Taliban must hide among Afghan civilians: commander

HERAT, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Taliban fighters have no choice but to hide among civilians while they fight foreign troops in Afghanistan and accept their family members may become victims of their holy war, a Taliban commander said on Sunday.

Mullah Mahmoud, a Taliban commander in the Golestan district of west Afghanistan's Farah province, also said most Taliban fighters in Afghanistan were foreigners. He said 60 percent were from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan's Punjab region and other countries.

U.S. and NATO-led forces in Afghanistan have accused Taliban insurgents of hiding in Afghan homes in a deliberate attempt to increase the number of civilian casualties caused by air strikes by foreign forces.

"There is truth in this to some extent, but what can Talibs do? Should they just let themselves be killed by Americans?" Mahmoud told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"When Talibs are part of that community and live amongst the people, when the Americans arrive, they have to go the house where their brother is, where their family is ... so when (Americans) come to our house to kill us, they will kill our families, too," he said.

A teacher during the time of the Taliban government, toppled in a U.S.-led invasion in 2001, Mahmoud said he joined the austere Sunni Islamist movement six years ago.

"I was a teacher, I worked. During the Taliban, they even shot me in the shoulder but after the Afghan government was installed I was compelled to join the Taliban because of its treatment of the people," he said.

Golestan is adjacent to Bala Boluk province, where Afghan officials say a U.S. air strike in early May killed 140 civilians. The U.S. military says between 20 and 35 civilians were among 80-95 killed, mostly insurgents, and that the Taliban had deliberately hidden among local villagers.

"When the air strikes came, our friends were being killed, our families, but we did not feel pain because we know that when we start jihad we have to accept that our women, our daughters and children, may be killed in the fight," Mahmoud said.

WILD WEST

Farah, which borders Iran, was relatively stable compared with the south and east after the Taliban were overthrown.

But violence has hit its highest level since 2001, according to U.S. and Afghan officials, as the Taliban take their fight out of traditional strongholds in the south and east.

Afghan and U.S. forces have increasingly come under attack by insurgents in the poppy-growing desert province of Farah.

"The situation in Farah is getting worse ... in some districts the insecurity is so bad that Americans cannot move on the ground," Mahmoud said. He said a lot of the violence was committed by criminals who falsely called themselves Taliban.

Farah's flat terrain means that, unlike the mountainous south and east which offer a warren of hiding places, the Taliban mainly use remote-controlled roadside bombs to attack troops.

"Those people who shoot at vehicles, they are criminals, not Taliban," Mahmoud said.

He said there would never come a time when the Taliban would talk with Americans because cooperation between a Muslim and a "kafir," or infidel, was forbidden.

U.S. and Afghan military officers have in the past accused neighboring Iran of supporting or arming the Taliban in the west, but Mahmoud denied the claims.

"So far Saudi Arabia and Sunnis only help us," Mahmoud said.

(Additional reporting by Sharafuddin Sharafyar; Editing by Paul Tait)