As Nicola Blom begins his mission as the European Union\u2019s new charg\u00e9 d\u2019affaires in Afghanistan, he met in Kabul with Sirajuddin Haqqani, the Taliban-run Interior Ministry\u2019s acting minister, to discuss Afghanistan\u2019s security situation and the continuation of cooperation related to counter-narcotics efforts.<\/p>\n
The Taliban-run Interior Ministry said in a statement that Haqqani stressed the importance of \u201cpreserving bilateral relations,\u201d expanding cooperation and continuing \u201ceffective efforts against narcotics,\u201d and called for continued assistance in this area. According to the ministry, Haqqani described relations between Afghanistan and the European Union as \u201cpositive.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Taliban-run Interior Ministry statement said the two sides also discussed Afghanistan\u2019s security situation, but it did not specify which aspects of the security environment were covered in the talks.<\/p>\n
Nicola Blom, an Italian diplomat, recently began work as the EU\u2019s charg\u00e9 d\u2019affaires in Afghanistan. On 6 October, he wrote on X that he had taken on the role of representing the European Union\u2019s interests in Afghanistan with \u201cgreat honour.\u201d<\/p>\n
Blom previously headed the Africa department at the European External Action Service and also served as the EU ambassador to Rwanda. Despite not recognising the Taliban administration, the European Union has kept its office in Kabul open since the developments of August 2021 and has continued diplomatic activity at charg\u00e9 d\u2019affaires level.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
EU envoy Nicola Blom meets Taliban official Haqqani in Kabul to discuss security and continued anti-drug cooperation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23551,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-important-news","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23552\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/atlaspress.news\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}