Afghanistan, “Ghani fled only with clothes he was wearing”

Ashraf Ghani left Afghanistan only with the clothes he was wearing and “literally without money”, to stop for a night in Termez, Uzbekistan, and then directly to the United Arab Emirates, where he is now, he tells CNN. former important advisor to the former president, stressing that Ghani himself, like everyone else, was taken by surprise by the speed of the Taliban’s advance on Kabul. An earlier version of Ghani’s escape, disseminated by the Russians, claimed that he had departed aboard a helicopter loaded with banknotes. Read also In the last hours before the fall of the capital, a senior government official had met a leading exponent of the Movement, also with contacts with al Qaeda, who told him bluntly that the government should have surrendered. “In the days leading up to the fall of the city we had been working on an agreement with the United States to peacefully transfer powers to an inclusive government and for Ghani’s resignation. These talks were underway when the Taliban entered Kabul from several points, a a fact that our intelligence has interpreted as a hostile act. For a year our intelligence had indicated that the President would be killed in the event of a conquest “, he says. Vice President Amrullah Saleh left Kabul on Sunday morning. Many others left the Presidential Palace “soon after, when gunshots began to be heard nearby. People in the city panicked and many security officers abandoned their posts. At that point, our target was that of saving the city and preventing its citizens from fighting in the streets. This has been achieved and the agreement we have begun to negotiate continues to be a matter for negotiation by former President Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah. ” “We were convinced that Kandahar had sufficient strength, after reinforcements were sent from Khost. We thought that Kandahar could hold, as Helmand province had. Once Kandahar fell last Friday, it was obvious that Kabul would not hold up but we thought we would. have more time before the Taliban reached the capital. They did it much faster. Before the fall of Kandahar, we had defined a strategy with the US forces to consolidate the forces. However, the speed of the collapse that no one had foreseen did not allow the completion of the consolidation of forces, “he added, indicating in Biden’s announcement of the acceleration of the withdrawal of US forces in April, which began in May, another reason for the speed of the fall. “We the Afghan government and our international partners underestimated the effects that the American withdrawal would have on the morale of our forces, as well as the logistical problems in maintaining supplies for the forces. And we thought, as the Americans also predicted, that we would have time at least until mid-September, to define a political agreement and consolidate our forces to create a military stalemate. The failure was of the political leadership, not of our military who fought bravely to the end. There is no single scapegoat, first of all because the process was never entirely controlled by the Afghans “.