Taliban say Afghanistan has freed several of its prisoners – World

Taliban officials say several of the group members have been released from Afghan prisons, including former shadow governors, the first such movement since an imminent peace agreement was declared "dead" and a few days later that an envoy from the United States met with the main Taliban leaders. in the Pakistani capital.

Officials also said the Taliban have released three Indian engineers who were held, although that has not yet been confirmed by New Delhi or the Afghan government.

Taliban officials spoke Sunday on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized by their leadership to speak with the media.

The shadow governors in the northeastern province of Kunar and the southwestern province of Nimroz, Sheikh Abdul Rahim and Maulvi Rashid, were among the liberated Taliban, officials said.

The Taliban have established a shadow government throughout the country and in areas under their control they have even established courts.

The Associated Press He contacted both the Afghanistan defense department and the president's office, but they declined to comment.

The United States peace envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, met last week with the Taliban chief negotiator, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, co-founder of the hard-line Taliban movement and head of a Taliban delegation that visited Islamabad. The Taliban said they were in Islamabad to discuss the status of approximately 1.5 million Afghan refugees living in the city.

US officials said Jalilzad was in Islamabad to follow up the talks he had in September in New York with Pakistani officials, including Prime Minister Imran Khan.

The United States insisted that Jalilzad was not in Pakistan to restart the peace talks, at least not yet.

But the Taliban and Pakistan confirmed that the two sides met.

The meeting is significant and the first Khalilzad was held with the Taliban since last month when the president of the United States, Donald Trump, declared an agreement that seemed made, but by the firm, "dead", blaming the Taliban for a increased violence, which included death. of an American soldier

Still, Trump said he wants to leave Afghanistan, end the longest war in the United States and withdraw its 14,000 troops. He has criticized the Afghan government for not doing more to defend Afghanistan and rely on US and NATO troops to monitor the country.

While the details of Khalilzad's meeting with the Taliban have been incomplete, there have been reports that the two sides discussed prisoner exchanges, with the freedom of two professors, an American and an Australian, from the American University in the capital Afghan figure in discussions.

American professor Kevin King and Australian Timothy Weeks were kidnapped in Kabul on August 7, 2016. The Taliban posted videos of the two men and said their conditions had deteriorated.