Pakistani airline PIA announces commercials flight to Afghanistan

Islamabad, Sep 11 (EFE).- Pakistani airline PIA announced Saturday commercial flight to Afghanistan, becoming among the first foreign firms to do so since the Taliban took Kabul on Aug.15.

“We have got all technical clearances for flight operations. Our first commercial plane,(an) Airbus A320, is scheduled to fly from Islamabad to Kabul on September 13,” PIA spokesperson Abdullah Hafeez Khan told EFE.

He said that this first flight will serve to assess how they control the situation from Kabul airport, before they decide on the future course of action.

Khan added that on the way back, 73 people from an international aid agency and belonging to different nationalities, including Afghans, will travel on board.

The spokesperson further said that since it was a war zone, the insurance companies were charging large sums, which was a setback in the resumption of daily operations.

On Thursday, Qatar Airways organized the first regular flight from Hamid Karzai airport in Kabul since the departure of the last US soldiers on Aug.31.

However, according to the PIA spokesperson, the Qatari company limited itself to chartering flights, which were not purely commercial.

A team from Qatar has been in Kabul since the Americans left, to help operate the airport in the Afghan capital, while several countries in the area have been chartering humanitarian flights to Afghanistan since the end of last week.

The new interim Taliban government, announced earlier this week, has been criticized by the international community for being made up of only fundamentalists and without any representation of women.

More than a dozen members of the new Taliban cabinet also feature on the UN Security Council terror blacklist, many of them with arrest warrants issued by US agencies. EFE

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