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BAKU: The first Afghan official to attend UN climate talks since the Taliban came to power told AFP Monday that his country hopes to benefit from a global finance deal under negotiation at COP29 in Baku.
Heading a three-person team, former Taliban negotiator Matiul Haq Khalis stood out in the bustling halls of the conference in Azerbaijan’s capital where delegates from nearly 200 countries began two weeks of talks.
The Taliban-led government, which is not internationally recognized, tried and failed to attend the previous COP (Conference of the Parties) meetings held in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.
Khalis, director general of Afghanistan’s National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA), said his team was invited to attend the talks by Azerbaijan’s ecology minister and COP29 president Mukhtar Babayev.
The Afghan delegation is in Baku as “guests” of the hosts, not as a party directly involved in the negotiations.
“I really appreciate” Babayev’s invitation and the Azerbaijani government’s facilitation of visas, said Khalis, son of prominent jihadist figure Mawlawi Yunus Khalis.
His delegation, he told AFP through an interpreter, aims to “deliver the message ... to the world community that climate change is a global issue and it does not know transboundary issues.”
With Afghanistan among the countries most vulnerable to global warming, the Taliban have argued that their political isolation should not bar them from international climate talks.
Khalis said COP29 participants should take into consideration vulnerable countries such as Afghanistan, which are most affected from the effects of climate change, “in their decisions.”
The Taliban treatment of women, however, could be controversial at climate conferences where gender rights always play a part of the discussions.
“Afghan people, especially the most vulnerable, urgently need support from climate finance to recover and adapt,” climate activist Harjeet Singh told AFP.
“However, as the Taliban government seeks to engage in the international process, it is essential that they respect and promote universal fundamental rights — particularly women’s rights within the country,” he said.
Women and children in particular “are bearing the brunt” of climate change, Sanjay Vashist, director of the Climate Action Network South Asia (CANSA) told AFP.
While the Taliban are barred from the negotiations, “the world cannot abandon the people of Afghanistan who are suffering from the triple whammy of the climate crises, gross human rights violations and extreme poverty,” Vashist said.
Asked about the gender issue, Khalis told AFP that the implementation of climate change projects “boost” women as well.
Azerbaijan’s COP29 presidency did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the invitation.
Azerbaijan reopened its embassy in Kabul in February this year, though it has not officially recognized the Taliban government.
Developed countries have committed to providing $100 billion per year in climate finance through 2025 to help developing nations prepare for worsening climate impacts and wean their economies off fossil fuels.
Developing nations are calling for trillions of dollars, but Babayev said Monday a more “realistic goal” was somewhere in the hundreds of billions.
“Our people in Afghanistan also should access” such funds “as a right (over) climate change,” Khalis said, describing it has his country’s “main expectation” at COP29.
Among the poorest countries in the world after decades of war, Afghanistan is particularly exposed to the effects of climate change, which scientists say is spurring extreme weather.
Drought, floods, land degradation and declining agricultural productivity are key threats, the UN development agency’s representative in Afghanistan, Stephen Rodriques, said in 2023.
Flash floods in May killed hundreds and swamped swaths of agricultural land in Afghanistan, where 80 percent of people depend on farming to survive.
Khalis said Afghanistan was seeking to attend next year’s climate summit in Brazil as an official party to the talks.
“We are very interested to be as a party in the COP30 in Brazil,” he said.
“This is the right of the people, the climate justice for the people that’s actually most vulnerable communities to the impact of climate change.”

NIAMEY, Niger: Nine members of an armed rebel movement seeking the release of Niger’s ousted president surrendered Monday, officials in the north of the military-ruled country said.
The rebel Patriotic Liberation Front (FPL) was set up in August 2023, a month after Niger’s democratically elected president Mohamed Bazoum was overthrown in a military coup.
Since then, Bazoum has been imprisoned with his wife Hadiza at the presidential palace in the capital Niamey.
“Nine FPL fighters repented and handed over their weapons and ammunition on Monday during a ceremony in the presence of General Ibra Boulama,” the governor of Agadez, an official from the governorate of the northern desert region near Libya told AFP.
FPL members began surrendering at the start of the month after discreet negotiations by “influential local personalities,” the Air-Info media outlet reported.
On November 1, FPL spokesman Idrissa Madaki and three other members turned themselves in separately in two towns near the Libyan border, according to Niger’s army and national television.
Last week, FPL leader Mahmoud Sallah was “provisionally stripped” of his nationality as well as seven members of the Bazoum regime who were suspected notably of “terrorist bomb attacks.”
Sallah had claimed responsibility for attacks against the army in the north and disabling part of a crucial pipeline carrying crude oil to Benin in June.
He had also threatened to attack strategic sites.
Another rebel movement also demanding Bazoum’s release, the Patriotic Front for Justice (FPJ), has held since June the military prefect of northeastern Bilma and four of his security team, kidnapped after an ambush.
Authorities in Niger, which is also battling attacks by jihadist groups, have stepped up security in recent weeks, with military patrols, checks and searches of vehicles.