Taliban show off captured weapons at Kandahar victory parade

In videos posted on social media, the Taliban But Pentagon press secretary John Kirby told CNN Tuesday he wasn’t “overly concerned about these images” of Taliban fighters examining the abandoned aircraft.”They can inspect all they want,” Kirby said. “They can look at them, they can walk around — but they can’t fly them. They can’t operate them.”He added that the US military had made “unusable all the gear that is at the airport — all the aircraft, all the ground vehicles,” leaving only some fire trucks and fork lifts operational.Efforts to reopen Kabul airport resumed on Wednesday as a team of Qatari technical experts arrived in the Afghan capital, a source with knowledge of the situation told CNN.The Taliban have pledged to govern more moderately this time around, and said they would still allow foreign nationals and Afghans with proper documentation to leave the country after August 31. But many Afghans are skeptical of their claims, and huge question marks hang over the Taliban’s ability to run the country.Standing on the Kabul airport runway on Tuesday, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told a small crowd that: “This victory belongs to us all.”He was joined by heavily armed fighters from the Taliban’s Badri 313 special forces brigade, kitted out in camouflage uniforms and desert boots.Mujahid congratulated the Taliban fighters who had lined up, and indeed “the whole of the nation.”Only one Afghan region is still holding out against the Taliban’s rule: the Panjshir Valley — a strategic slice of territory about 90 miles north of Kabul that was once a stronghold for the mujahideen fighting the Soviets and is now the seat of the resistance movement. Ali Nazary, spokesperson for the anti-Taliban National Resistance Front (NRF) of Afghanistan, said Wednesday that NRF forces had inflicted heavy casualties on Taliban attackers attempting to fight their way into Panjshir via the Gulbahar area, damaging the militant group’s weaponry and sending them retreating.”Negotiations have stopped, they have reached an impasse,” Nazary said. “They tried attacking from two directions, one the north and one in the south.”It was not possible for CNN to independently verify the intensity of the fighting or the total number of casualties on both sides. The emergency hospital, a surgical center for war victims in Kabul, said on Twitter it had received five wounded patients and four people dead on arrival following fighting in Gulbahar. Top Taliban leadership have not acknowledged heavy fighting in the region. In an audio message released Wednesday, Amir Khan Muttaqi, a Taliban leader, called on Panjshiris to accept an amnesty and avoid fighting, but acknowledged that negotiations had thus far yielded no result.Correction: A previous version of this story included a card image from Kabul not Kandahar. This has been fixed.