The Afghan government has declined to participate in a regional meeting on Afghanistan held in Tehran, a senior Taliban diplomat said during the weekend.
Zakir Jalaly, the third political director of the foreign ministry, wrote on X that the Afghan government expects that established mechanisms should be used for discussions on Afghanistan, not new ones.
Special representatives of Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and China met in Tehran on Sunday to discuss Afghanistan.
The United Nations is set to hold an international meeting of various countries' special representatives for Afghanistan later this month in Doha, with the aim of increasing international cooperation in the country.
The Taliban did not participate in the previous round of the Doha meeting in February. Jalaly added that the Taliban is engaged in talks about the upcoming Doha meeting.
In December, the UN Security Council adopted a resolution calling for the appointment of a special envoy for Afghanistan. The Taliban has consistently been against this.
Since returning to power in 2021, the Taliban rejected calls for the formation of an inclusive government and to ensure women's rights to education and work.
As a result, no country has recognized their government.
Experts agree the next step following Taliban's delisting as a terrorist organization could be its official recognition as a legitimate state power.
Moscow has kept informal ties with the Taliban since 2015, and Russia is suspected to have delivered weapons to the movement in the past.
In March 2022, both sides assumed official diplomatic relations.
Six months prior, in August 2021, Taliban fighters took over Afghanistan's government after Western armed forces and diplomatic representatives who had supported the former government swiftly left the country.
The Taliban was previously in power in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001. Two decades later, the Taliban's return has also meant the restoration of their own narrow interpretation of Islamic law, and with it, the wide restriction of basic human rights, particularly for women and girls.
No state has officially recognized the Taliban as Afghanistan's legitimate government, and Russia has listed the movement as a banned organization since 2003.
Kazakhstan, Russia’s neighbor, was the first country to remove the Taliban from its list of terrorist organizations in 2023.
Meanwhile, the German Foreign Ministry on Friday warned against cooperating with Afghanistan's Taliban rulers on deporting Afghan offenders, saying the Islamist government would seek international recognition through such a move.
“The Taliban will want to have any repatriations paid for at least through international recognition,” a spokesman for Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said in Berlin.
“And it is a fact that the German government does not recognize the de facto Taliban government in Afghanistan, just like any other country in the world, and does not cooperate with it,” he said. There is only sporadic contact “on a technical level” in individual cases, the spokesman added, referring to a fatal knife attack in Mannheim, in which a police officer was stabbed to death by an Afghan national.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he intended to allow the deportation of serious criminals to Afghanistan and Syria again. Interior Minister Nancy Faeser is currently looking into this.
The Taliban had previously shown themselves to be open to cooperation on accepting Afghan criminals and dangerous individuals.
“Afghanistan calls on the German authorities to settle the matter within the framework of normal consular relations and an appropriate mechanism based on a bilateral agreement,” Taliban Foreign Ministry spokesman Abdul Kahar Balchi wrote on X on Friday.
