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NEW DELHI: Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi began an official visit to India on Thursday, the first by a senior Afghan leader since 2021.

Like all other countries, except for Russia, India does not officially recognize Afghanistan’s Taliban administration, which took over the country four years ago, when its Western-backed regime collapsed, and US-led troops withdrew after two decades of military occupation.

Most of the Taliban leaders, including Muttaqi, have been sanctioned by the UN, but the Security Council said last month that he was granted “an exemption to the travel ban” to visit New Delhi from Oct. 9 to 16.

He was offered a “warm welcome” by Indian Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal, who said in a statement that the ministry looked forward to “engaging discussions with him on bilateral relations and regional issues.”

Muttaqi, who met with India’s Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri in Dubai in January, is expected to hold talks with External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar.

“It is scheduled that the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan will hold discussions with his Indian counterpart and other officials on various political, economic, and trade issues, as well as on strengthening relations between Afghanistan and the region,” Hafiz Zia Ahamad, spokesperson of the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in an X post.

While India’s engagement with the Taliban administration has grown in recent months — especially as Afghanistan’s ties with India’s archrival neighbor Pakistan have soured — Prof. Harsh V. Pant, vice president of Delhi-based think tank Observer Research Foundation, told Arab News that it did not signal imminent recognition of the Taliban government.

“Engagement is, of course, necessary with all of India’s neighbors, so India will be engaging. And I think the Taliban government has been signaling that it remains committed to protecting Indian interests,” Pant said.

“They have been at loggerheads with Pakistan in asserting their own identity and their own strategic autonomy. So, I think there, there is going to be much that is going to be convergent, but still there are divergences which are huge, and engagement should no longer be seen as any kind of endorsement of the regime, or any swift move towards recognition.”

The Afghan foreign minister’s visit follows his trip to Russia for the Moscow Format of Consultations on Afghanistan earlier this week.

Besides Russia and Afghanistan, the forum includes India, Pakistan, China, Iran and Central Asian nations, which on Tuesday issued a joint statement voicing opposition to any foreign military infrastructure in Afghanistan.

The statement came as US President Donald Trump has been pressing to regain control of the Bagram airbase near Kabul.

MOSCOW: Russian President Vladimir Putin told Azerbaijan’s leader that two Russian missiles had detonated beside an Azerbaijan Airlines plane last year after Ukrainian drones entered Russian air space, in an incident that led to the deaths of 38 people.
In what was the Kremlin leader’s most candid admission to date that Moscow was to blame for the deadly incident, he offered his apologies again to President Ilham Aliyev and promised compensation to those affected.
Flight J2-8243, en route from Baku to the Chechen capital Grozny, crash-landed on December 25 near Aktau in Kazakhstan after diverting from southern Russia, where Ukrainian drones were reported to be attacking several targets. At least 38 people were killed.
Video footage on Thursday showed Putin and Aliyev shaking hands and smiling before a bilateral meeting in Tajikistan at which Putin spoke about the plane crash.
Putin last year issued a rare public apology to Aliyev for what the Kremlin called a “tragic incident” over Russia in which the plane crashed after Russian air defenses were deployed against Ukrainian drones.
On Thursday, he went further.
“Of course, everything that is required in such tragic cases will be done by the Russian side on compensation and a legal assessment of all official things will be given,” Putin told Aliyev.
“It is our duty, I repeat once again... to give an objective assessment of everything that happened and to identify the true causes.”

DEBRIS FROM MISSILES
Putin told Aliyev that two Russian air defense missiles had detonated several meters away from the plane after Ukrainian drones entered Russian airspace.
“The two missiles that were launched did not hit the plane directly; if that had happened, it would have crashed on the spot, but they exploded, perhaps as a self-destruction measure, a few meters away, about 10 meters,” Putin said.
“And so the damage was caused, mainly not by the warheads, but most likely by the debris from the missiles themselves. That is why the pilot perceived it as a collision with a flock of birds, which he reported to Russian air traffic controllers, and all this is recorded in the so-called ‘black boxes.’“
The Embraer jet had flown from Azerbaijan’s capital Baku to Grozny, in Russia’s southern republic of Chechnya, where the incident occurred, and had then traveled, badly damaged, another 280 miles (450 km) across the Caspian Sea. Putin cautioned on Thursday that it would “probably take some more time” to fully investigate the crash’s causes.
A preliminary report published on a Kazakh government website in February found that the plane suffered external damage and was riddled with holes in its fuselage.
Aliyev was angry about the crash and has publicly criticized the initial reactions from Moscow which he said sought to cover up the cause of the incident.
On Thursday, he thanked Putin for personally monitoring the progress of the investigation into the deadly incident.
“I would like to express my gratitude once again for the fact that you deemed it necessary to highlight this issue at our meeting,” Aliyev told Putin.