TALIBAN supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar today offered international forces a safe retreat from Afghanistan if they agree to withdraw from the war-torn country.
If US and NATO troops battling the hardline militia failed to take up the offer, they would suffer a defeat like Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s, said the message posted on the Internet.
"I say to the invaders: if you leave our country, we will provide you the safe context to do so," Omar said in the statement marking the Muslim festival of Eid-al-Fitr.
"If you insist on your invasion, you will be defeated like the Russians before you."
The Red Army pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989 after 10 years of fighting that cost the lives of at least 10,000 Soviet troops.
A civil war followed after which Omar`s Taliban movement took power in 1996.
There was no immediate reaction from the US-led coalition, which invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban after 9/11, or the separate NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.
Omar, who has been in hiding since the fall of the Taliban Government in late 2001, said in the message that he offered his support to all those fighting foreign troops in Afghanistan.
"The Americans, with their advanced technology, could not have predicted their defeat but now, with God`s help, every day they welcome their soldiers` dead bodies and are facing severe losses of lives and finance," he said.
"Several years ago, no one thought that Americans and their friends would face such hard resistance, that today the (Afghan) President and his ministers would beg for money, weapons and soldiers while no one gives a positive answer".
"They came to our country seven years ago and they have not succeeded in their targets - and they will never succeed, even in a hundred years," he added.
This year has been the deadliest yet for international forces in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion, with at least 221 troops dying in the first nine months of 2008, most of them Americans.
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