Afghan President travels to Taliban besieged Mazar-i-Sharif

The situation is becoming critical in northern Afghanistan, where the Taliban are besieging the key city of Mazar-i-Sharif. A new contingent has been dispatched and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani made the trip on Wednesday to encourage demoralized armed forces.

Faced with demoralized troops after the numerous defeats of the army in northern Afghanistan, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani arrived on Wednesday August 11 in Mazar-i-Sharif, the large northern city besieged by the Taliban. He will try to coordinate the response to the insurgents who now control more than a quarter of the country’s provincial capitals.

The Taliban conquered in the night Faizabad, capital of the province of Badakhshan, which they had never been able to penetrate during their rise to power in the 1990s. They now control nine of the 34 provincial capitals of Afghanistan, all fallen like dominoes, including seven located in the north of the country, a region that had always resisted them.

On Tuesday, the Taliban seized Farah in the west and Pul-e-Khumri in the north, 200 km from Kabul. Since Friday, they have chained the catches: Zaranj (southwest), Sheberghan (north), stronghold of the famous warlord Abdul Rachid Dostom, and especially Kunduz, the big city in the northeast, as well as three other northern capitals, Taloqan, Sar-e-Pul and Aibak.

With the situation becoming critical in the north of the country, President Ghani visited Mazar-i-Sharif on Wednesday, to which the Taliban are now turning all their attention.

He was to “check the general security situation in the northern zone” and “meet security officials, jihadist leaders, notables and other influential figures,” the presidential palace said in a statement.

A contingent of soldiers sent to Mazar-i-Sharif

Ashraf Ghani was thus likely to meet with Mohammad Atta Noor, the former governor of the province of Balkh, of which Mazar-i-Sharif is the capital. This strong man from the North has promised to resist “to the last drop of blood”, as well as with Abdul Rachid Dostom, his former vice-president.

Images posted overnight on social media showed Marshal Dostom, a powerful leader of Uzbek ethnicity, boarding a plane for Mazar-i-Sharif with a large contingent of armed men.

The Taliban, who are converging from several directions on Mazar-i-Sharif, attacked neighborhoods on the immediate outskirts of the city on Tuesday, but were pushed back, according to an AFP reporter there.

The loss of Mazar-i-Sharif would be catastrophic for the government, which would no longer have any control over the entire northern half of the country. It would also allow the Taliban to shift their efforts to other regions and perhaps even to the capital Kabul.

Washington annoyed by the defeats of the Afghan army

The Taliban launched their offensive in May, at the start of the final withdrawal of American and foreign troops, but their advance has accelerated in recent days with the capture of several urban centers.

The departure of international forces must be completed by August 31, twenty years after their intervention in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.

“I do not regret my decision” to leave Afghanistan, assured US President Joe Biden on Tuesday. Afghans “must have the will to fight” and “must fight for themselves, for their nation”. Washington is less and less hiding its annoyance at the weakness of the Kabul army, which the Americans have been training, financing and equipping for years.

The spokesman for the American diplomacy, Ned Price, thus underlined that the government forces were “very superior in number” to the Taliban, and that they had “the potential to inflict more important losses”. “This idea that the advance of the Taliban cannot be stopped”, “it is not the reality on the ground”, he estimated.

Taliban at the gates of power

Doha hosted an international meeting on Tuesday with representatives from Qatar, the United States, China, the United Kingdom, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, the United Nations and the European Union.

The exchanges continued on Wednesday, the American envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, to urge the Taliban “to cease their military offensive and to negotiate a political agreement”. However, as it stands, a political agreement could lead to the Taliban seizing power at the head of Afghanistan.

The peace process between the Afghan government and the Taliban opened last September in Qatar, as part of the agreement reached in February 2020 between the insurgents and Washington providing for the total departure of foreign troops from Afghanistan.

But the discussions are at a standstill. On the contrary, they gave way to deadly fighting, which has intensified since the spring of 2021, as soon as the American withdrawal was officially announced.

With AFP

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