Taliban leaders say they met former Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The Taliban say they want to form a government together with other parties.
Their delegation included Annas Haqqani of the infamous Haqqani Network. Former peace negotiator Abdullah Abdullah accompanied Karzai.
Karzai became president in late 2001 after the fall of the terror regime and was head of state until 2014. He is a prominent figure in the Pashtun ethnic group from which most of the Taliban originate.
Karzai is also a chieftain in Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold. There is a photo of the meeting, but nothing else about the conversation has been disclosed.
The Haqqani Network is actually an Afghan-Pakistani criminal gang that has the best-trained fighters within the Taliban movement. The network is blamed for drug crime, kidnappings, ties to terrorists, and the Afghan war’s bloodiest attacks.
The basis of the network lies in the wars of the 1970s and 1980s, in a mountainous border area south of Kabul. The network’s founder, Jalaluddin Haqqani, was a guerrilla leader here.
