Five Taliban delisted by UN committee: diplomat

 Al-Arabiya

UNITED NATIONS (Agencies)

Five Taliban have been struck off a U.N. Security Council list of people subject to sanctions -- a move sought by Kabul to ease reconciliation talks with insurgents, a U.N. diplomat said on Friday.

The move followed a review of the list of Taliban and al-Qaeda members maintained by a Security Council committee. Two of the five were delisted because they were dead, the diplomat said.

Afghanistan had pressed the committee to take some names off the list as part of a scheduled update. A "peace Jirga" in Afghanistan last month recommended negotiations with moderate Taliban leaders and other insurgents to end a worsening nine-year war in the country.

Diplomats said Afghan President Hamid Karzai had been seeking the delisting of about a dozen Taliban, either because they had joined the government side or because they were dead.

But Russia, which sits on the committee along with other Security Council members, had been cautious about deleting names, they said.

The diplomat named the five delisted as Abdul Hakim Mujahid Mohammed Awrang, a former Afghan ambassador to the United Nations, Abdul Salam Zaeef and Abdul Satar Paktin, as well as Abdul Samad Khaksar and Mohammed Islam Mohammadi, who have both died.

Russia, diplomats said, has indicated reluctance to remove even the names of dead people from the U.N. blacklist, possibly because it would free up any frozen assets that could somehow be used to help fund the Taliban insurgency.

The committee has been reviewing all the more than 500 Taliban and al-Qaeda entries on the blacklist.

"The review of the Taliban and al-Qaeda sanctions list will continue," a diplomat said. "There may be more names coming off the list in the weeks and months ahead."

Five years ago Karzai's office had asked the Security Council committee that oversees implementation of resolution 1267, approved in 1999, to remove some 20 names from the roughly 140 on the list at the time. Some have already been removed.

Resolution 1267 freezes assets and bans travel of senior Taliban and al-Qaeda figures and firms associated with them.