Taliban: 'No one wants a civil war' in Afghanistan - Al Jazeera English

The Taliban says it does not want to monopolise power but insists there will not be peace in Afghanistan until there is a new negotiated government in Kabul and President Ashraf Ghani is removed.

In an interview with The Associated Press news agency, Taliban spokesman, Suhail Shaheen, who is also a member of the group’s negotiating team, laid out the group’s stance on what should come next in a country on the precipice.

Shaheen said the Taliban will lay down weapons when a negotiated government acceptable to all sides in the conflict is installed in Kabul and Ghani’s government is gone.

Shaheen said under this new government, women will be allowed to work, go to school, and participate in politics but will have to wear the hijab, or headscarf.

He said women would be required to have a male relative with them to leave their home and that Taliban commanders in newly occupied districts have orders that universities, schools and markets operate as before, including with the participation of women and girls.

Shaheen said some Taliban commanders had ignored the leadership’s orders against repressive and drastic behaviour and that several have been put before a Taliban military tribunal and punished, though he did not provide specifics.

Shaheen said there are no plans to make a military push on Kabul and that the Taliban have so far “restrained” themselves from taking provincial capitals.

The Taliban controls about half of Afghanistan’s 419 district centres, and while has it yet to capture any of the 34 provincial capitals, it is putting pressure on about half of them, Milley said

In recent days, the US has carried out air attacks in support of beleaguered Afghan government troops in the southern city of Kandahar, around which the Taliban fighters been amassing, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said on Thursday

The rapid fall of districts and the seemingly disheartened response by Afghan government forces have prompted US-allied warlords to resurrect militias with a violent history

Shaheen also repeated Taliban promises aimed at reassuring Afghans who fear the group

Shaheen said they had nothing to fear from the Taliban and denied threatening them

He also denied that the Taliban has threatened journalists and Afghanistan’s nascent civil society, which has been hit by dozens of killings over the past year

The ISIL (ISIS) group has taken responsibility for some, but the Afghan government has blamed the Taliban for most of the killings while the Taliban in turn accuses the Afghan government of carrying out the killings to defame them

Shaheen said journalists, including those working for Western media outlets, have nothing to fear from a government that includes the Taliban