Taliban “foreign minister” Amir Khan Muttaqi announced on Thursday that his terrorist organization is running 39 “fully operating” Afghanistan diplomatic missions around the world.
The dozens of diplomatic outposts representing the jihadist terror group, which is in uncontested control of the government of Afghanistan, are particularly notable given that not a single state power has officially recognized the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” the formal name the Taliban uses for its administration, as a legitimate government entity. Some global entities, including the United Nations and the Chinese Communist Party, have accepted the Taliban merely as an “interim” ruler following the collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Kabul in 2021.
The takeover of 39 embassies, consulates, and other facilities indicates that a significant number of world powers are interested in cooperating with the Taliban despite the lack of formal recognition. It also highlights the abject failure of the government of leftist American President Joe Biden to ostracize the jihadists or organize any functional opposition to their control of Afghanistan.
Muttaqi updated the public on the status of Taliban diplomatic efforts during a press conference on Thursday.
“The [Taliban Foreign] Ministry now manages and oversees 39 Afghan diplomatic missions worldwide, which are fully operating under the Islamic Emirate’s leadership,” the Taliban’s official Bakhtar News Agency paraphrased Muttaqi as saying.
“Calling for the international community and the United Nations to assess Afghanistan based on its current realities, Mawlawi Muttaqi urged for a more pragmatic approach to diplomatic relations with the Islamic Emirate,” Bakhtar continued. “He also dismissed allegations from Pakistani officials regarding the alleged financing of the TTP [Pakistani Taliban] from within Afghanistan, firmly rejecting these claims.”
Muttaqi did not reportedly name all the countries that have established official ties with the Taliban or where all the diplomatic missions are located. China became the first country to accept an official Taliban ambassador to its capital, Beijing, in December 2023, following years of Taliban leaders courting Chinese officials and businesses to invest in the country. The Taliban has openly expressed interest in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s global infrastructure debt trap scheme, and offered Afghanistan’s abundant mineral resources to Beijing.
Other nations Muttaqi named as accepting Taliban diplomats include the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Turkey, Malaysia, Pakistan, Iran, and Turkmenistan. Before the press conference on Thursday, the Taliban announced that the government of Oman would accept Taliban representatives to run the Afghan embassy in Muscat.
“With the cooperation of the host country and the commencement of the embassy’s operations, this embassy will play a constructive role in strengthening the political, economic, social, and religious relations between Kabul and Muscat,” the Taliban “foreign ministry” proclaimed.
The top Taliban diplomat did note that the group had successfully convinced neighboring Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to remove it from the countries’ list of banned terrorist organizations and hinted that Russia would “soon” do the same. The Russian government, which claims to take a hard line against radical Islamic terrorism, has similarly suggested it was considering removing the Taliban from its terror designation list to allow for greater cooperation with Kabul.
“The Taliban are the ones holding real power [in Afghanistan]. Just as the People’s Republic of China, we have never closed down our embassy there,” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in May. “Kazakhstan has recently decided to remove them from the list of terrorist organizations. We are going to do this, too.”
The Taliban returned to power in August 2021, following Biden’s decision to extend the 20-year-old Afghan War beyond the May 2021 deadline for U.S. troop withdrawal that the Taliban, the then-Afghan government, and the government of predecessor Donald Trump had brokered in a deal now known as the “Doha agreement.” As Biden chose to violate the Doha agreement, the Taliban launched a spree of attacks that resulted in the collapse of the Afghan military and sent then-President Ashraf Ghani fleeing Kabul on a helicopter.
In the years since, the Biden administration has paid the Taliban nearly $11 million in “taxes,” “utilities” fees, and other expenses, according to a report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) published in May.
The Taliban is a radical Islamist terrorist group that has presided over the catastrophic collapse of human rights in Afghanistan, particularly for women. Taliban leaders attempted to ingratiate themselves with the West in the early aftermath of their return to power by claiming to be interested in creating an “inclusive” Afghanistan but rapidly undermined their own messages by ordering women not to leave the house and raiding media outlets. The Taliban has since upgraded its restrictions on women to include a ban on showing their faces in public at all and a ban on speaking audibly.
For men, the Taliban jihadists have banned shaving their beards, claiming a clean-shaved face to be “un-Islamic,” and practicing mixed martial arts (MMA), which had grown in popularity in Afghanistan shortly before the fall of the government in 2021.
Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter.