German foreign minister: Europe needs to be involved in talks over Ukraine

KABUL: The Daesh group claimed Wednesday a suicide bombing of a bank in north Afghanistan which killed five people a day earlier, saying it was targeting Taliban government employees collecting salaries.
Violence has waned in Afghanistan since the Taliban surged back to power and ended their insurgency in 2021, but the Daesh group frequently stages gun and bomb attacks challenging their rule.
On Tuesday police in the northern city of Kunduz said a suicide attack in front of a bank killed five people — including civil servants — and wounded seven others.
The Daesh propaganda wing said Wednesday a “suicide bomber” had “detonated his explosive vest” as “Taliban militia members gathered outside a public bank to collect their salaries.”
The group previously claimed responsibility for a similar bombing in March 2024, outside a bank in the southern city of Kandahar — considered the spiritual heartland of the Taliban movement.
Daesh said it had targeted “Taliban militia” members outside the bank. Taliban authorities said only three people had been killed in last year’s incident, but a hospital source put fatalities far higher at 20.
The Taliban government has declared security its highest priority since returning to power and analysts say they have had some success quashing Daesh with a sweeping crackdown.
But the group remains active — targeting Taliban officials, visitors from abroad, and foreign diplomats.
There are frequently discrepancies between the casualty tolls given by Taliban authorities and those reported by officials on the ground, and attack sites are routinely shut down by security forces.
In December, Daesh claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing which killed the Taliban’s government minister for refugees, Khalil Ur-Rahman Haqqani, in the capital Kabul.

RIYADH: US President Donald Trump will see his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin in Saudi Arabia for their first meeting since taking office in January.

Trump’s announcement came after an almost 90-minute phone conversation with the Russian leader, where they discussed in ending the nearly three-year Moscow offensive in Ukraine.

“We ultimately expect to meet. In fact, we expect that he’ll come here, and I’ll go there, and we’re gonna meet also probably in Saudi Arabia the first time, we’ll meet in Saudi Arabia, see if we can get something something done,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

الرئيس ترامب يقول انه سيجتمع مع الرئيس الروسي بوتين في السعودية، لمناقشة إنهاء الحرب في أوكرانيا، بحضور ولي العهد السعودي الأمير محمد بن سلمان :

"بوتين وأنا نعرف ولي العهد جيداً، والسعودية ستكون المكان المناسب للقائنا الأول". pic.twitter.com/k7dXV1J67o

— محمد|MFU (@mfu46) February 12, 2025

A date for the meeting “hasn’t been set” but it will happen in the “not too distant future,” the US president said.

He suggested the meeting would involve Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. “We know the crown prince, and I think it’d be a very good place to meet.”

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov earlier announced that Putin had invited Trump and officials from his administration to visit Moscow to discuss Ukraine.

“The Russian president invited the US president to visit Moscow and expressed his readiness to receive American officials in Russia in those areas of mutual interest, including, of course, the topic of the Ukrainian settlement,” Peskov said.

The invitation followed Trump’s announcement Wednesday that peace talks would start “immediately” and that Ukraine would probably not get its land back, causing uproar on both sides of the Atlantic.