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The Washington Post (2 June 2020)

Karen DeYoung and Dan Lamothe

The Taliban has not broken its ties with al-Qaeda, the U.N. Security Council declared in a new report that threatened to undermine a key aspect of the Trump administration’s agreement with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. forces after nearly 19 years of war in Afghanistan.

The report states that relations between the Taliban, especially its Haqqani network, and al-Qaeda “remain close, based on friendship, a history of shared struggle, ideological sympathy and intermarriage.” Released Monday, the report is the latest of periodic, U.N. mandated assessments of Taliban-al-Qaeda relations.

“Additional information suggested that discussions were held among senior Haqqani Network figures to form a new joint unit of 2,000 armed fighters in cooperation with and funded by Al-Qaida,” the report added, describing a plan in which the unit would be broken into zones in two different parts of eastern Afghanistan.

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