Afghan President Ashraf Ghani signed a presidential decree pardoning the last batch of Taliban detainees after the Loya Jirga decision to release them.
A source in the presidential palace said to Al-Jazeera that the release process will begin tomorrow, and that the Taliban movement must release a number of Afghan special forces.
For his part, a spokesman for the Taliban's political office, Suhail Shaheen, said in statements to Al-Jazeera that if the rest of the movement’s detainees included in the list of 5,000 detainees are released, the movement is ready to start negotiations within a week with the Afghan government.
In turn, the US envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad welcomed the announcement of the Loya Jirga and the Afghan president’s decision to sign the decree ordering the release of the rest of the prisoners in the country.
Khalilzad added that he expects in the next few days the release of prisoners and the immediate start of negotiations between the Afghans in the Qatari capital, Doha.
Reuters quoted a government source as saying that the original plan, after Ghani signed the release decision, was to travel to the Qatari capital, Doha, on Wednesday, and to start the talks next Sunday.
The spokesman for the Afghan National Security Council, Javed Faisal, said that the government would start releasing 400 Taliban detainees within two days.
The Taliban movement had ended more than a week before the release of the 1,000 government forces it had arrested, according to an agreement it concluded last February in the Qatari capital with the US government, with the aim of ending the 19-year-old war in the country.
The stumbling block of the prisoner exchange file between the Taliban and the Afghan authorities constituted a major obstacle to launching peace talks between the two parties, who confirmed their commitment to complete the prisoner exchange before the start of negotiations.