Afghanistan's ousted president Burhanuddin Rabbani will meet Turkish President Ahmet Necdet Sezer in Tajikistan on Wednesday, Afghan anti-Taliban officials said Monday.
Sayed Hussein Anwari, a senior opposition figure, said that Rabbani would meet the Turkish president to discuss the current situation in Afghanistan.
"He (Rabbani) has been invited to Dushanbe to meet the Turkish president," Anwari told AFP.
"He will fly to Tajikistan on Tuesday," the anti-Taliban official said, reached by satellite telephone inside Afghanistan.
Rabbani is accompanied by his foreign minister Abdullah, Haji Abdul Qadeer and Waheedullah Sabaoon, his ethnic Pashtun military allies from eastern Afghanistan, Anwari said.
Rabbani, who was ousted from power by the ruling Taliban in 1996, is internationally recognized as the head of Afghanistan’s state.
He is the political leader of the Northern Alliance groups battling the Taliban religious militia in the country's rugged northeast.
The Tajik Foreign Ministry had earlier said that Ahmet Necdet Sezer would travel to Dushanbe Wednesday for talks with his Tajik counterpart, Emomali Rakhmonov, on the situation in Afghanistan.
Turkey, the only member of NATO with a majority Muslim population, announced Thursday it was sending a special 90-man team to Afghanistan to help train the Northern Alliance forces.
It has also expressed readiness to host a long-expected crucial meeting between a Rabbani delegation and associates of the Afghan ex-monarch Mohammed Zahir Shah in Ankara.
Anwari also said that the Anti-Taliban Leadership Council, a body grouping the leaders of the Northern Alliance, had approved Ankara as the venue for the talks after days of deliberations.
He added that Rabbani's trip to Dushanbe interrupted his delegation's departure for Ankara, which was expected last month to discuss the appointment of 120 people they are nominating for positions in the so-called Supreme Council of National Unity of Afghanistan.
The council is expected to elect an interim government to replace the Taliban, assuming it collapses under the US military thrust, Anwari said.
Abdul Sattar Sirat, a spokesman for the ex-king, complained that further delays in holding the talks would damage the whole process.
"Unfortunately, they have lost too much time," he also told AFP reached by telephone in Rome, where Zahir Shah has been living in exile since 1973 -- PARIS (AFP)
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