Tag: Joe Biden

Pakistan has supported Turkish thesis on the events of 1915 after American President Joe Biden’s declaration that massacre of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turks in World War I was genocide.

In a phone call with his Turkish counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi stressed Islamabad’s support for Ankara’s take on the events of 1915, said an official statement.

Turkey, established in 1923 after the Ottoman empire collapsed, has always denied there was a systematic campaign to annihilate Armenians.

It says that thousands of Turks and Armenians died in inter-ethnic violence as the empire started to fall apart and fought a Russian invasion of its eastern provinces during the war.

“We believe that one-sided approaches and political categorisation of historical events could undermine trust and lead to polarisation between nations,” Foreign Office (FO) spokesperson Zahid Hafeez Chaudhri said in a statement.

The statement also praised Turkey’s “constructive approach” on the subject including Ankara’s proposal for a joint historical commission to explore the facts.

Turkish Foreign Ministry thanked Pakistan for its support.

“Thank you brotherly Pakistan! Long live Turkey-Pakistan friendship!” read a tweet.

Biden, in his statement, said the American people honour “all those Armenians who perished in the genocide that began 106 years ago.”

“Over the decades, Armenian immigrants have enriched the United States (US) in countless ways, but they have never forgotten the tragic history,” Biden said.

“We honour their story. We see that pain. We affirm the history. We do this not to cast blame but to ensure that what happened is never repeated.”

The largely symbolic move, breaking away from decades of carefully calibrated language from the White House, comes at a time when Ankara and Washington grapple with deep policy disagreements over a host of issues.

The Turkish government and most of the opposition showed rare unity in their rejection of Biden’s statement.

Ankara has repeatedly proposed the creation of a joint commission of historians from Turkey and Armenia as well as international experts to tackle the issue.

The commander of foreign forces in Afghanistan, U.S. Army General Scott Miller, on Sunday said an orderly withdrawal of foreign forces and the handing over of military bases and equipment to the Afghan forces had begun.

Miller said he was acting on orders based on U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to end America’s longest war, deeming the prolonged and intractable battle in Afghanistan no longer aligned with American priorities.

Earlier this month Biden said he would withdraw troops from Afghanistan before Sept. 11, the 20th anniversary of the militant attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon that launched the Afghan war.

Miller, who has been commanding the U.S. forces and the NATO Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan in their fight against the Taliban and other Islamist militant groups since 2018, said foreign forces will continue to have “the military means and capability to fully protect themselves during the ongoing retrograde and will support the Afghan security forces.”

“I’ve had the opportunity to talk to Taliban members with the Taliban Political Commission, and I’ve told them a return to violence, an effort to force a military decision, would be a tragedy for Afghanistan and the Afghan people,” Miller told reporters in the capital Kabul.

The Taliban ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, when they were ousted by U.S.-led forces. Since then they have waged a long-running insurgency and now control wide swathes of territory.

Security experts in recent weeks said they doubt if the Taliban will allow U.S. forces, whom they call invaders, to peacefully exit the country at a time when clashes between the Afghan forces and the Taliban have not ebbed.

Foreign force withdrawal is slated to begin on May 1, in line with an agreement with the Taliban in 2020.

“As we retrograde to zero U.S. forces, we will turn over the (military) bases primarily to the (Afghan) Ministry of Defense and other Afghan forces,” Miller said adding that the Taliban have committed to break their relationship with al Qaeda, the Islamist extremist group.

The Taliban government’s sheltering of Al-Qaeda was the key reason for the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan after the September 2001 attacks.

A United Nations report in January said there were as many as 500 al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan and that the Taliban maintained a close relationship with them. The Taliban denies al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan.

A Pakistani-American has been nominated by President Joe Biden for the position of a federal judge on the United States (US) District Court for New Jersey.

If confirmed, Zahid Quraishi will be the first Muslim American to serve as a federal district judge.

Hailing from New Jersey, Quraishi was ppointed in 2019 to be a magistrate judge in the District of New Jersey by the judges he now seeks to join on the bench.

He is of Pakistani descent and got his law degree from Rutgers Law School, where he currently serves as an adjunct professor.

An army veteran, Quraishi was a military prosecutor with the JAG Corps and did deployments in Iraq in 2004 and 2006, according to his Rutgers bio page.

He later worked with the Department of Homeland Security then served as a federal prosecutor in the District of New Jersey.