By Joe Evans
KABUL - Taliban seizes cities as Afghan military collapses and more than 1,000 soldiers flee across the border as others hand over weapons to insurgents
The top US commander in Afghanistan formally stepped down yesterday in a simple ceremony in Kabul marking the end of the two-decade occupation.
General Austin “Scott” Miller officially transferred control just days after Joe Biden announced that US military operations in the war-ravaged country would cease by 31 August.
Other Nato allies, including the United Kingdom, are also withdrawing nearly all military forces ahead of the president’s deadline.
But as Miller quietly gave up his duties, a very different scene was playing out in northern Afghanistan, a “traditional stronghold of US-allied warlords and an area dominated by the country’s ethnic minorities”, says Associated Press (AP).
In the past 15 days alone, advances by the insurgents “have driven more than 5,600 families from their homes” as the nation’s security forces crumble.
s the withdrawal gathers pace, civilians in the north are “fleeing their homes, fearful of living under the insurgents’ rule”, says AP. In Camp Istiqlal, a “makeshift camp on a rocky patch of land” near the city of Mazar-e-Sharif, “family after family” tell of “Taliban commanders using heavy-handed tactics as they overran their towns and villages”, the agency continues.
Many Afghan soldiers have “surrendered to the militants, handing over their equipment and weapons”, The Guardian reports, while others have fled to neighbouring nations.
Following the final departure from Bagram Airfield - the key US base in Afghanistan - earlier this month, “there is perhaps just one thing that the entire political spectrum can agree on: no one foresaw the scale or speed of the collapse of the Afghan security forces in recent weeks”, says The Guardian.
“Instead of retrenchment there was collapse, and intelligence agencies have ripped up their assessments of the strength of the Afghan military,” the paper continues.
The US “now fears Kabul could fall within months”, with control of the capital city handed to the insurgents who were warned 20 years ago by then president George W. Bush that there was “nothing to negotiate” following the US-led invasion.
The Taliban “recently claimed that their fighters have retaken 85% of territory in Afghanistan”, the BBC reports. Although that figure is “impossible to independently verify and disputed by the government”, analysts suggest the group controls at least “a third of Afghanistan's 400 districts”, says the British broadcaster.
