Americans stuck in the middle.
The first day of the Eid holiday in eastern Afghanistan brought a strange sight — presumed Taliban fighters walking up to Afghan soldiers at checkpoints and taking selfies with them.
Dozens of armed men believed to be Taliban walked freely through the bazaar in the capital of Logar province on Friday.
Similar gatherings were reported throughout the country and continued into the second day on Saturday. In Logar, young men piled atop an Afghan Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles waving both the Afghan and Taliban flags.
The jihadists appeared to be enjoying the mutual cease-fires declared last week by the Afghan government and Taliban leadership.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani last week announced an eight-day cessation of offensive operations against the Taliban surrounding the end of the Muslim holy month and Eid holiday.
U.S. and other foreign forces said they would also abide the temporary truce, part of a gambit to induce the Taliban to lay down their weapons and enter peace talks to end the 17-year Afghan War.
Days later, without acknowledging the Kabul government’s stand-down, the Taliban said they would observe an unprecedented three-day cease-fire during the Eid holiday, which began Friday. The truce does not extend to foreign fighters, the Taliban said.
U.S. forces, meanwhile, are focusing on attacking the local Islamic State affiliate and other militant groups not covered by the cease-fire.
A U.S. airstrike Wednesday in the mountainous Kunar province, near the Pakistan border, targeted the leader of a “known terrorist organization,” said Col. Martin O’Donnell, a military spokesman in Kabul.
Afghan defense ministry spokesman Gen. Mohammad Radmanish told the media the strike killed Mullah Mauland Fazlullah, leader of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, who had ordered the shooting of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai.
Washington had been offering $5 million dollars for information on the whereabouts of the terrorist leader, but U.S. officials in Kabul and Washington would not confirm whether he had been killed in the strike. The mountains of Kunar can be forbidding, which could hamper efforts to verify the strike’s success.
As for the Afghan Taliban, their offensives seemed to wane even before Eid officially began, despite several bloody attacks in the days leading up to the cease-fire. Radmanish said the number of their attacks throughout the country had declined significantly by Wednesday, the second day of the government’s cease-fire.