Taliban Prime Minister: "We don't want problems with anyone. We are mired in problems."

Muhammad Hassan Akhund, head of the government of the Taliban regime and one of the founders of the movement, stressed on Saturday that his government "will not interfere" in the internal affairs of other countries and that the regime wants peaceful relations with the rest of the world, appealing to international humanitarian organizations to continue providing their aid to war-weary Afghanistan.

Afghan state television broadcast a recorded speech of Akhund, his first since the Taliban seized power last August, and came before a meeting of the United States and the Taliban next week in Doha.

In his speech, which lasted about 30 minutes, amid criticism of him on social media for his silence since the Islamists took control, despite the difficulties the country is facing, Akhund said, “We assure all countries that we do not want to interfere in their internal affairs and create problems and insecurity for them, and no one can To prove that we have done this over the past twenty years,” stressing that “we want to establish good economic relations with it.”

"We are immersed in our problems, and we are trying to gather our strength to get our people out of misery and hardships with God's help," he added.

The Taliban came to power on August 15, after the rapid withdrawal of the US army and the overthrow of the previous government backed by Washington.

The United States overthrew the former Taliban regime, after it invaded Afghanistan following the September 2001 attacks carried out by Al-Qaeda. At the time, the founder of the organization, Osama bin Laden, took the country's lands as his stronghold.

Akhund, who is believed to be in his sixties, is a Taliban veteran, and was a close aide and political advisor to Mullah Omar, the movement's founder and first leader, and served as the foreign minister and deputy prime minister in the movement's previous regime between 1996 and 2001.

The UN Security Council had previously included Akhund on its sanctions list for the "activities" of the Taliban.

Akhund's government faces a series of challenges, most notably reviving the country's collapsed economy after the suspension of international aid, which made up 75 percent of the country's budget under previous governments.

Since the Taliban seized power, inflation has risen dramatically, as has unemployment among Afghans, amid the collapse of the banking system.

The crisis worsened after Washington froze about 10 billion dollars of the assets of the Afghan Central Bank, and the decline intensified with the suspension of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund from their financing of Afghanistan.

United Nations aid agencies have warned of a major humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, where more than half of its 38 million people are expected to face starvation this winter.

The rapidly deteriorating situation forced Afghans to sell everything they owned to buy food and other necessities, as the value of the local currency collapsed and prices skyrocketed.

In his speech, Akhund said, "We ask all international humanitarian organizations not to stop their aid, and to provide aid to our exhausted nation (...) so that people's problems can be solved," stressing that the problems the country is facing are the result of the policies of previous governments.

"Girls have largely resumed going to school, and there is hope for more facilitation in the field of education," Akhund said, noting that the educational system would be oriented according to the principles of Islamic law.

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