Taliban overrun two provincial capitals, marking eight in five days
By Taimoor Shah, Thomas Gibbons Neff and Najim Rahim
KANDAHAR — Two provincial capitals in Afghanistan all but fell to the Taliban on Tuesday (10), this time in the country’s west and north, local officials said, marking the seventh and eighth to be overrun in under a week.
The Taliban had been encroaching for some time on Farah city, the capital of the province with the same name, as the western province has been a focal point for the group’s offensive operations in the country’s west for years.
Gulbuddin, a police officer in Farah city who like many Afghans goes by one name, said that government officials had fled to an army headquarters several miles outside the city and that the main prison had been breached by Taliban fighters. The streets, he said, were full of freed inmates.
And in the north, the months-long Taliban stranglehold on the capital of Baghlan province, Pul-i-Khumri, finally succeeded, forcing government forces to retreat. The city is on the highway connecting the northern provinces to Kabul, meaning the insurgents need only to turn south and advance to begin putting even more pressure the country’s capital.
Mohammad Kamin Baghlani, a pro-government militia commander in Baghlan, said that Pul-i-Khumri had fallen Tuesday and that his forces had retreated to the south.
Masood Bakhtawar, the provincial governor of Farah, denied that the city had been captured by the insurgents and said that fighting was ongoing.
Bismullah Attash, a member of the provincial council in Baghlan province, said the city of Pul-i-Khumri fell after government forces had resisted there for months.
Farah and Pul-i-Khumri’s likely fall comes as the Afghan security forces have been fending off attacks in other cities, including in the province of Herat, where fighting has been reported outside the capital. The Taliban are entrenched in Kandahar and Lashkar Gah in the south and outside Faizabad, the capital of Badakhshan, the remote northern province that was once considered an anti-Taliban stronghold.
In recent weeks, the Afghan government has done little to articulate a plan to fend off the Taliban’s military offensive, which has captured roughly half of Afghanistan’s 400-odd districts since the US withdrawal began on May 1.
But a fledgling strategy to slow down the Taliban’s string of victories does now exist, US and UN diplomats and officials say.
As of Tuesday, Afghan security forces had yet to carry out any earnest operations to retake the seized capitals.
-New York Times