Daily US Times: A European intelligence official told that Russian intelligence officers for the military intelligence GRU recently offered money to Taliban militants in Afghanistan as rewards if they killed UK or US troops there. Russia denied the allegation.
The official was unclear as to the precise Russian motivation, but according to their assessment, the incentives had led to coalition casualties. The official did not specify as to the date of the casualties, their nationality or number, or whether these were fatalities or injuries.
“This callous approach by the GRU is startling and reprehensible. Their motivation is bewildering,” the official said.
New York Times reported the story first. According to the newspaper’s report on Friday, US intelligence concluded months ago that Russian military intelligence offered the bounties, amid peace talks.
The Times reported that the White House’s National Security Council held a meeting about it in late March on the intelligence findings and President Donald Trump was also briefed.
On Saturday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said that the President and Vice President Mike Pence were not briefed “on the alleged Russian bounty intelligence.”
The White House press secretary said her statement “does not speak to the merit of the alleged intelligence but to the inaccuracy of the New York Times story,” which said Trump had been briefed. She did not deny the validity of US intelligence findings that a GRU offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants to carry out attacks on coalition forces in Afghanistan.
On late Saturday, director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe confirmed in his own statement that ”neither the President nor the Vice President were ever briefed on any intelligence alleged by the New York Times in its reporting yesterday.”
“The White House statement addressing this issue earlier today, which denied such a briefing occurred, was accurate. The New York Times reporting and all other subsequent news reports about such an alleged briefing are inaccurate,” he added.
As the Times reported, the Trump administration held expanded briefings about the intelligence assessment this week. The White House also shared information about it with the British government, whose forces were also believed to have been targeted.
On Friday, the Russian Embassy in Washington, DC, denounced the report as “baseless allegations” that have led to death threats against Russian diplomats in London and Washington.
“In the absence of reasons to #BlameRussians,” the Times is inventing “new fake stories,” the embassy wrote on Twitter. Taliban also rejected the report.
Zabihullah Mujahid, the militant group’s spokesman, said in a statement Saturday: “We strongly reject this allegation. The nineteen-year Jihad of the Islamic Emirate is not indebted to the beneficence of any intelligence organ or foreign country and neither is the Islamic Emirate in need of anyone in specifying objectives.”
“Our target killings and assassinations were ongoing in years before, and we did it on our own resources.”
The Taliban spokesperson added that the it had stopped attacking US and Nato forces after they agreed in February to a phased troop withdrawal and to lift sanctions. In return, the Taliban said they would not allow extremist groups to operate in areas they control.
The Times reported that, in its covert operation, the Russian spy unit within the intelligence agency GRU had offered rewards for successful attacks last year, armed criminal associates or Islamist militants are thought to have collected bounty money.
The European official told that the Russian intelligence officers worked for the GRU unit known as 29155, which has been blamed by European intelligence officials previously a number of prominent attacks, including the attempted assassinations of Sergei Skripal, a former KGB agent who had once been recruited years earlier by British intelligence, and his daughter in 2018 in Salisbury, UK.
The US concluded that the GRU was behind the cyberattacks against the Democratic National Committee and top Democratic officials and the unit was behind the interference in the 2016 US election.
The military agency of Russia was also accused by the West of assassination attempts and poison attacks in Europe within recent years.
Referring to the New York Times report at a town hall focused on Asian American Pacific Islander issues, former Vice President Jope Biden described Trump’s presidency a “gift” to Putin. “It’s a betrayal of every single American family with a loved one serving in Afghanistan or anywhere overseas. I’m quite frankly outraged by the report, and if I’m elected president, make no mistake about it, Vladimir Putin will be confronted.”
Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, an Air Force veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, tweeted that “Russia is not a partner, and not to be negotiated with” and that Trump “needs to immediately expose and handle this, and stop Russia’s shadow war.”
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