Afghanistan Times
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AT Monitoring Desk
KABUL: The Iranian foreign ministry announced on Monday that the country continues the policy of paving the ground for talks among different Afghan groups to attain sustainable peace and security in Afghanistan.
“Fully secure and stable Afghanistan is a high priority to us. Peace talks should be intra-Afghan talks. Iran is always ready to cooperate. We tried to get all Afghan groups to enter into talks with the Afghan government, and this is our policy today too, and we have always tried so that talks will be held within the intra-Afghan framework,” Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said.
He added that special representative of the Iranian Foreign Ministry for Afghanistan Affairs Mohammad Ebrahim Taherian Fard had on Monday morning held talks with Head of Afghanistan’s High Council for National Reconciliation Abdullah Abdullah on the recent intra-Afghan summit in Istanbul, noting that Iran will consider attendance in the meeting if the Istanbul talks are based on the principles declared earlier.
Last week, Taherian Fard stressed the country’s full support to achieve lasting peace and stability in Afghanistan.
In a telephone conversation with the Afghan Minister of Foreign Affairs Haneef Atmar, he said that Tehran fully supports the process of peace talks in the neighboring country.
During the phone talk, the two sides discussed latest situation in Afghanistan especially process of intra-Afghan peace talks and Istanbul Summit.
Also last Monday, he had a phone conversation with Abdullah Abdullah, during which the two sides discussed bilateral ties, latest developments in the peace talks and the ways to achieve lasting peace and stability in the Central Asian country.
In relevant remarks on March 31, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in a Twitter message underlined that the United Nations should play a much more active role than before in Afghanistan’s peace process.
“Participants of the Heart of Asia Conference in Tajikistan stressed the UN role in inclusive Afghanistan peace talks,” Zarif tweeted.
The Iranian foreign minister wrote that there were extensive talks at the Heart of Asia meeting in Dushanbe where issues of Afghanistan, regional and global issues and mutual cooperation were on agenda with presidents and foreign minister of Tajikistan and Afghanistan, as well as foreign ministers of Azerbaijan, India, Pakistan, Turkey.
