TEHRAN – The Taliban did not attend a UN-convened session on Afghanistan in Doha this week due to disagreements on how the group would appear at the summit, President Ebrahim Raisi’s special envoy for Afghanistan tells the Tehran Times.

“The Taliban was invited to hold meetings with UN officials in Doha after the main summit. They weren’t asked to take part in the summit itself,” Hassan Kazemi Qomi said before explaining that Afghanistan’s de facto rulers had also been scheduled to sit down with human rights activists and listen to their concerns. “The Taliban did not want to meet with activists. They also wanted to be present at the summit which could not be made possible. That’s why they refrained from sending a delegation to Qatar,” Qomi added.

On February 18-19, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres convened a meeting on Afghanistan in Doha to discuss the humanitarian situation in the war-torn country.

During a press conference on Monday, Guterres said the Taliban had set unacceptable conditions for attending the meeting. “I received a letter [from the Taliban] with a set of conditions to be present in this meeting that were not acceptable,” he noted.

The Taliban took over Afghanistan in 2021 after the U.S. withdrew its forces from the country following two decades of occupation. No country yet recognizes the Taliban as Afghanistan’s official government.