The UN Security Council has granted permission to the Taliban’s foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, to travel to Islamabad and hold official meetings with Pakistani and Chinese diplomats.
Amir Khan Muttaqi, along other top Taliban leaders, are under UN Security Council sanctions which ban them from travelling abroad.
But according to to Reuters, the Pakistani mission at the UN requested a travel exemption from the Security Council’s sanctions committee for Amir Khan Muttaqi to travel to Pakistan between 6 to 9 May “for a meeting with the foreign ministers of Pakistan and China.”
The UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, is currently hosting a meeting in Doha on Afghanistan with representatives from at least 25 countries. The Taliban, who has not been invited to the meeting, has called it “counterproductive“.
On 28 April, the Taliban rejected the UN Security Council’s unanimous condemnation of the group’s restrictions on women and girls, saying its policies were “internal social matter of Afghanistan that does not impact outside states.”
