KABUL, July 2: President Hamid Karzai has warned that the worsening security situation in Afghanistan is like a fire that could spread throughout the region.

The situation was “seriously worrying” and had been deteriorating for the past two years, the president said in an interview with the BBC’s Pashtu service that was aired on Sunday.

The reasons behind the continued attacks, despite international and Afghan efforts to rein in the militants, were both domestic and foreign, the president said.

Domestic issues included the inadequacy of the Afghan security forces and corruption among officials, he said. Afghanistan was working on these problems, he said.

“But the foreign factors, where trained terrorists come from abroad is not what we can solve.

“The international community has agreed to help us with that, to save Afghanistan from terrorism so they can save themselves,” he said, likening the problem to a kind of “invasion”.

If the foreign-based camps where militants are being trained and the sources of their funding were not rooted out, the violence will spread to the whole region, he said.

“It is our hope that the region would not think they burn Afghanistan only in this fire — it is impossible that it stays here. It will spread,” he said.—AFP