Pakistan will host the third meeting of four-way talks next week aimed at reviving the stalled peace process between the Afghan government and the Taliban, a top official said Thursday.
Pakistan will host the third meeting of four-way talks next week aimed at reviving the stalled peace process between the Afghan government and the Taliban, a top official said Thursday.
Foreign office spokesman Qazi Khalilullah said that the meeting of quadrilateral group invol-ving Afghanistan, China, Pakistan and the US will be held on February 6 in Islamabad. Mr Khalilullah said that the meeting would discuss the road map for reconciliation in Afghanistan.
It would be third such meeting in recent weeks. The group of four was set up in December to facilitate the talks with the Taliban which were stalled in July after news of Taliban chief Mullah Omar’s death. The dates and venue of the third meeting was announced at the end of the Kabul meeting.
Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif will soon travel to Qatar as part of that effort, Mr Khalilullah said, without giving more details about the trip. Thursday’s announcement came days after the Afghan Taliban said that its “political office” in Qatar is the only entity authorised to carry out negotiations on its behalf.
Members of the Taliban’s Qatar office are believed to be directly linked to Mullah Akhtar Mansoor. Officials from Pakistan, China and US were present when representatives of the Taliban and the Afghan government met in Murree near Islamabad during the first round.
Meanwhile, Pakistan is hosting almost 1.6 million registered Afghan refugees which is still the largest protracted refugee population globally, said an official of the United Nations High Commi-ssioner for Refugees (UNHCR) on Thursday.
An official of UNHCR said that since 2002 the UNHCR had facilitated the return of 3.8 million registered Afghans from Pakistan, reports our correspondent.
