KABUL, Feb 14 (NNN-ANA) – Afghanistan’s former president, Hamid Karzai, yesterday urged the U.S. administration to return his country’s assets.
“Holding Afghanistan’s money on any name is unfair and unjust. That money belongs to the people of Afghanistan … I am calling on President Joe Biden to return the money to the people of Afghanistan,” Karzai told a press conference here.
The United States, following its forces’ exit from Afghanistan in Aug, 2021, has frozen more than nine billion U.S. dollars of assets of Afghanistan’s central bank. The move is widely seen as the major factor leading to the current economic crisis in the war-torn Asian country.
U.S. President, Joe Biden, signed an executive order on Friday, which seeks to split seven billion U.S. dollars out of the Afghan assets, between funding humanitarian aid for cash-strapped Afghanistan and creating a trust fund with 3.5 billion U.S. dollars to compensate the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Karzai said, the Afghan people share the grief of the American people have suffered, due to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, yet no Afghan was involved in the attack, and therefore Biden has to reconsider his decision.
Criticising Biden’s decision as unjust, Karzai stressed that, all Afghans, including members of the present Taliban-led caretaker government, take a united stand to get the Afghan money back to their country.– NNN-ANA