Taliban prisoners released from Afghan jails

Taliban officials say several of their group’s members have been freed from Afghan jails, including former shadow governors, just days after a US envoy met top Taliban leaders in the Pakistani capital following the suspension of US-Taliban talks last month.

The Taliban also said they released three Indian engineers they had been holding, though that has yet to be confirmed by New Delhi or the Afghan government. The Taliban officials spoke Sunday on condition of anonymity because they were not cleared by their leadership to speak to the media.

Among the Taliban figures freed were the group’s shadow

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governors for northeastern Kunar province and southwestern Nimroz province, Sheikh Abdul Rahim and Maulvi Rashid, the officials said. The Taliban have established a shadow government in areas they control across Afghanistan and have even set up courts to try offenders and abide by their strict interpretation of Islamic law, or Sharia.

The Taliban were reportedly released from one of Afghanistan’s largest jails at the Bagram military base, north of the capital, Kabul. While the US troops years ago handed over the sprawling base to Afghan security forces, it still maintains a military presence at Bagram. It wasn’t clear whether the US or Afghan forces released the Taliban. The Associated Press contacted both Afghanistan’s defense department and the president’s office but they declined to comment. US peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad met last week in Islamabad with the Taliban’s top negotiator Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a cofounder of the hard-line Taliban movement and head of a Taliban delegation to the Pakistani capital. The Taliban said they were in Islamabad to discuss the condition of roughly 1.5 million Afghan refugees living in the city.

US officials said Khalilzad was in the Pakistani capital to follow up on talks he held in September in New York with Pakistani officials, including Prime Minister Imran Khan.

The US insisted Khalilzad was not in Pakistan to restart US-Taliban peace talks — at least not yet. But the Taliban and Pakistan confirmed the two sides met.

The meeting is significant and the first Khalilzad has held with the Taliban since last month, when President Donald Trump declared that the talks were “dead,” blaming an uptick in violence by the Taliban that included the killing of a US soldier.