Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) on Tuesday said Afghanistan and Iran have made progress on signing the joint comprehensive cooperation document and the two nations are waiting for two out of five committees, to finalize their talks.
According to the foreign ministry, Iran and Afghanistan have held talks with five committees over signing this document and so far, talks have been finalized by three of them. These are the committees of water, refugees and culture.
“We agreed with the committees of water, culture and refugees. But our disagreements have not been solved with the committees of security and economic and transit, so discussions should continue,” Sebghatullah Ahmadi, spokesman of MoFA said.
One of the issues Iran and Afghanistan have disagreed on so far, is the issue of water and now talks have been finalized on this.
“We have reached the demands we wanted. And the Helmand River Treaty will be implemented fully by the two sides,” said Ahmadi.
“Currently necessity has brought Tehran and Kabul closer and that is that Islamabad is getting closer to the Taliban and US,” Juma Khan Mohammadi, an international affairs analyst said.
The new improvements on the joint comprehensive cooperation document between Afghanistan and Iran were expressed amid Iran’s Foreign Deputy Minister Abbas Araghchi visit to Kabul on Saturday.
In his visit, Araghchi met with President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Officer Abdullah Abdullah and discussed a range of issues, including the joint comprehensive cooperation document.
Many years ago, Afghanistan and Iran began talks on signing the joint comprehensive cooperation document. So far, over 10 meetings have been held in this regard and still have not been finalized.
In the meantime, sources told TOLOnews that talks in the security committee are about to be finalized and both sides need to finalize talks in economic and transit committee to pave the way for signing this document.
According to sources, Tehran insists that this document should be signed ahead of Afghanistan’s presidential elections scheduled for July this year.