Herat Chamber of Commerce and Investment says the volume of exports has doubled in this province over the first six months of 1403 compared to last year.

The chamber officials said that over the first six months of 1403, they had exports worth $77 million and 882 thousand dollars.

During this period, more than 32,000 tons of agricultural, industrial products, medicinal plants and minerals have been sent to the world markets, the officials said.

However, this chamber added that the issue of exporting Herat's fresh fruits is still not resolved.

Gardeners also expect that basic steps must be taken to send fresh fruits to world markets.

“We have many agricultural products, including cotton, saffron, asafetida, grapes, raisins, which fortunately have been marketed a lot this year, said Bashir Ahmad Bahaduri, chair of Herat's Chamber of Agriculture.

“These items are also exported to countries like Türkiye, India, China, United Arab Emirates, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Iran,” he added.

The Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation has announced that 25 Afghan nationals have been released from prisons in Iraq.

The ministry said in a statement that they were imprisoned in different provinces of Iraq for six months due to a lack of legal documents.

Based on the statement, the released prisoners returned to the country via Iran on Friday/

After being registered at the Nimroz border officials, the individuals were introduced to the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to receive assistance.

Former US special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation, Zalmay Khalilzad, has said that it would have been better to get the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA) involved in negotiations or deliberations about the future early on.

Speaking in a podcast released by Doha Debates, Khalilzad said that senior IEA members had met chairman of the interim authority in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, following the Bonn negotiations, saying they would accept the new authority, provided that they could live in honor and dignity in their homes and not to be pursued and prosecuted.

He noted that the anger and feelings of the US leadership at that time would have made it difficult to reconcile with the IEA, but the IEA members, in conversations in Doha, blamed Karzai and the Northern Alliance figures.

“They (IEA) thought that 20 years of war and all the loss of life on all sides of Afghanistan was due to that mistake, as they saw it, to that neglect by President Karzai,” he said.

The former US diplomat recalled that President Donald Trump decided in 2018 to get troops out of Afghanistan believing the US wouldn’t succeed in winning the war and that priorities had changed.

Khalilzad said that he kept insisting in talks with the IEA that nothing would be agreed to until everything is agreed to, but there was this messaging from Washington and a desire not to link, too tightly, withdrawal to the agreement between the government and the IEA because of an assumption that the “Afghans would not agree with each other.”

On the two secret annexes of the Doha Agreement, Khalilzad said that they were about the specifics of the withdrawal process and terrorism issues, not the future Afghan government.

He emphasized that the Doha agreement meets the core concerns of the United States as not as single American was killed by the IEA during the 18 months and IEA is living up to its commitments regarding terrorism.