The Taliban has announced that its new government, which includes several individuals wanted for terror offenses, aims to establish ties and diplomatic relations with all countries of the world, except for Israel.
According to the group’s spokesman Suhail Shaheen, who spoke to the Russian state-owned news agency Sputnik, the group will allow relations to develop with all world countries including the United States which occupied Afghanistan for two decades.
“If America wants to have a relation with us, which could be in the interest of both countries and both peoples, and if they want to participate in the reconstruction of Afghanistan, they are welcome,” Shaheen stated to Sputnik.
He added in the same press statement, “of course, we won’t have any relation with Israel. We want to have relations with other countries, [but] Israel is not among these countries.”
The spokesman’s announcement comes a month after he was implicated in a controversy relating to the Israeli channel Kan to which he gave an interview.
Shaheen, who has been giving interviews in English from Qatar since the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan, insisted afterward that he was not aware the channel was Israeli, saying that “some journalists may be masquerading but I haven’t done [an] interview with anyone introducing himself [that] he is from an Israeli media.”
When Shaheen spoke over video with journalist Roi Kais at Kan, the Israeli broadcaster, Kais named his network but did not tell Shaheen that he or it was Israeli, said Shaheen on Twitter.
The former Afghan government, which the Taliban recently overthrew after the U.S and allies withdrawal, also had no official relations with Tel Aviv.
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