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UN must return to Afghanistan to look into refugee situation — Russian Foreign Ministry

According to Zamir Kabulov, the current situation is far from its descriptions in the Western mass media

MOSCOW, August 30. /TASS/. UN officials should get back to Afghanistan to interact with the local population and to correctly assess the refugee situation, Russia's special representative for Afghanistan, director of the Foreign Ministry's second Asian department, Zamir Kabulov, said on the Rossiya-24 round-the-clock television news channel on Monday.

"To know what the situation is like locally the UN officials should get back to work in the field and have contacts with the local population. In fact, this is what they had been dispatched there for, and they are obliged to do their job," he said.

"I found very surprising the statement by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to the effect about 500,000 Afghans were going to leave the country. Firstly, as far as I know, UN personal left Afghanistan a week ago. Where do they take such statistics from?" Kabulov asked.

The diplomat believes that an influx of Afghan refugees into Europe is inevitable, but the process may be put in order.

"In any case, the current situation is far from its descriptions in the Western mass media. I keep track of their reports. They are breeding panic," he stressed.

Situation in Afghanistan

On August 23, the UN said it was evacuating another 120 of its staffers and representatives of non-governmental organizations from Afghanistan to Kazakhstan. A week earlier, about a hundred UN staffers left Kabul for Almaty to go ahead with distance work. On the eve of the Taliban movement's final offensive (Taliban is outlawed in Russia), various UN missions in Afghanistan had a staff of about 3,000 locals and 700 foreign nationals.

The situation in Afghanistan aggravated after US President Joe Biden in April declared his decision to curtail the operation in the country. The Taliban movement (outlawed in Russia) promptly launched a large-scale offensive operation to enter Kabul on August 15 without encountering any resistance and had the city under control within a matter of hours. Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani left the country. Many countries have evacuated their citizens and embassy staffers.

The Taliban established control of the country's territory and ordered all foreign forces to leave by August 31. Otherwise, their further presence will be considered as further occupation, it warned.