On 17 August 2021, the leader of the Taliban-affiliated Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin party, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, met with both Hamid Karzai, the former President of Afghanistan, and Abdullah Abdullah, the chairman of the High Council for National Reconciliation and former Chief Executive, in Doha, Qatar, with the aim of forming a government (though it is unclear whether either Karzai or Abdullah will be directly involved in any such government). President Ashraf Ghani, having fled the country during the Taliban advance to either Tajikistan or Uzbekistan, emerged in the United Arab Emirates and said that he supported such negotiations and was in talks to return to Afghanistan.