{"id":21828,"date":"2018-11-10T00:24:26","date_gmt":"2018-11-10T00:24:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=21828"},"modified":"2018-11-10T00:24:26","modified_gmt":"2018-11-10T00:24:26","slug":"taliban-russia-meeting-not-about-direct-talks-with-kabul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=21828","title":{"rendered":"Taliban: Russia meeting ‘not about direct talks’ with Kabul"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Taliban representatives have reaffirmed their group’s position that they will not hold direct talks with Afghanistan’s Western-backed government, as they attended Russian-hosted international talks aimed at bringing an end to the country’s long-running conflict.<\/p>\n

Moscow, which said it invited representatives from the United States, India, Iran, China and Pakistan, as well as\u00a0five former Soviet republics in Central Asia<\/span>, hailed Friday’s meetings as an opportunity to “open a new page” in Afghanistan’s history.<\/p>\n

The Kabul government did not send a delegation.<\/p>\n

Instead, members of the High Peace Council (HPC), a government-appointed body responsible for reconciliation efforts with the Taliban, attended the event, where they repeated Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s offer of peace talks without pre-conditions.<\/p>\n

The meetings ended without the sides agreeing on a path to direct dialogue, the delegations from the Taliban and HPC said.<\/p>\n

“This conference was not about direct talks,” Sher\u00a0Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai, Taliban spokesperon, told journalists in translated comments quoted by Interfax news agency.<\/p>\n

The Taliban “does not recognise the current government as legal and therefore we won’t hold talks with them”, he added.<\/span> <\/p>\n

“Considering our main demand is the withdrawal of foreign forces, we will discuss a peaceful resolution with the Americans.”<\/span><\/p>\n

For his part, HPC represantive\u00a0Eshan Taheri said that Kabul was ready for direct talks with the group. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

“We confirmed to them [Taliban representatives] that we are ready to go on negotiations without conditions,” he said.<\/p>\n

“We asked them to define a date and place for the direct talks. The meeting in Moscow helped move things in this direction.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

Haji Din Mohammad Azizullah, head of the Kabul delegation, confirmed that he had “brief talks” with the Taliban members at a working lunch, characterising the talks as “friendly”, according to Anadolu Agency.<\/p>\n

The build-up\u00a0<\/h2>\n

Russia says the Moscow talks marked the first time that a Taliban delegation had taken part in such high-level international meeting.<\/p>\n

In a final communique, the Russian foreign ministry said that the participants “agreed to continue consultations within the framework of this mechanism”.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The talks came while the Taliban have increased the pressure on Afghan police and troops this year, even as they have also shown a tentative willingness to hold talks with the United States.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Moscow meeting was initially scheduled for September but was postponed after Kabul insisted the process should be Afghan-led. \u00a0 <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Taliban representatives in Qatar held a preliminary meeting<\/a> with US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad last month to discuss the group’s conditions to end the 17-year war.<\/p>\n

“The fact that the Afghan government did not send an official representative sends a message that they are not fully committed to these talks,”\u00a0Yuri Barmin, a fellow with the Russian International Affairs Council, told Al Jazeera on Friday.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n\n\n\n\n
<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Members of the Taliban delegation during the multilateral peace talks on Afghanistan in Moscow [Reuters\/Sergei Karpukhin<\/span>]<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n

\n SOURCE:
\n Al Jazeera and news agencies<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Taliban representatives have reaffirmed their group’s position that they will not hold direct talks with Afghanistan’s Western-backed government, as they attended Russian-hosted international talks aimed at bringing an end to the country’s long-running conflict. Moscow, which said it invited representatives from the United States, India, Iran, China and Pakistan, as well as\u00a0five former Soviet republics…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21828"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21828\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}