Afghanistan’s Taliban want to address General Assembly, says UN

The Taliban, Afghanistan’s new rulers for a matter of weeks, are challenging the credentials of their country’s former UN ambassador and need to talk at the overall Assembly’s high-level meeting of world leaders in the week , the international body says.

The question now facing UN officials comes just over a month after the Taliban, ejected from Afghanistan by the us and its allies after 9/11, swept back to power as US forces prepared to withdraw from the country at the top of August.

The Taliban stunned the planet by taking territory with surprising speed and tiny resistance from the US-trained Afghan military. The Western-backed government collapsed on Assumption .

UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Secretary-General Antonio Guterres received a communication on September 15 from the currently accredited Afghan Ambassador, Ghulam Isaczai, with the list of Afghanistan’s delegation for the assembly’s 76th annual session.

Five days later, Guterres received another communication with the letterhead ‘Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, Ministry of Foreign Affairs,’ signed by ‘Ameer Khan Muttaqi’ as ‘Minister of Foreign Affairs,’ requesting to participate within the UN gathering of world leaders.

Muttaqi said within the letter that former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani was “ousted” as of Assumption which countries across the planet “no longer recognise him as president,” and thus Isaczai not represents Afghanistan, Dujarric said.

The Taliban said it had been nominating a replacement UN permanent representative, Mohammad Suhail Shaheen, the UN spokesman said. He has been a spokesman for the Taliban during peace negotiations in Qatar.

Senior US State Department officials said they were conscious of the Taliban’s request — the us may be a member of the UN credentials committee — but they might not predict how that panel might rule.

However, one among the officials said the committee “would take a while to deliberate,” suggesting the Taliban’s envoy wouldn’t be ready to speak at the overall Assembly at this session a minimum of during the high-level leaders’ week.

In cases of disputes over seats at the United Nations , the overall Assembly’s nine-member credentials committee must meet to form a choice . Both letters are sent to the committee after consultations with General Assembly President Abdulla Shahid’s office.

The committee’s members are the us , Russia, China, Bahama, Bhutan, Chile, Namibia, Sierra Leone and Sweden.

Afghanistan is scheduled to offer the last speech on the ultimate day of the high-level meeting on September 27. It wasn’t clear who would speak if the committee met and therefore the Taliban got Afghanistan’s seat.

When the Taliban last ruled from 1996 to 2001, the UN refused to recognise their government and instead gave Afghanistan’s seat to the previous, warlord-dominated government of President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who eventually was killed by a terrorist in 2011. it had been Rabbani’s government that brought Osama bin Laden , the mastermind of 9/11, to Afghanistan from Sudan in 1996.

The Taliban have said they need international recognition and financial help to rebuild the war-battered country. But the makeup of the new Taliban government poses a dilemma for the United Nations . Several of the interim ministers are on the UN’s so-called blacklist of international terrorists and funders of terrorism.

Credentials committee members could also use Taliban recognition as leverage to press for a more inclusive government that guarantees human rights, especially for women who were barred from getting to school during their previous rule, and ladies who weren’t ready to work.