Taliban takes over key town, Kabul in reach
KABUL: Afghan forces abandoned the country’s third biggest city to the Taliban on Thursday, hours after insurgents seized a key district capital close to Kabul in a lightning offensive that has seen them take more than half the country in a week.
The government has effectively lost most of north, south and west Afghanistan, and is left holding the capital and a dwindling number of contested cities also dangerously at risk. As the rout unravelled, Kabul handed a proposal to Taliban negotiators in Qatar offering a power-sharing deal in return for an end to the fighting, according to a member of the government’s team in Doha, who asked not to be named.
After being under siege for weeks, government forces on Thursday pulled out of Herat -- an ancient silk road city near the Iranian border -- and retreated to a district army barracks.
“We had to leave the city in order to prevent further destruction,” a senior security source from the city told AFP. A Taliban spokesman tweeted that “soldiers laid down their arms and joined the Mujahideen”.
Earlier, the Taliban seized the strategic Afghan city of Ghazni, just 150 kilometres from Kabul.
The interior ministry confirmed the fall of the city, which lies along the major Kabul-Kandahar highway and serves as a gateway between the capital and militant strongholds in the south.
A negotiator, Ghulam Farooq Majroh, said the Taliban had been given an offer about a “government of peace” without providing more specifics.
Authorities in Kabul have now effectively lost most of northern and western Afghanistan. “The
enemy took control,” spokesperson Mirwais Stanikzai said in a message to media, adding later that Ghazni’s governor had been arrested by Afghan security forces. Pro-Taliban Twitter feeds showed video of him being escorted out of Ghazni by Taliban fighters and sent on his way in a convoy, prompting speculation in the capital that the government was angered with how easily the provincial administration capitulated.
The conflict has escalated dramatically since May, when US-led forces began the final stage of a troop withdrawal due to end later this month following a 20-year occupation.
The latest US military intelligence assessment suggests Kabul could come under insurgent pressure within 30 days and that, if current trends hold, the Taliban could gain full control of the country within a few months. The Afghan government may eventually be forced to pull back to defend the capital and just a few other cities in the coming days if the Taliban keeps up its momentum.
While Kabul itself isn’t directly under threat yet, the loss of Ghazni and the battles elsewhere further tighten the grip of a resurgent Taliban estimated to now hold some two-thirds of the nation.
Thousands of people have fled their homes amid fears the Taliban will again impose a brutal, repressive government. The loss of Ghazni piles more pressure on the country’s already overstretched air force, needed to bolster Afghanistan’s dispersed security forces who have increasingly been cut off from reinforcements by road.