{"id":41101,"date":"2019-10-07T06:23:25","date_gmt":"2019-10-07T06:23:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=41101"},"modified":"2019-10-07T06:23:25","modified_gmt":"2019-10-07T06:23:25","slug":"afghanistan-frees-several-taliban-prisoners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=41101","title":{"rendered":"Afghanistan ‘frees’ several Taliban prisoners"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Taliban officials said that several of the armed group’s members have been freed from Afghan jails, including former shadow governors, the first move of its kind since a peace deal that seemed imminent was declared “dead” and just days after a US envoy met top Taliban<\/a> leaders in the Pakistani capital.<\/p>\n

The officials also said the Taliban has released three Indian engineers who were being held, though that has yet to be confirmed by New Delhi or the Afghan government.<\/p>\n

The Taliban officials spoke to AP news agency on Sunday on condition of anonymity because they were not cleared by their leadership to speak to the media.<\/p>\n

Shadow governors in northeastern Kunar province and southwestern Nimroz province, Sheikh Abdul Rahim and Maulvi Rashid, were among the Taliban freed, the officials said.<\/p>\n

The Taliban have established a shadow government throughout the country; in areas under their control they have even established courts.<\/p>\n

Afghanistan<\/a>‘s defence department and the president’s office declined to comment to AP.<\/p>\n

US peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad met last week with the Taliban’s top negotiator Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder of the hardline Taliban movement and head of a Taliban delegation to the Pakistani capital.<\/p>\n

The delegation said it was in Islamabad to discuss the condition of roughly 1.5 million Afghan refugees living in the city.<\/p>\n

US officials said Khalilzad was in the Pakistani capital to follow up on talks he held in September in New York with Pakistani officials, including Prime Minister Imran Khan.<\/p>\n

The US insisted Khalilzad was not in Pakistan to restart peace talks. But the Taliban and Pakistan confirmed the two sides met.<\/p>\n

This is the first meeting\u00a0Khalilzad has held with the Taliban since last month when US President Donald Trump declared<\/a> “dead” a deal that seemed done but for the signing, blaming an uptick in violence by the Taliban, that included the death of a US soldier.<\/p>\n

Still, Trump said he wants to exit Afghanistan, ending the US’s longest war, and withdraw its 14,000 troops.<\/p>\n

He as criticised the Afghan government for not doing more to defend Afghanistan and relying on US and NATO troops to police the country.<\/p>\n

While details of Khalilzad’s meeting with the Taliban have been sketchy, there have been reports that the two sides did discuss prisoner exchanges, with the freedom of two professors – an American and an Australian – of the American University of Afghanistan featuring in the discussions.<\/p>\n

American professor Kevin King and Australian Timothy Weeks were kidnapped in Kabul August 7, 2016.<\/p>\n

The Taliban have released videos of the two men and have said their conditions have deteriorated.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Taliban officials said that several of the armed group’s members have been freed from Afghan jails, including former shadow governors, the first move of its kind since a peace deal that seemed imminent was declared “dead” and just days after a US envoy met top Taliban leaders in the Pakistani capital. The officials also said…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":41102,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41101","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=41101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41101\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/41102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}