Afghan Taliban to attend crisis group's conference in Qatar

The Afghan Taliban will send representatives to a conference organised by an international crisis group that will discuss resolving the war in Afghanistan, the group said in a statement on Friday.

Representatives of the Taliban's "political office" will attend the conference in Qatar's capital, Doha, organised by Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, a Nobel peace prize-winning group focused on resolving conflict. The conference is "aimed at finding a solution to the conflict in Afghanistan," now in its 15th year. It is not part of the official peace process, which recently restarted after being derailed in July when the Afghan government announced that the Taliban's founder and leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, had been dead since early 2013.

The official, four-country initiative, involving Afghanistan, Pakistan, China and the United States, is due to hold its third meeting in Islamabad on February 6. The meetings do not include Taliban representatives, but aim to lay the groundwork for an eventual dialogue between militants and the Kabul government.