UN Lifting Sanctions on Key Taliban Leaders to Support Negotiations

According to sources within the Taliban movement, the UN has been steadily removing the names of their political leadership from the terror blacklist for the past nine months. This is meant to facilitate ongoing US-Taliban peace talks.

The removal from the blacklist is officially “temporary,” and it’s not exactly clear who all has been removed. Everyone at the Taliban’s office in Qatar is removed from the list, and indications are everyone else involved in US talks has been as well.

The UN has not confirmed this move at all, and neither has the Afghan government, but the reports present it as both a confidence-building measure as well as a practical necessity for organizing and holding talks.

Talks between the US and Taliban have been making progress, and a deal is starting to come together, based around the US withdrawing from Afghanistan and the Taliban promising to keep ISIS and al-Qaeda out of the country in the future.