The office of the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a federal watchdog agency, revealed in its regular report that China has held more than 200 meetings with Taliban terrorists since their return to power, Afghanistan’s Tolo News reported this weekend.
SIGAR published the information in its quarterly report officially released on October 30, summarizing the current situation in Afghanistan under Taliban rule, the money America is spending in the country at the moment, and the catastrophic humanitarian and economic situation on the ground in the country. The report noted that the Taliban passed its most draconian set of “morality” laws yet since its return to power in 2021, empowering its terrorists to abuse civilians for a wide variety of alleged violations of Islamic law including improper facial hair for men and speaking in public for women.
Despite its increasingly long list of atrocities against its own people, the Taliban has made significant diplomatic inroads, SIGAR detailed, in large part facilitated by communist China.
“Despite the Taliban’s repressive rule, the group has continued to build relationships with countries in the region,” the SIGAR report explained. “According to a new report from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Taliban have publicly announced 1,382 diplomatic meetings with at least 80 countries between August 2021 and February 2024, the majority of which occurred with regional counterparts.”
“China has had the most diplomatic engagements with the Taliban at 215, followed by Turkey (194), Iran (169), Qatar (135), and Pakistan (118),” it noted.
The Chinese Communist Party has been enthusiastically supportive of the Taliban despite being an officially atheist state entity, while the Taliban is a Sunni Muslim jihadist terror organization. Beijing became the first national capital in December to accept an official Taliban ambassador, a status Bilal Karimi obtained without China officially recognizing the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan. Chinese officials – as well as the Iranian government and several other neighbors – have accepted the Taliban as an “interim” government, but not an official government, nor does the Taliban represent Afghanistan at the United Nations.
Taliban terrorists seized control of Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, following a quick and extremely successful campaign to topple the U.S.-backed government of Afghanistan at the time. The Taliban began attacking the now-defunct Afghan military in April of that year after President Joe Biden announced that he would break an agreement with both Kabul and the Taliban to withdraw American troops from the country by May 1, 2021, a deal brokered under the administration of predecessor Donald Trump.
Since the early days of the return of the Taliban to power, the terrorists enthusiastically embraced the potential of working with communist China, ignoring and in some cases supporting the ongoing genocide the Communist Party is committing against Uyghur and other majority-Muslim ethnic groups on the other side of the Afghan border in occupied East Turkistan. Taliban leaders began courting Chinese funding of their operation almost immediately after taking over Kabul and expressed particular interest in China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI), a global financing project in which China offers predatory loans to poor countries to be used on costly infrastructure projects, then seizes control of the projects and land they are on when the countries cannot pay. Taliban leaders suggested they could formally join the BRI last year.
In October, the official Chinese ambassador to the Taliban, Zhao Xing, announced that the Communist Party was preparing to establish “zero-tariff” trade with the Taliban. Taliban ambassador to Beijing Bilal Karimi reportedly attended an exhibition in Shanghai on Sunday to promote Taliban goods in the Chinese market, including “almonds, apricot kernels, pine nuts, figs, as well as saffron, sweet-scented herbs, yarlang, and other products,” according to the Taliban’s Bakhtar News Agency.
In addition to China, the SIGAR report noted that the latest countries to accept some form of Taliban diplomatic representation were Oman and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), two countries with traditionally friendly ties to the United States. Russia has also worked to improve relations to the Taliban, which has required a formal process to remove the group from its official list of foreign terrorist organizations (the Taliban is not on the U.S. equivalent of the list).
“In July, Putin publicly said that Russia considered the Taliban an ally in the fight against terrorism,” SIGAR added.
The highest-ranking global official to visit Taliban officials in Kabul so far, the report documented, is Uzbek Prime Minister Abdulla Aripov. The United Nations, while not formally accepting the Taliban to represent Afghanistan, has nonetheless maintained communication with the group to allegedly offer humanitarian aid to Afghans. SIGAR lamented, citing criticism from other observers, that the U.N. Security Council has indulged the Taliban’s unreasonable demands that others adhere to its fundamentalist interpretation of sharia, or Islamic law, by “sending all-male delegations” to meetings.
Taliban leaders celebrated in September that they now controlled 39 Afghan missions around the world despite not being recognized by a single country as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan.
“Calling for the international community and the United Nations to assess Afghanistan based on its current realities, [Taliban official] Mawlawi Muttaqi urged for a more pragmatic approach to diplomatic relations with the Islamic Emirate,” the Taliban’s Bakhtar news reported.
The United Nations invited the Taliban to participate in its Conference of Parties (COP29) climate alarmism summit, beginning this week. Taliban leaders have repeatedly claimed to be interested in fighting the alleged “climate crisis.”
“Since the establishment of the Islamic Emirate, this is the first time we have been invited to such a conference,” Matiul Haq Khalis, the head of the Afghan Red Crescent Society (ARCS), told the Afghan outlet Tolo News this week. “We aim to share the extent of Afghanistan’s climate impacts and related challenges in various formats during this conference. This is an opportunity to strengthen our relations.”