ISLAMABAD — Officers from Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban on Wednesday welcomed the resumption of FlyDubai flights to Kabul’s worldwide airport two years after stopping service following the collapse of the Western-backed authorities.
All worldwide airlines halted flights to Afghanistan after the Taliban seized energy in Afghanistan in mid-August 2021 as U.S. and NATO forces departed after twenty years of warfare.
A United Arab Emirates-based FlyDubai flight landed in Kabul on Wednesday. FlyDubai, the sister service of long-haul airline Emirates, now will make two flights a day to Kabul.
The workplace of the Taliban’s deputy prime minister, Abdul Ghani Baradar, in a press release Wednesday described the flight resumption as “indicative of the restoration of Afghanistan’s airspace to a safe and traditional state, accommodating numerous varieties of flights.” Nevertheless, almost all Western carriers are avoiding flying in Afghan airspace.
“It reveals that each one airports in Afghanistan at the moment are outfitted to ship requisite amenities and cling to straightforward providers,” mentioned the assertion.
FlyDubai, when requested for remark, referred to an October assertion asserting that flights would resume. It didn’t talk about any of the safety issues associated to working within the nation.
In Could final yr, the Taliban signed a deal permitting an Emirati firm to handle three airports in Afghanistan. Below the settlement, the Abu Dhabi-based agency GAAC Options would handle the airports in Herat, Kabul and Kandahar.
Two Afghan airways, Kam Air and Ariana Afghan Airways, function from Kabul to locations corresponding to Dubai, Moscow, Islamabad and Istanbul.
The resumption of flights got here after Related Press journalists on Monday noticed Afghanistan’s Taliban envoy to the UAE, Badruddin Haqqani, stroll by means of an Airbus A380 taking a look at its enterprise class seats on the Dubai Air Present. He was just lately appointed to the place in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the UAE.
The Emirates, lengthy aligned with the U.S., has hosted Afghan diplomatic posts for years underneath each the Taliban and its former Western-backed authorities. Afghanistan’s former president, Ashraf Ghani, had been seen within the nation instantly after fleeing the Taliban advance in 2021.
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Related Press author Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.