The discovery of the grave on Tuesday in the northern Balkh province in the Deh Dadi district near the site of a major battle during the country’s bloody civil war of the early 1990s is yet another reminder of the country’s turbulent past.

“We brought 10 to 15 skeletons out of the grave and then stopped digging,” said Mohammad Nahim, a spokesman for the Afghan Army in the north said.

Nahim added that the army asked forensic and human rights bodies to investigate the grave, where the hands of skeletons, some poking out from dusty sweaters, had been tied behind their backs with blue rope.

The army stopped operating around the grave on Wednesday, following a request from the Independent Human Rights Commission, which will investigate when the people were killed, its head Sayed Mohammad told Reuters.

“Soon it will become clear who they were and why they were killed,” Nahim added. Army officials estimate that the number of bodies in the grave could be higher.

The grave is some two kilometers from Qala-e-Jangi, where the Taleban killed hundreds of resistance fighters led by mujahideen hero Ahmad Shah Massoud.

Meanwhile, the White House said Tuesday that the Taleban must abandon violence before any real peace process can begin in Afghanistan, after the insurgents made their first public gesture toward peace talks with the US.

"We welcome any step along the road... of the Afghan-led process toward reconciliation," White House spokesman Jay Carney said, while adding that the conditions for that so-called reconciliation "have not changed."

President Barack Obama "has made clear that we would support and participate in Afghan-led reconciliation efforts," Carney told reporters.

"We've always said that Taleban reconciliation would only come on the condition of breaking from Al-Qaeda, abandoning violence and abiding by the Afghan constitution, and that remains the case."

Earlier Tuesday, the Taleban said that they had come to an "initial agreement with relevant sides including Qatar" to open their first political overseas office, possibly in Doha.

It was the first time the insurgent group has publicly raised the prospect of a negotiated peace after more than 10 years of fighting, always previously insisting they would not talk until all foreign troops had left Afghan soil.

One of their demands would be for a prisoner exchange to include the release of Taliban inmates from the US-run detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, they said in a statement on their purported website "Voice of Jihad".

Carney did not formally respond to the demand, saying he was "not in a position to discuss ongoing deliberations or individual detainees."

"But our goal of closing Guantanamo is well-established and widely understood," he added.