Last pocket of resistance captured, claim Taliban
KABUL: The Taliban forces have taken complete control of Afghanistan including the Panjshir valley where opposition forces had been holding out, three Taliban sources told Reuters on Friday as heavy celebratory gunfire was heard in the Afghan capital of Kabul.
“We are in control of the entire Afghanistan. The troublemakers have [been] defeated and Panjshir is now under our command,” one Taliban commander reportedly said.
It was not immediately possible to confirm the claims of the Taliban sources. The country’s former vice-president Amrullah Saleh, one of the leaders of the opposition forces, told Tolo News television station that reports he had fled the country were untrue.
The BBC, however, reported that National Resistance Front (NRF) spokesman Ali Nazari said that anti-taliban forces had actually pushed the insurgents back earlier in the day.
“The Taliban’s propaganda machine keeps publishing the same claims that Panjshir has fallen - we have seen it for the past week that it is false, and it’s the opposite - that it’s the National Resistance Front that has caused them to retreat,” Nazari told the BBC.
Other possible reasons for the gunfire in Kabul include a top Taliban leader entering Kabul or co-founder Abdul Ghani Baradar being appointed head of state, the BBC report speculated.
In a separate development, Afghanistan’s 250 female judges are particularly afraid of men they jailed who have now been freed by the Taliban. “Four or five Taliban members came and asked people in my house: ‘Where is this woman judge?’ These were people who I had put in jail,” a judge who had escaped to Europe said from an undisclosed location.