Exclusive | China is helping Afghanistan set up mountain brigade to fight terrorism
Afghan embassy refutes claim China is building a training camp in Wakhan Corridor and says there will be ‘no Chinese military personnel on Afghan soil’
China is helping Afghanistan to set up a mountain brigade in the country’s north to boost counterterrorism efforts, the Afghan embassy in Beijing said on Wednesday.
But “there will be no Chinese military personnel of any kind on Afghan soil at any time”, the embassy said in a fax to the South China Morning Post.
The embassy said the Afghan government appreciated China’s assistance and that the countries’ militaries were working in close coordination, without giving further details.
Sources close to the Chinese military earlier told the Post that China had funded and started building a training camp for Afghan troops in Afghanistan’s isolated Wakhan Corridor – a narrow strip of inhospitable and barely accessible land extending about 350km from the northern Afghan province of Badakhshan to China’s Muslim region of Xinjiang.
One of the sources said that once the camp was completed, the People’s Liberation Army was likely to send troops there, but the embassy denied the claim, saying no Chinese military personnel would be stationed in Afghanistan.
