Senior Taliban leader and Deputy Minister of Foreign Minister Sher Muhammad Abbas Stanikzai has fled Kabul to join his family in Dubai. According to the sources, Stanikzai is accused of having "close" ties with Russia and links with India, by the radical, pro-Pakistan, Haqqani group members in the Taliban government.
Stanikzai, who could have been the foreign minister, is afraid that he could be assassinated by the Pakistani spy agency Inter-State Intelligence (ISI) if he returned, IANS said quoting its sources.
Taliban leadership of the Haqqani faction and the Pakistani ISI are concerned about Stanikzai's "suspicious" relations with India.
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Stanikzai was educated at the Indian Military Academy. India's first formal contact in August with the Taliban was with Stanikzai, who was then the head of the Taliban's political office in Doha.
Later after Afghanistan was captured, Stanikzai, who was expected to be the new foreign minister of the Taliban regime, had said that the group wanted to continue Afghanistan's political, economic and cultural ties with India.
Now, like his fellow and the deputy prime minister Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Stanikzai also stands isolated inside the Taliban.
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"These two guys, Abbas Stanikzai and Mullah Barader who had told the world for over two years, that we are 'the changed Taliban', one has been exiled like ex-president Ghani in UAE and the other has been isolated in Kabul," says Iranian journalist Tajuden Soroush in his post on Twitter.
But unlike Stanikzai, Mullah Baradar, who escaped to Kandahar to save his life after he was injured in a fight with Haqqani faction in Kabul last month, is "forced" to live in Afghanistan as his family is in Quetta in Pakistan under the ISI's protection. Now Baradar is back in Kabul but refused the security provided by the Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani despite the latter insisting that it was their job to provide personal security to the deputy PM.
