Afghanistan’s Mazar-i-Sharif Airport Resumes Work
Tashkent, March 28: The airport in Mazar-i-Sharif, the largest city in northern Afghanistan, has partly resumed operations and is expected to be fully restored by August with the assistance of specialists from Uzbekistan, a representative of the Uzbekistan Ministry of Transport told Sputnik.
Special Representative of the President of Uzbekistan for Afghanistan Ismatullah Irgashev met with the Taliban in the northern Afghan province of Balkh in October 2021 and pledged that Uzbekistan would help to restore the Mazar-i-Sharif airport.
Subsequently, Uzbekistan sent a team of technicians to help repair the airport’s equipment. “A team of our specialists is assisting to help restore the Mazar-i-Sharif airport. Basically, the airport is accepting aircraft,” the representative of the Ministry of Transport said.
The official said that the Uzbek side has trained 20 Afghan specialists in air traffic control at the airport while work on replacing the air navigation equipment is currently underway. “It in progress, I think that by August 1 (the airport) will be fully operational,” the representative said. At the beginning of August last year, the Taliban stepped up their offensive against government forces in Afghanistan, entering Kabul on August 15 and announcing the following day that the war was over.
