The Taliban, who took almost twenty years to return to Kabul, are still resisting foreign capitals. No government has officially recognized his Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, a year and a half after its restoration. However, something moves, discreetly, in his favor.
Yesterday, Monday, the interim foreign ministry in Kabul was overjoyed to announce that officials and diplomats loyal to the Taliban were already in control of the Afghan embassy in Tehran. Something corroborated by the first photos, which could not contrast more with the last ones of the previous team.
Returning to Iran, the recently appointed charge d’affaires, Fazl Mohammad Haqqani and his team would have “taken possession of the Afghan embassy, ??this Monday in Tehran”, according to the statement of the Taliban Foreign Ministry. Iran has said that, for what as far as they are concerned, it is “an internal Afghan matter”.
Similar discretion is observed in Turkey. Just yesterday, although somewhat later, an adviser to the same Afghan ministry, Zakir Jalali, stated that the Afghan consulate in Istanbul had also been ceded to the Islamic Emirate. A certain Gulmat Khan Zadran would have been sent from Kabul, although not in the capacity of consul. Ankara, in any case, a few months ago already protected the entry into the Afghan embassy in the Turkish capital of diplomats sent by the Taliban, who did not take long to fire three former government employees.
The Afghan embassy in the Iranian capital was under the control of diplomats and officials appointed by the previous government, Ashraf Ghani.
The same is still happening in almost every country in the world, where these officials continued issuing and collecting visas, at least until August of last year, when the Taliban turned them into a piece of paper by stopping accepting them. Also, in many cases, the promises of the former to the Afghan community to process passports that they no longer had would have remained a dead letter.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the Iranian opening coincides with a concerted move by the Arab world to reintegrate Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, dodging red lines to make it less dependent on Tehran. The fact is that yesterday, for the first time since 2011, a head of Egyptian diplomacy set foot in Syria and met with President El Asad.
The Egyptian minister, Sameh Shukry, just breaking an eleven-year taboo, has broken another by continuing his trip to Turkey, where he met his counterpart, Mevlüt Çavusoglu, in Adana. The motive, once again, the promise of solidarity to alleviate the effects of the earthquake. Yesterday afternoon, the World Bank estimated that the destruction of real estate and infrastructure assets in Turkey was equivalent to about 34,000 million dollars. Its reconstruction, perhaps double.
Iran shares a porous border with Afghanistan and hosts more than three million refugees from this origin. If Iran is the first country of passage for hundreds of thousands of Afghan and Pakistani immigrants bound for Europe, Turkey is the second.
