‘People Are No Chess Pieces’; Taliban Condemns Prince Harry’s Murder Boasts

The Taliban leader asserted that those who were killed “were not chess pieces, they were humans.”

Prince Harry has come under fire by the Taliban government in Afghanistan after the British royal claimed in his memoir that he had killed 25 Afghans while working as a military helicopter pilot, referring to them as “chess pieces taken off the board.”

According to Abdul Qahar Balkhi, a spokesman for the Taliban-run Afghan foreign affairs ministry, “the western occupation of Afghanistan is truly an odious moment in human history, and comments by Prince Harry are a microcosm of the trauma experienced by Afghans at the hands of occupation forces who murdered innocents without any accountability.”

Days prior to its international release on January 10th, Harry’s deeply personal book Spare began selling in Spain. The 38-year-old describes his two tours of duty in Afghanistan in one section of his memoir, the first in 2007–2008 as a forward air controller and the second in 2012 as an Apache helicopter pilot with the British Army Air Corps stationed at Camp Bastion in the south of the country.

The Spanish translation of the book states that Harry stated, “It’s not a number that fills me with satisfaction, but it also doesn’t embarrass me.”. “I didn’t think of those 25 as people when I found myself engulfed in the sweltering heat and confusion of combat.

“Bad people were eliminated before they could kill Good people; they were taken off the chessboard. ”

The Taliban’s leader Anas Haqqani criticized the comments on Twitter, writing: “Mr. Harry, the people you killed weren’t chess pieces; they were actual people with waiting families. Few Afghan killers have your decency to admit to their war crimes and reveal their conscience. ”

Because they are deaf and blind for you, I don’t anticipate that the ICC will summon you or that human rights activists will condemn you. But hopefully these crimes against humanity will be recorded in the annals of history,” he continued.

“His Thumbs”

The Duke of Sussex said his love of video games was another factor in his success as an Apache gunner. He said, “It’s a joy for me because I’m one of those people who loves playing Playstation and Xbox, so with my thumbs I like to think that I’m probably quite useful.”

The US has charged the Taliban, a militant organization that first came to power in Afghanistan in the 1990s, with harboring fighters who were part of al-Qaeda, the organization that carried out the 9/11 attacks.

Afghanistan has been in a state of upheaval and instability ever since the US and its close allies invaded that country in the latter part of 2001. As of September 2021, it is estimated that the war directly caused the deaths of more than 70,000 Afghan and Pakistani civilians.

The royal received criticism from the Taliban in addition to his fellow British service members.

That is not how you conduct yourself in the army, and that is not how we think. He has seriously failed the team. No notches are made for the rifle butt. Tim Collins, a retired colonel in the British Army, said to Forces News, “We never did.