Kabul, Taliban will meet to plan prisoner swap

‘Positive’ deal opens way for crucial peace talks with militants

The Afghan government and the Taliban have agreed to a prisoner swap at the end of March as part of the militants’ peace deal with Washington, officials said on Thursday.

The agreement comes after President Ashraf Ghani finalized a list of delegates to begin planning crucial peace talks with the Taliban, the officials said.

The prisoner exchange was secured on Wednesday following a five-way video conference that included officials from the Taliban, the Afghan government, the Red Cross, US and Qatar.

Javid Faisal, a spokesman for Ghani’s national security adviser, said that Taliban and Afghan officials will hold a face-to-face meeting in Afghanistan ahead of the release, which is set to begin on March 31. Taliban prisoners will be selected for release according to age, health and coronavirus risk, he said. Individual prisoners and the Taliban will have to provide assurances that freed inmates will not return to battlefield, Faisal told Arab News. Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, also confirmed on Thursday that progress has been made on the prisoner exchange, but offered no further details. On Wednesday, Suhail Shaheen, the Taliban’s spokesman in Qatar, the group’s political headquarters, tweeted a series of comments on the agreement made in the five-way video conference.

“The process of releasing the prisoners will begin on March 31, and (the Taliban) will dispatch its technical team to Bagram prison to determine the identities of its prisoners — to verify the list of the prisoners that was previously endorsed,” he said.

The agreement on the prisoner swap ends the deadlock that threatened the start of the first intraAfghan talks following Washington’s deal with the Taliban, signed last month following 18 months of secret negotiations.

The deal envisaged the exchange of prisoners before the start of the intra-Afghan talks set for March 10. It will pave the way for the withdrawal of foreign troops led by the US from Afghanistan within 14 months. In return, the Taliban will guarantee that there will be no threat against any country, including US interests, in areas controlled by the militants.

US envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, who signed the deal with the Taliban, in a tweet described the agreement to release the prisoners in coming days as “a positive development.”

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The deal comes after Ghani finalized a list of delegates to begin planning crucial peace talks with the Taliban.