The Afghan Taliban will send representatives to a conference organised by an international crisis group that will discuss resolving the war in Afghanistan, the group said in a statement on Friday.
The Afghan Taliban will send representatives to a conference organised by an international crisis group that will discuss resolving the war in Afghanistan, the group said in a statement on Friday. Representatives of the Taliban’s “political office” will attend the conference in Qatar’s capital, Doha, organised by Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, a Nobel peace prize-winning group focused on resolving conflict. The conference is “aimed at finding a solution to the conflict in Afghanistan,” now in its 15th year.
It is not part of the official peace process, which recently restarted after be-ing derailed in July when the Afghan government an-nounced that the Taliban’s founder and leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, had been dead since early 2013.
The official, four-country initiative, involving Afgha-nistan, Pakistan, China and the US, is due to hold its third meeting in Isla-mabad on February 6. The meetings do not include Taliban representatives, but aim to lay the groundwork for an eventual dialogue between militants and the Kabul government.
Referring to itself as the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” the Taliban said the group sought to take “healthy advantage” of the Pugwash initiative to “relay the legal demands of our nation and our just policy to the world directly.” The conference was “purely for research purposes with academic debates,” it said.
Deputy spokesman for Afghanistan’s chief executive Abdullah Abdullah, said no government representatives would attend the Pugwash gathering.
