With 17 out of 33 ministers in the Taliban cabinet on the sanctions list of the UN Security Council's (UNSC) 1267 Committee, the Sunni Islamist government will have to seek delisting of these individuals based on the latest 2593 UNSC resolution on Afghanistan. The 1267 Committee is headed by India till December 2022.
Taliban fighters patrol the streets of Kabul, in Afghanistan, (AP Photo)
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Resolution 2593 was passed by the UNSC under the presidency of India on August 30, 2021 with Russia and China abstaining from voting.
Paragraph two of resolution 2593, which has become a mantra for the democratic world, clearly demands that Afghan territory should not be used to threaten or attack any country or to shelter or train terrorists or to plan or to finance terrorist acts. While reiterating the importance of combating terrorism in Afghanistan, the resolution also calls to take action against those individuals and entities designated pursuant to resolution 1267 (1999).
While Taliban has not been designated as a terrorist organization, many of its leaders are under the 1267 list with Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani being the most prominent one. The head of Haqqani Network is designated both by UN and US Department of State and has a USD 5 million bounty on his head. Other prominent listed ones are: Abdul Haq Wasiq, head of intelligence; Mohammed Fazl, Deputy Minister for Defence; Khairullah Khairkhwa, Minister of Information and Broadcasting and Noorullah Noori, Minister for Border and Tribal Affairs. While Sirajuddin Haqqani remains in the shadows, the four others were released from Guantanamo Bay detention facility in exchange for a US Army deserter during the Obama regime.
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Violation of 2593 resolution will lead to UN sanctions on the Taliban government, particularly if the Sunni Islamist group provides safe havens to terrorists group like al Qaeda, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Lashkar-e-Taiba or Tehreek-e-Taliban, Pakistan. All these groups have publicly sworn allegiance or Bayat to elusive Taliban chief Hibatullah Akundzada with JeM’s chief operational commander Mufti Abdul Rauf Azhar aka MARA personally meeting him in Kandahar last month.
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Violation of 2593 resolution will lead to UN sanctions on the Taliban government, particularly if the Sunni Islamist group provides safe havens to terrorists group like al Qaeda, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Lashkar-e-Taiba or Tehreek-e-Taliban, Pakistan. All these groups have publicly sworn allegiance or Bayat to elusive Taliban chief Hibatullah Akundzada with JeM’s chief operational commander Mufti Abdul Rauf Azhar aka MARA personally meeting him in Kandahar last month.
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.
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