Taliban fighters reached the outskirts of Kabul, as the US scrambled to evacuate personnel from its embassy amid fears of an imminent assault on the capital.
The Islamist group released a statement saying its fighters would not “enter the city by force,” and that talks were under way on a transition “in a secure environment to prevent harm to the people,” according to Afghanistan’s Tolonews channel.
President Ashraf Ghani’s government, politically and militarily isolated after the Taliban’s lightning offensive, sought to assure Kabul residents that “the situation is under control” and the country’s “security and defence forces are working together with international partners to ensure the security”.
Ghani was said to be in emergency talks with international officials on Sunday afternoon as sporadic gunfire was reported near Kabul airport.
The Taliban, which wants to impose a strict interpretation of Islamic law, has swept across the country in just over a week, often meeting limited resistance as it took control of almost two-thirds of Afghanistan’s provinces in an astonishing reordering of the political map.
“Kabul is now effectively surrounded — all major roads to Kabul are closed,” Bill Roggio, editor of the Long War Journal wrote on Twitter, after the Taliban entered Jalalabad, about 150km east of the capital. “The only thing that can slow the collapse of Kabul is the US mission to evacuate the embassy. Only for a time.”
President Joe Biden late on Saturday announced that Washington would increase its deployment to 5,000 troops to support the evacuation of diplomats, allied personnel and thousands of Afghans at high risk of retribution for working with the US, while affirming plans to withdraw troops by the end of the month.
Biden said Washington had warned the Taliban that “any action on their part, on the ground in Afghanistan, that puts US personnel or our mission at risk there, will be met with a swift and strong military response”.
As the US evacuation got under way, embassy staff were instructed to burn sensitive documents, two military officials told the Associated Press, while Kabul residents thronged banks in a bid to withdraw their savings.
Biden said that the US was working with Ghani and other Afghan political leaders, as well as regional powers, “as they seek to prevent further bloodshed and pursue a political settlement”.
Hamid Karzai, the former president, held talks with Abdullah Abdullah, the head of the High Council for National Reconciliation, over sending a delegation to Qatar for negotiations with the Taliban.
However, experts warned that Afghanistan, with a diverse mix of rival ethnic groups and fierce community rivalries, was heading towards a civil war.
“This is the end of Afghanistan as a nation,” Sara Wahedi, a former Afghan government official who runs a security app for Kabul residents, wrote on Twitter. “No one will be able to lead the entire country.”
The rapid disintegration of the Afghan National Army has stunned many in Washington who had expected the US-trained force to be able to put up stronger resistance to the Islamic insurgents.
The northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, a traditional stronghold of fierce anti-Taliban resistance, fell to the insurgent group late on Saturday night after days of heavy fighting. Influential political figures in the region fled, including anti-Taliban leaders Abdul Rashid Dostum and Ata Mohammad Noor, who sought refuge in neighbouring Uzbekistan, according to local news reports.
Analysts said the abrupt pace of the US drawdown — including abandoning Bagram air base, the main US military facility, virtually overnight — had severely damaged morale among the Afghan forces, undermining their will to fight.
“What we’ve underestimated is the level of Taliban planning with regard to the withdrawal,” Rudra Chaudhuri, a war studies lecturer at King’s College London, told the Financial Times. “They had a very clear plan. The question is, how did the entirety of the US intelligence community not know this?”
Many Afghans also expressed fury at the US focus on evacuating its own citizens, leaving the local population at the mercy of the Taliban and its extremist ideology. Afghan women, in particular, fear hardship under a Taliban regime, which severely restricted their freedoms of movement and ability to work when it ruled the country in the 1990s.
“I wish I could go to Kabul now and scream outside the US embassy, ‘We are also human beings like you and we also have the right to live and enjoy freedom’,” said a young woman in Herat, which fell to the Taliban a few days ago. She added that the Islamist fighters had already begun searching people’s homes for alcohol or weapons.
“How could the Americans hand us over the Taliban?” she said.
Additional reporting by Najmeh Bozorgmehr in Tehran