Rival Afghans will meet starting Sunday in Qatar, officials said, in a fresh attempt to make political headway as the United States seeks a peace deal with the Taliban within three months.

The Taliban have refused to negotiate with President Ashraf Ghani and a previous attempt to bring the insurgents together with government officials in Doha collapsed in April in a dispute over attendees.

Germany, a key player in international support for the post-Taliban government, and Qatar, which maintains contacts with the militants, said that they jointly extended invitations for a dialogue in Doha on Sunday and Monday.

The Afghans "will participate only in their personal capacity and on an equal footing," Markus Potzel, Germany's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said in a statement released Monday by the United States.

"Afghanistan stands at a critical moment of opportunity for progress towards peace," he said.

"An essential component of any process leading to this objective will be direct engagement between Afghans," he said.

The meeting comes after U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo paid an unannounced visit last week to Kabul where he voiced hope for a peace deal with the Taliban "before September 1."

The United States will as usual attend the seventh round of talks with the Taliban in Doha that started on Saturday.

"Once the timeline for the withdrawal of foreign forces is set in the presence of international observers, then we will begin the talks to the Afghan sides, but we will not talk to the Kabul administration as a government," tweeted Suhail Shaheen, the spokesman of the Taliban's office in Qatar.

Under a peace deal, the United States plans to pull its roughly 14,000 troops from Afghanistan. In return, the Taliban would provide assurances that they will never allow their territory to be a base for foreign attacks.

U.S. military troops have been in Afghanistan for nearly 18 years after it overthrow the Taliban government in 2001, and the American troops currently in Afghanistan are divided based on three functions - training the  Afghans, advising Afghan forces and attacking terrorist groups like the ISIL and Al Qaeda.

President Donald Trump vowed in last December to pull all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, believing that America's longest war, launched after the September 11, 2001 attacks, no longer makes military or financial sense.

The ambitious time frame would allow a deal before Afghanistan holds elections in September, which Western officials fear could inject a new dose of instability.

(With input from Reuters)