The Taliban demanded on Wednesday that members of the US Congress release Afghan assets that had been blocked since the Taliban took control of the nation, saying that economic turmoil at home may lead to trouble abroad.
Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi wrote in an open letter that the main difficulty confronting Afghanistan was financial insecurity, “and the origins of this concern can be traced back to the American government’s freezing of our people’s assets.”
The Afghan central bank’s assets have been seized by Washington for over $9.5 billion, and the aid-dependent economy has practically failed, with civil servants unpaid for months and the treasury unable to pay for imports.
