South Ossetian Intelligence Officer Meets Taliban Leader

Mohammad Naeem, spokesman for the Taliban’s political office tweeted that Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, one of top Taliban leaders and Afghanistan’s acting deputy prime minister met with Alexei Maksimov of Kremlin-backed South Ossetia’s foreign intelligence service (SVR).

According to the September 23 tweet, “issues related to both countries, regional security and the situation in Afghanistan and recent developments were discussed at the meeting.”

Noteworthy, the South Ossetian SVR’s Russia-native officer Maksimov recently became at the center of controversy, after Croatian website Altermainstreaminfo alleged details of his official biography – in particular, about his service in “limited contingent of Russian UN peacekeepers in Yugoslavia” in 1991-1993 – to be made up. The source noted the name was copy of the “limited contingent of [Soviet] troops in Afghanistan” and that there was neither UN peacekeeping contingent in Yugoslavia that time, nor Russian peacekeepers.

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