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News > China

Afghanistan's Taliban Meet Chinese Officials in Beijing

  • China has long worried about links between militant groups and what it says are Islamist extremists operating in Xinjiang, home to the mostly Muslim Uighur people.

    China has long worried about links between militant groups and what it says are Islamist extremists operating in Xinjiang, home to the mostly Muslim Uighur people. | Photo: Reuters

Published 23 September 2019
Opinion

China, a close ally of Pakistan, has been deepening its economic and political ties with Kabul and try to bring the two uneasy neighbors closer.

A Taliban delegation met Sunday with China's Special Representative for Afghanistan in Beijing to discuss the group's peace talks with the United States, a spokesman for the Islamist insurgency said.

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The meeting comes after U.S. President Donald Trump's 11th-hour cancellation earlier this month of negotiations with the Taliban, which many had hoped would pave the way to a broader peace deal with the Afghan government and ending an 18-year war.

The Taliban's nine-member delegation traveled to Beijing and met Deng Xijun, China's special representative for Afghanistan, said Suhail Shaheen, the Afghan group's spokesman in Qatar, on his official Twitter account on Sunday.

"The Chinese special representative said the U.S.-Taliban deal is a good framework for the peaceful solution of the Afghan issue and they support it," Shaheen wrote.

Mullah Baradar, the Taliban delegation's leader, said they had held a dialogue and reached a "comprehensive deal," adding that "now, if the U.S. president cannot stay committed to his words and breaks his promise, then he is responsible for any kind of distraction and bloodshed in Afghanistan," Baradar said, according to Shaheen.

Speaking in Beijing on Monday, Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang confirmed that Baradar and several of his assistants came to China for exchanges in recent days.

"China's relevant foreign ministry official exchanged opinions with Baradar regarding the situation in Afghanistan and promoting Afghanistan's peace and reconciliation process," Geng confirmed.

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As China's far western region of Xinjiang shares a short border with Afghanistan, the Asian nation has long worried about links between militant groups and what it says are Islamist extremists operating in Xinjiang, home to the mostly Muslim Uighur people, who speak a Turkic dialect.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Sunday called on all countries to resist China's demands to repatriate ethnic Uighurs, saying Beijing's campaign in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang was an "attempt to erase its own citizens."

Geng responded Pompeo had slandered China, and that its policies in Xinjiang were fundamentally no different than what other countries had done to guard against extremism and terrorism.

In June, before the peace talks fell apart, another Taliban team went to China to meet with the government. At the time, a foreign ministry spokesman said China supported Afghans resolving their problems themselves through talks, and the visit was an important part of China promoting such peace talks.

Afghanistan will hold its fourth presidential elections on Sept. 28 since U.S.-led forces invaded in 2001. Those elections have gained importance since the collapse of the peace talks, as the negotiations could have led to the creation of an interim government, now a more distant prospect.

President Ashraf Ghani is seeking re-election to a second five-year term while facing strong rejection from the Taliban, who have warned civilians to not campaign or head to the polls, dismissing them as a sham.

As the year-long peace process crumbled, in Washington, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reiterated that U.S. negotiations are on hold and that the U.S. would not reduce military support for Afghan troops or presence currently estimated at 14,000 U.S. troops and about 8,000 NATO forces.

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