An Afghan peace assembly ended today with a call by the 1,600 delegates for the government and insurgent groups to start talks aimed at ending three decades of war in Afghanistan, dpa reported. The assembly, know as a jirga, issued a 16-point declaration derived from a 1,000-page recommendation, which also called on Afghan and NATO-led forces to release Taliban prisoners against whom there was no solid evidence. "We ask the Afghan government and foreign forces to make a gesture of goodwill and immediately release those people who are currently in different prisons because of false information and baseless allegations," the declaration said. President Hamid Karzai, who was speaking at the closing session of the three-day jirga, accepted the recommendations, promising to "act fast". The president praised the work of the assembly and called the non-biding resolution ""comprehensive, complete and just." "The Afghan people today got a message of peace from you," Karzai told the delegates, whose deliberations were aimed at finding ways to encourage Taliban militants to come to the negotiating table. The jirga also called on the Afghan government to form a high- level peace commission, which should include representatives from all provinces and districts, to work on the peace process. Among other recommendations, the jirga asked Karzai's administration to remove Taliban members from a UN terrorist blacklist, but failed to say if the call also included senior figures like Mullah Mohammad Omar, the movement's leader. However, jirga chairman Burhanuddin Rabbani said the delegates demanded that all Taliban members be included in peace talk. "One of the commissions explicitly said that Mullah Omar's name should be removed from the list," he the told German Press Agency dpa after the jirga ended. There were no immediate reaction from the Taliban, which boycotted the jirga and called it a move aimed at safeguarding the interest of US and other NATO members. The militants attacked the jirga tent, located inside Polytechnic University in western part of Kabul, with rockets and sent in three suicide bombers. Two of the attackers were killed by police and a third was taken into custody. The attacks, which took place minutes after the jirga began on Wednesday, failed to stop the conference, but it sent a clear message that the Taliban were not interest in peace talks. The decisions taken by the meeting are non-binding for the government.
