Afghanistan has always been known as the place empires go to die, and President Ashraf Ghani sees that applying to the local ISIS affiliate too, claiming that the group has already been defeated and that “Afghanistan will be their graveyard”.
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Sources in Hekmatyar’s HeI – the second largest resistance movement in Afghanistan – said the group had been contacted but no formal invitation was ever extended.
Afghanistan’s Taliban has cast further doubt on prospects for peace talks with the Kabul government.
During a meeting of the cabinet of ministers, Abdullah said “The anti-government armed militants are once again invited to respond positively towards the legitimate calls of the government of national unity for the revival of peace process”.
A Taliban statement reportedly said, “Until Taliban names are removed from global blacklists, and until our detainees are released, talks will yield no results”.
The militants said they had no intention of joining talks as long as the country was under what they described as foreign occupation.
Obama announced late last year he is postponing the withdrawal of most US forces in Afghanistan one year until he leaves office in January 2017.
In a major setback to the ongoing peace efforts, the Taliban issued a statement, on Saturday, refusing to participate in talks negotiated by the US, China and Pakistan, also referred to as the Quadrilateral Coordination Group (QCG).
Before this, the US President Barack Obama, during a video conference call with Ghani on Friday, welcomed Ghani’s recent efforts for direct talks with Taliban – which is expected to be held in mid-March. “In Nangakhar, most intensively”, Nicholas Haysom, who once served as the UN Secretary-General’s deputy special representative in Afghanistan, said in December.
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The reconciliation dialogue with the Taliban has been suspended since July previous year. Its fighters have pushed into key areas as USA and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation troops withdraw from the country. In their statement, the Taliban said they opposed talks because they had not been “kept informed about the negotiations from the onset” and because the United States had deployed additional troops, and carried out air strikes and night raids.
