President Ashraf Ghani flees Afghanistan as Taliban sweep into city to seize control of country
The final collapse of the 20-year western mission to Afghanistan took only a single day as Taliban gunmen entered the capital, Kabul, on Sunday, President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, and America abandoned its embassy in panic.
Even the militants themselves were surprised by the speed of the takeover, co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar admitted in a video statement in the evening. Now the group faces the challenge of ruling, he added. They are expected to proclaim a new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan soon.
Many in Kabul do not trust promises made by the former insurgents of an amnesty for their old enemies and those, like women’s rights activists, who sought a different future for Afghanistan. The airport was mobbed with thousands of people desperate to escape. In the evening they flooded on to the runway, halting all air traffic.
In deeply humiliating scenes for the Biden administration, less than a month before the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on America, smoke spiralled from the embassy compound as staff hastily destroyed documents, before a final group took down the stars and stripes flag and headed to the airport by military helicopter.
It was clear from early Sunday that a second era of Taliban rule had effectively begun. Taliban commanders started the day so confident of victory that after their fighters surrounded the capital, they ordered them to stay outside the city and wait.
“Our forces are not entering Kabul city. We want a peaceful transfer of power,” said spokesman Suhail Shaheen. But with surrender apparently inevitable, Afghan government forces melted away, looting broke out, and hours later the Taliban claimed their men were needed to restore order.
So they moved in not as fighters but as policemen, presenting themselves as a government in waiting. By evening the Taliban had seized the ‘Arg’, the presidential palace that is Afghanistan’s historic seat of power.
It is expected to be used to declare a new Islamic Emirate, more than two decades after the group had established its first one, and TV footage showed Taliban fighters roaming its rooms and taking down flags to replace with their own standard.
Afghans with no option to leave had raced home when they realised the Taliban were arriving to destroy evidence of western or government links. Women without burqas searched for shops where they could buy them. Even hospitals were closed, with at least one desperate woman forced to give birth at home, with a doctor she begged to attend.
In parks and other open areas, people who had fled the Taliban’s advance in other parts of Afghanistan huddled in tents, fearful of a future they had tried and failed to escape. The United Nations refugee agency says more than 550,000 people in Afghanistan have left their homes due to the conflict since the start of this year.
Shaheen, the Taliban spokesman, has promised “amnesty” for those who worked for the now-fallen government, or with western nations, inviting them – though probably only the men – to serve under Taliban rule. “We once again invite them all to come and serve the nation and the country,” he said.
But it was an offer viewed with scepticism by many. In areas seized by the group there have been credible reports of reprisal killings, execution of surrendering soldiers, and women forced from their jobs at gunpoint, barred from education and forced into marriage by militants.
Remnants of the Afghan government travelled to Qatar to meet Taliban representatives in a bid to win assurances on a peaceful transfer of power, treatment of refugees and a promise of a ban on reprisals.
But a US mandate that once aimed to rebuild Afghanistan had been reduced to trying to get all staff, and Afghan allies who had made the sometimes random cut, out of the country before a full Taliban takeover.
All other western embassies were already operating only out of the airport, at the insistence of the US. Their buildings across town stood largely empty, although diplomats for Russia, Pakistan, Iran and other countries that had not been part of the Nato mission remained in their compounds.
The exodus of those who could get out began early, after the insurgents captured the eastern city of Jalalabad, the last major centre held by the government, and the nearby border crossing with Pakistan.
By evening, Ghani was reportedly in Tajikistan. In a post on Facebook, he acknowledged the Taliban’s military victory, and said he left to avoid fighting in Kabul that would have caused a “flood of bloodshed”.
“The Taliban have won with the judgment of their swords and guns, and are now responsible for the honour, property and self-preservation of their countrymen,” Ghani wrote.
Former president Hamid Karzai, in contrast, shared a video of himself with his daughters, promising to stay in Kabul. He is part of a newly formed coordination council of Afghan leaders, which will meet with the Taliban and manage the transfer of power.
There was anger at the flight of a man who just a day earlier had been on national TV, promising to reorganise the army. “Ghani sold the country to the Taliban,” said civil servant Karima Jamili. “I trusted him and voted for him but he is a failed leader.”
But as the Taliban approached there had also been fears of street-to-street fighting, a reprisal of the brutal civil war that ripped Afghanistan apart in the 1990s and reduced Kabul to ruins. So some welcomed his departure, despite trepidation about what would come next.
“Imagine if he fought against the Taliban; how many lives would be taken and how many innocent civilians would be killed?” said Hadia, a university student. “Considering that all provinces are under the control of the Taliban now, it was the only way to decrease violence temporarily.”
The Taliban’s almost bloodless seizure of the capital came after a lightning 11-day offensive on cities across Afghanistan. They had already seized most of rural Afghanistan along with key border crossings in a campaign that began in May, and this month they moved on urban areas nationwide in force, splintering and demoralising Afghan forces.
On Friday they captured the second and third largest cities, southern Kandahar and western Herat, and on Saturday the northern stronghold of Mazar-i-Sharif fell.
It then seemed a question of if, rather than when, the Taliban would take Kabul but even so the speed of Sunday’s collapse was stunning. A US intelligence estimate just last week had said Kabul could hold out for at least three months.
It came almost exactly two decades after an international coalition led by Washington and London triumphantly toppled the Taliban in December 2001, seemingly consigning their caliphate to history.
Both in the UK and the US politicians tried to cast their long mission as an anti-terror one that would continue. UK prime minister Boris Johnson, asked about the situation in Afghanistan, said in a TV interview: “It’s very important that the west collectively should work together to get over to that new government, be it by the Taliban or anybody else: nobody wants Afghanistan once again to be a breeding ground for terror.”
But the west for years also laid out an explicit mission to support democracy and human rights, and most of those gains are expected to be swept away. The Taliban have always been clear that they are fighting for an austere interpretation of Islam, which includes particularly severe restrictions on women and girls.
Over years of peace talks brokered by the US, Taliban negotiators have promised to respect women’s rights under Islam, but refused to be drawn on details. And in areas they control women already have limited education, work and freedom of movement.
In Kabul, shops had started erasing photos of women in wedding dresses and women were bracing for a very different life. “I have felt very sad today; it was unbelievable for me that the Taliban were back in Kabul,” said Hawa. “They will not respect our freedom.”
