KABUL: The Taliban are prepared to hold peace talks with the Afghan government next month straight after the Eidul Azha holidays, the insurgents said on Thursday, provided an ongoing prisoner swap has been completed.

The conditional offer marks the first occasion a timeline for talks has been floated since warring parties blew past a March 10 deadline to begin negotiations.

The development comes amid soaring violence that has threatened to derail US-backed efforts to bring Kabul and the Taliban to the negotiating table and seek an end to Afghanistan’s nearly 19-year-old war.

The Taliban are “likely ... ready to begin intra-Afghan negotiations immediately after Eid in case the process of the release of the prisoners is completed,” the insurgents’ political spokesman Suhail Shaheen said on Twitter.

He added that the Taliban were ready to release the remaining Afghan security force prisoners in their custody, as long as Kabul freed all insurgent inmates “as per our list already delivered” to authorities.

The prisoner exchange issue, agreed to under the auspices of a deal between the US and the Taliban, has proved a major sticking point ahead of peace talks.

The Afghan government —which was excluded from the US-Taliban deal — is supposed to release 5,000 Taliban fighters, while the insurgents have pledged to free 1,000 Afghan security forces in their custody.

Afghanistan’s National Security Council spokesman Javid Faisal said several of the freed Taliban inmates were dangerous fighters who quickly returned to the battlefield.

“The Taliban ... must stick to their commitments of stopping the freed prisoners from going back to violence,” he said on Twitter.

“Stop violence, get ready for intra-Afghan talks as soon as possible,” he said soon after Shaheen’s tweet.

So far, Kabul has released about 4,400 Taliban captives. The militants say they have freed 864 government inmates.

Even amid faltering progress on the prisoner exchange, violence levels have soared across Afghanistan, with the Taliban carrying out almost daily attacks against security forces.

Published in Dawn, July 24th, 2020