U.S., Taliban resume talks to end war

KABUL, Afghanistan — A United States envoy and the Taliban resumed negotiations Thursday on ending America’s longest war.

A Taliban member familiar with, but not part of, the talks that resumed in Qatar said U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad also met one-on-one Wednesday with the Taliban’s lead negotiator, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.

The Taliban member spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk with reporters.

Baradar is one of the Taliban’s founders and has perhaps the strongest influence on the insurgent group’s rank-and-file members. Some in Afghanistan fear that Taliban fighters who reject a deal with the U.S. could migrate to other militant groups such as the brutal local affiliate of the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at a Kabul wedding over the weekend that killed at least 80 people.

The U.S. and the Taliban have held several rounds of negotiations in the past year on issues including a U.S. troop withdrawal, a cease-fire, intra-Afghan negotiations to follow and Taliban guarantees that Afghanistan will not be a launch pad for global terror attacks.

Previously, Khalilzad has said the intra-Afghan negotiations will be the occasion to work out thorny issues such as constitutional changes, the fate of the country’s many militias and even the name for Afghanistan, as the Taliban still refer to it as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.