After 19 years, since the outbreak of the war in Afghanistan, which was triggered by the US persecution of those responsible for the attacks of 11 September, the talks between the opposing parties are resuming to explore ways of establishing national peace.
Peace talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban will resume in early January, and both sides will decide to pause after agreeing early this month on the modalities of their talks.
Talks between the Afghan government and Taliban representatives began in September in Doha, in line with the February agreement between the United States and the insurgents to withdraw the US contingent of 12,000 people within 14 months.
The long-awaited scene of the meeting between the Afghan government and the Taliban, who have been resisting talks with the Asian country's executive for all these years, has thus arrived.
There were doubts about establishing the dialogue as the Taliban insisted on the need for the Kabul government to release all the members of the list of 5,000 prisoners it handed over in February. The Afghan authorities were reluctant to do so at first, but US pressure forced them to accept and in recent months, despite the fact that the security forces have suffered constant attacks from the insurgency throughout the country, they have been releasing all the names on the list.
The ultimate goal is to achieve a ceasefire as the first step towards establishing peace. Qatar is the scene of the beginning of the dialogue between the Afghan government and the Taliban rebels in order to finally establish the necessary and much-demanded peace in the Asian country. Thus, these negotiations between the Taliban and Kabul began this Sunday.
The Afghan President, Ashraf Ghani, agreed this Sunday to continue the second round of intra-Afghan peace negotiations with the Taliban in Doha, after he pressed for the resumption of talks on Afghan territory.
Ghani made the decision today after meeting this morning at the Presidential Palace with the president of the High Council for National Reconciliation, Abdullah Abdullah, with whom he discussed when and where the next round of negotiations would be held. "Based on the request of the leaders of the negotiating team and the High Council for National Reconciliation, (...) and in order to avoid delays in the second round of talks, the President of Afghanistan agreed that the next round of negotiations will be held in Qatar," the President's spokesman, Sediq Sediqi, announced on Twitter.
Despite the start of the peace process, clashes and bomb and rocket attacks remain frequent in Afghanistan, particularly in Kabul.
This weekend, some ten rockets hit several neighbourhoods of the Afghan capital, killing at least one person and injuring two, according to Reuters.
Last week, US forces even carried out an air strike against the Taliban in support of government forces in the province of Kandahar, a rare intervention since the signing of the agreement that paved the way for their withdrawal.
