KABUL, Afghanistan - Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s High Peace Council has held meetings with a breakaway faction of senior Taliban leaders in the United Arab Emirates, officials said Saturday.
The Dubai meetings are the first, fresh Afghan-initiated efforts to restart peace talks aimed at bringing a negotiated end to the conflict ahead of the final withdrawal of international combat troops at the end of this year. But they also reflect deepening divisions among Taliban leadership.
Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar publicly has refused direct talks with Karzai, and the Taliban have denied links to the faction in Dubai, cobbled together by former Taliban Finance Minister Aga Jan Mohtism.
The council said in a statement Saturday that the delegation it met with clearly had indicated it was ready for peace talks and that both sides agreed on the need for further dialogue - both inside and outside Afghanistan.
“Both sides agreed that they will continue to have these sort of talks and also both sides wish for a good outcome from the meetings,” according to the statement, which added that discussions had focused on bringing peace and stability to Afghanistan.
While the council did not say who was represented in each delegation, Mohtism confirmed his group’s participation in a statement issued to The Associated Press.
Mohtism said that recent talks in Dubai among Taliban leadership had resulted in a consensus and willingness to end the conflict through an intra-Afghan dialogue, which resulted in the recent meeting with a delegation from Karzai’s council.
That meeting was held in an “atmosphere of peace and sincerity and with due determination towards an everlasting peace and establishing an Islamic system,” he said. “Both sides in the said meeting agreed to analyze all dimensions of the issue deeply and to find a permanent solution instead of working on interim formats of the solution.”
Mohtism is the former head of the Taliban’s powerful political committee and once a close associate of Omar. In 2010, Mohtism was shot while in the Pakistani Arabian port city of Karachi.
Though no one took responsibility for the shooting, suspicion fell on hard-line Taliban members who opposed his repeated calls for peace talks to end the protracted conflict in Afghanistan.
His breakaway faction is made up of senior Taliban ministers, commanders and former Taliban diplomats. It represents the largest gathering of Taliban leaders since failed peace talks in Qatar last June, which broke down before they started when the Taliban demanded their movement be recognized as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
In an apparent reflection of a deepening divide with Omar, Mohtism’s statement was issued under the banner of the Islamic Movement of Taliban.
Meanwhile, the Taliban on Saturday called for an end to violence against Muslims in the Central African Republic, making a rare statement on conflicts outside their region that was soon echoed by al-Qaida’s North Africa branch.
The Central African Republic has been wracked by sectarian violence, with Christian fighters hunting down and killing Muslim civilians in recent weeks despite the presence of thousands of French and African peacekeepers. The violence has displaced tens of thousands of Muslims in what the United Nations human-rights body has called “ethnic-religious cleansing.”
In a statement released Saturday, the Taliban condemned the “merciless killings” of Muslims at the hands of “bloodthirsty militias” as the world sits “idly by.”
They warned that the situation threatens the peaceful coexistence of Muslims and Christians throughout Africa and urged the international community - including the pope - to stop the bloodshed.
The comments are “more than surprising,” said Nader Nadery, director of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, a Kabul-based think tank.
“It has been very rare where the Taliban would comment or show concern about any development internationally that has not been linked to their cause or to their ideology,” he said.
While the Taliban long have focused on their domestic conflict, Nadery said the “unusual” statement could be an effort to display Muslim solidarity or may be tied to increasing talk and demands to be recognized as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
“This is symbolically an attempt both to show they are mindful of what’s happening globally and caring about the Muslim world, and they are trying to portray themselves as a state,” Nadery said.
Information for this article was contributed by Cassandra Vinograd and Rukmini Callimachi of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 7 on 02/23/2014