Mohammad Zahir Aghbar, the Afghan ambassador to Tajikistan, reacted to the news of his dismissal. Earlier, Western media reported that the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Taliban movement, Amirkhan Muttaqi, by his decree dismissed the current ambassador of Afghanistan in Tajikistan and appointed his successor.
Source: Sputnik Tajikistan
Zahir Aghbar told Sputnik Tajikistan that this news is a hoax spread by foreign media to confuse the public and is not entirely true.
“We are in Tajikistan and according to the laws of this country. Tajikistan did not recognize the Taliban regime, like all countries of the world. From the first day the Taliban came to power, the Afghan embassy in Tajikistan stated that it did not recognize the authority of this group and its Foreign Minister Muttaqi. We continue to work,” said Zaher Aghbar.
Earlier, Western media (for example, Independent Farsi, Britain - Sangar) reported that on November 26 this year, the Taliban Foreign Minister Amirkhan Muttaki signed an order appointing a certain Qari Fazlrahman Atai as an assistant to the Afghan embassy in Dushanbe. According to these reports, Tajikistan sent two of its diplomats to Kabul a few months ago.
According to reports previously received by Sputnik Tajikistan, Qari Fazlrahman Atai a Badakhshan Tajik, a man of Qari Fasihuddin, the chief of the general staff of the Taliban army, received his "safariya" (travel and stay expenses) at the Taliban Foreign Ministry but has not yet appeared in Dushanbe.
At the same time, according to reports, two Tajik diplomats, one of whom is the head of the Tajik embassy in Afghanistan, Samariddin Chuyanzoda, have been in Kabul for five months.
However, experts say that in such a situation, the Taliban may have a contact person in Dushanbe, and they will not have the right to control the embassy until their government is recognized by the government of the host country.
In early 2020, Zahir Aghbar was appointed Afghan Ambassador to Tajikistan by former President Ashraf Ghani. After the fall of Ghani's government, he announced that, according to the Afghan constitution, Amrullah Saleh, Ghani's first deputy, was the head of the Afghan government. For this reason, he symbolically hung a photo of Amrullah Saleh in the Afghan embassy in Dushanbe.