US President Donald Trump said on Monday on peace talks with insurgent group Taliban, "As far as I'm concerned, they are dead." trump told this to a group of White House reporters.
The Taliban has retaliated by saying that they would continue fighting against US forces in Afghanistan and that Washington would regret abandoning negotiations.
"We had two ways to end the occupation in Afghanistan, one was jihad and fighting, the other was talks and negotiations," Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said.
"If Trump wants to stop talks, we will take the first way and they will soon regret it."
President Trump cancelled secret plans to host a Taliban delegation in the US after the militant group admitted killing a US soldier. Trump was to hold direct talks with Taliban leaders at the Camp David presidential facility outside Washington.
Trump said the US was walking away from negotiations after nearly a year of talks that aimed to pave the way for an American withdrawal from Afghanistan following 18 years of war.
Trump said a US military onslaught on the guerrillas was at its fiercest level in a decade.
"Over the last four days, we have been hitting our Enemy harder than at any time in the last ten years!" he wrote in a tweet.
Through the negotiations that lasted for nearly a year, Taliban leaders had been refusing to talk to anyone from the Afghanistan government. Trump while hosting Taliban leaders, was also to fly out Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani for the talks. “I cancelled Camp David on the basis that they did something that they sure as hell shouldn't have done," Trump said, condemning the attack that killed 12 people, including the US soldier.
US-led forces overthrew the Taliban government in Afghanistan in 2001 because the militants had given haven to the al-Qaeda, the terror organisation that planned the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. US had agreed to withdraw troops from Afghanistan as long as the Taliban promised not to provide a haven for terrorists. However, the fact that 16 US troops have been killed this year even as peace talks took place, seems to be the final nail to the coffin in the failed talks with the Taliban.
