KABUL: The Afghan Taliban will send representatives to a conference organised by an international crisis group that will discuss resolving the war in Afghanistan.

Representatives of the Taliban’s “political office” will attend the conference being held in Doha on Saturday by Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, a Nobel peace prize-winning group focused on resolving conflicts.

The group said in a statement on Friday that the conference was “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 revealed that the Taliban’s founder Mullah Mohammad Omar had been dead since early 2013.

The official initiative involving Afghanistan, Pakistan, China and the United States is due to hold its third meeting in Islamabad on Feb 6.

The meetings do not include Taliban representatives, but aim to lay the groundwork for an eventual dialogue between militants and the Afghan government.

The Taliban said they sought to take “healthy advantage” of the Pugwash initiative to “relay the legal demands of our nation and our just policy to the world directly”.

The conference was “purely for research purposes with academic debates”, they said.

Last year, a similar event organised by Pugwash was attended by Afghan officials, although they came in a personal capacity.

Political analyst Waheed Muzhda, who was an official in the Taliban’s 1996-2001 administration, said the conference would not discuss the peace process but would instead focus on “current circumstances in Afghanistan”.

Members of the Taliban’s Doha office are believed to be directly linked to the current leader of the group, Mullah Akhtar Mansoor. He was Mullah Omar’s deputy and took over when his death was revealed.

Some Afghan parliamentarians and civil society representatives would also participate in the event, albeit in a private capacity, another analyst said.

Javid Faisal, deputy spokesman for Afghanistan’s Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, told The Associated Press that no government representatives would attend the Pugwash gathering.

Published in Dawn, January 23rd, 2016