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Taliban shall follow political goals through democratic ways: Ghani
President Ashraf Ghani said the Taliban should pursue their political goals through democratic ways such as taking part in the Afghan elections.
Speaking at a summit to strengthen the global consensus on peace hosted in Kabul, Ghani said that the group could take part in the presidential and parliamentary elections.
Representatives from 19 countries and international organizations including NATO, the United Nations, the European Union had participated in the summit.
President Ghani stressed that the Taliban must be present within the framework of the republican system. Much of the president’s speech focused on global support in Afghanistan’s peace talks. Ashraf Ghani said the government is investigating the release of 1,000 Taliban prisoners from the Taliban.
Meanwhile, Abdullah Abdullah, Chairman of the High Reconciliation Council, also said that the government has boost efforts to finalize the process of releasing prisoners, saying that the first round of intra-Afghan talks would be held in Qatar a week after the completion of the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners. Abdullah stressed that the ceasefire is the main agenda of the first round of talks.
“At the moment as we are well aware, the first round will be held in Doha. The initial understanding is that after the completion of exchange of prisoners, it will be one week after that,” Abdullah said, adding, “There is an understanding about the facilitation that the host country should do the facilitation, but on the details of the facilitation, the two sides needs to agree.”
The head of the High Reconciliation Council says that in the first round of talks between Afghans, the ceasefire will be the main agenda and that important issues will be prioritized. According to Abdullah Abdullah, strategies will be discussed in the negotiations on issues of serious disagreement.
He added, “We need to secure the commitment from the Taliban that it will not be a sort of one of the negotiations, but to secure their commitment, not only for deduction in violence in a comprehensive ceasefire but at the same time for continued engagement and as part of strategy, the first agenda will be ceasefire. How to strategize and prioritize it is important.”
The Taliban’s political bureau, however, accuses the Afghan government of delaying the release of prisoners on the pretext of delaying the start of talks between Afghans, although the office acknowledges that there are only a few Taliban prisoners left to be released until the number of released prisoners reaches 5,000.
“They say we have released 4,000 prisoners, but we say more than 3,000. But if they had released the same thousands of prisoners, negotiations would have started and other prisoners would have been released later. They are creating obstacles on the way of the process,” said Sohail Shahin, a spokesman for the Taliban’s political bureau in Qatar.
The National Security Council says the Taliban have so far released about half of the 1,000 captured security forces. The council emphasizes that the government has so far released 4,099 Taliban prisoners, but the release of 592 prisoners who have been convicted of serious crimes such as drug trafficking, kidnapping, rape, stoning women, assassination, and other criminal offenses will not happen.
The Embassy of Japan in Afghanistan announced on Friday that the country has allocated $19.5 million in humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan.
In a statement, the Japanese Embassy said it hopes the aid will help bring positive change to the lives of vulnerable Afghans.
According to the statement, the assistance will cover the basic humanitarian needs of vulnerable communities in Afghanistan.
The embassy added that the aid will be delivered through United Nations agencies, international organizations, and Japanese non-governmental organizations operating in Afghanistan.
Japan’s total assistance to Afghanistan since August 2021 has reached more than $549 million.
Security forces at the Islam Qala border in Herat province prevented hundreds of young Afghans from illegally entering Iran.
Officials from the 207 Al-Farooq Army Corps said that around 530 people attempted over the past two days to illegally enter Iranian territory through areas of Kohsan district in Herat, but border forces detained them and transferred them back to their original areas.
Meanwhile, officials in the local administration of Herat said that due to severe cold along the illegal migration route to Iran, three Afghan migrants have lost their lives in the Kohsan district of the province, and a shepherd has also died there for the same reason.
Mohammad Yousuf Saeedi, spokesperson for the Herat governor’s office, said that some statistics and images shared on social media regarding the incident are not reliable.
According to him, further investigations are underway to determine whether any individuals have died on the other side of the border.
President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program on Thursday that allowed the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings to come to the United States.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on the social platform X that, at Trump’s direction, she is ordering the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program, the Associated Press reported.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she said of the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente.
Neves Valente, 48, is suspected in the shootings at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others, and the killing of an MIT professor. He was found dead Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, officials said.
Neves Valente had studied at Brown on a student visa beginning in 2000, according to an affidavit from a Providence police detective. In 2017, he was issued a diversity immigrant visa and months later obtained legal permanent residence status, according to the affidavit. It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017.
The diversity visa program makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year by lottery to people from countries that are little represented in the U.S., many of them in Africa. The lottery was created by Congress, and the move is almost certain to invite legal challenges.
Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery, with more than 131,000 selected when including spouses with the winners. After winning, they must undergo vetting to win admission to the United States. Portuguese citizens won only 38 slots.
Lottery winners are invited to apply for a green card. They are interviewed at consulates and subject to the same requirements and vetting as other green-card applicants.
Trump has long opposed the diversity visa lottery. Noem’s announcement is the latest example of using tragedy to advance immigration policy goals. After an Afghan man was identified as the gunman in a fatal attack on National Guard members in November, Trump’s administration imposed sweeping rules against immigration from Afghanistan and other counties.
While pursuing mass deportation, Trump has sought to limit or eliminate avenues to legal immigration. He has not been deterred if they are enshrined in law, like the diversity visa lottery, or the Constitution, as with a right to citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil. The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear his challenge to birthright citizenship.
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