - The Straits Times

The planned withdrawal of all U.S. and European troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 11, 2021 will probably allow the Taliban to reconquer Afghanistan and impose a strict Islamist regime within the country, and establish terrorist organizations devoted to attacking the United States.

The Taliban followers are terrorists who are aligned with al-Qaida, and they are the same groups who have launched terrorist attacks in the world over the past 30 years, including the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.

We need to keep adequate military forces in the region outside of Afghanistan to counter Taliban and al-Qaida moves in Afghanistan and to keep them off balance to prevent attacks against us.

Approximately 3,000 U.S. troops should be based on the Arabian peninsula in case they are needed as a quick reaction force. U.S. Special Forces in the region will probably have to be beefed up.

We need ground assault aircraft available in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Additionally, a squadron of B-52s should be based in the region.

A U.S. Navy carrier battle group and an amphibious assault force must be deployed in the region to provide the capabilities for air bombardment and missile attacks as necessary.

The Taliban are the enemy and must be treated as such.

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Dangerous withdrawal from Afghanistan | News, Sports, Jobs - The Express - Lock Haven Express

1. Massive fire breaks out at oil refinery near Iran's capital  Associated Press
2. Firefighters battle massive fire at Iranian oil refinery  CNN
3. Oil Refinery Fire Near Irans Capital Burns into Second Day  Voice of America
4. Iran: Huge fire reported in oil refinery in Tehran  The Jerusalem Post
5. View Full Coverage on Google News

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Massive fire breaks out at oil refinery near Iran's capital - Associated Press

In two weeks, when Iran is scheduled to hold its presidential election, Narges Mohammadi will be staying home. One of her countrys most courageous human-rights activists, she views the upcoming vote as a sham.

The principle of absolute jurisprudence has invalidated all the principles of the Iranian constitution and reduced the power of other institutions to zero, she told me in an WhatsApp interview from Iran. The countrys unelected supreme leader and the countrys Guardian Council, which vets presidential candidates and can overturn laws passed by Irans legislature, have consolidated power.

As if to prove her point, the Guardian Council last month disqualified all but seven candidates from running for president. That decision has drawn rebukes even from Iranian leaders who are supportive of the ruling regime.

But Mohammadis criticism is deeper. As a journalist in the late 1990s, she supported the reformer president, Mohammed Khatami. Now, she has concluded that elections offer no chance for Iran to make the transition to a true democracy.

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In previous elections, she said, Iranians voted for candidates who could create a rift in the system. This split could then create breathing space for the people to achieve democracy and political and civic activity, she said. Now this strategy has reached a dead end.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was one of the hardliners who foiled the reforms of Khatami when he authorized a crackdown on student protesters in 1999. Nonetheless, when he won the presidential election in 2013, he was often portrayed as a moderate capable of bringing his country into the community of nations.

Instead, under his presidency Iran has become far more repressive which Mohammadi knows firsthand. Since the late 1990s, she has been prosecuted and jailed for her advocacy work. Under Rouhani, her plight worsened. The organization she helped lead, Defenders of Human Rights Center, was closed. For the last six years, the state has barred her from seeing her children. Last October, after serving more than eight years of a 10-year sentence, she was released from Irans notorious Evin Prison.

Now she faces 30 months in prison and 80 lashes for the crime of participating in a prison sit-in to protest the violent repression of popular protests in November 2019. She does not necessarily fear a new trial, she told me. But she wants the world to know that I was brutally and shamelessly assaulted by the security and non-uniform agents of the head of the prison.

One might think that a person so brutalized by Irans regime would favor the harsh secondary sanctions imposed by former President Donald Trump in 2018. But she considers the sanctions a mistake.

She told me that the secondary sanctions which freeze revenue from Irans main export, oil have the effect of harming both the regime and the Iranian people. (Like Mohammadi, many Iranian human-rights activists do not support the sanctions, though some dissidents do.) That said, Mohammadi supports individual sanctions on human-rights violators in Iran. She supports the idea of prohibiting their participation in international forums and said the international community should work to cut off and control their movements.

At the same time, Mohammadi is critical of the current nuclear diplomacy with Iran. As she sees it, current talks in Vienna should focus not just on Irans nuclear program but on the issue of human rights.

Western governments should respect the concept of the right to self-determination and national sovereignty in the true sense, she told me. This right is enshrined in the charter of the United Nations and it is systematically flouted by the current Iranian regime, which continues to erase the few remnants of that countrys history of constitutional government.

And that brings things back to Irans upcoming presidential elections. They are best seen as a kind of propaganda to persuade gullible outsiders that a clerical tyranny has democratic legitimacy. Narges Mohammadi knows better. Thats why she will be boycotting them.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:Eli Lake at elake1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:Michael Newman at mnewman43@bloomberg.net

Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal.

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Iran's Leading Human-Rights Activist Is Boycotting Its Election - Bloomberg

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) Satellite photographs taken Thursday show the burned hulk that remains of Irans biggest warship after it caught fire and sank in the Gulf of Oman.

The photos from Planet Labs Inc., analyzed by The Associated Press, show the 207-meter (679-foot) Kharg just off the coast of the Iranian port city of Jask, surrounded by a sea of oil-slicked waters. Iranian officials have not acknowledged the pollution left behind by the ships sinking on Wednesday.

The photos show the ship partially submerged, with debris floating in the water around it.

Iranian state media reported that 400 sailors and trainee cadets on board fled the vessel, while 33 suffered injuries in the incident. Iranian officials have offered no cause for the fire.

The fire Wednesday aboard the Kharg warship follows a series of mysterious explosions that began in 2019, targeting commercial ships in the Gulf of Oman. The US Navy accused Iran of targeting the ships with limpet mines, timed explosives typically attached by divers to a vessels hull.

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Oil-slicked waters spread out from the partially sunk Iranian navy vessel Kharg in the Gulf of Oman off the coast of Jask, Iran, in this Thursday, June 3, 2021, satellite photo from Planet Labs Inc. (Planet Labs Inc. via AP)

Iran denied that, though US Navy footage showed Revolutionary Guard members removing one unexploded limpet mine from a ship. The attacks came amid heightened tensions between the US and Iran after then-President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew America from Tehrans nuclear deal with world powers. Negotiations on saving the accord continue in Vienna.

In April, an Iranian ship called the MV Saviz believed to be a Guard base and anchored for years in the Red Sea off Yemen was targeted in an attack suspected to have been carried out by Israel. It escalated a yearslong shadow war in the Mideast between the two countries, ranging from strikes in Syria, assaults on ships and attacks on Irans nuclear program.

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Satellite photos show hulk of what was biggest Iran warship - The Times of Israel