Kabul offers Taliban power-share deal as rebels capture more cities
Strategic city Ghazni, 3rd largest city Herat, also fall during offensive
Kabul/Doha, Aug. 12: Afghan government negotiators in Qatar are reported to have offered the Taliban a power-sharing deal in return for an end to fighting in the country, a government negotiating source said on Thursday.
“Yes, the Abdul Ghani government has submitted a proposal to Qatar as the mediator. The proposal allows the Taliban to share power in return for a halt in the violence in the country,” the source told AFP in Doha.
The Taliban, meanwhile, captured a strategic provincial capital near Kabul and broke
US TROOPS going into Afghanistan to help evacuate some personnel from its embassy in Kabul. — AP
through defensive lines in Afghanistan’s thirdlargest city on Thursday, further squeezing the country’s embattled government just weeks before the end of the American military mission. Seizing Ghazni cuts off a crucial highway linking the Afghan capital with the country’s southern provinces, which similarly find themselves under assault as part of an insurgent push some 20 years after American and Nato troops invaded and ousted the Taliban government.
The assault on the city of Herat, still raging Thursday night, could put nearly all of western Afghanistan under Taliban control just a day after the militants completed their capture of the country’s northeast. While Kabul itself isn’t directly under threat yet, the loss of Ghazni and the battles elsewhere further tighten the grip of a resurgent Taliban which are now believed to hold around two-thirds of the nation.
Doha, Aug 12: The Taliban took over Herat, Afghanistan’s third-largest city, on Thursday and also seized another key district capital just 150 kilometres (95 miles) from Kabul. A senior security source from Herat said that government forces and administration officials had retreated to an army barracks outside the city. The interior ministry confirmed the fall of the city, which lies along the major Kabul-Kandahar highway and serves as a gateway between the capital and militant strongholds in the south.
“The enemy took control,” spokesman Mirwais Stanikzai said in a message to media, adding later the city’s governor had been arrested by Afghan security forces.
Pro-Taliban Twitter feeds showed video of him being escorted out of Ghazni by Taliban fighters and sent on his way in a convoy, prompting speculation in the capital that the government was angered with how the provincial administration capitulated.
As security forces retreated across the country, Kabul handed a proposal to Taliban negotiators in Qatar offering a power-sharing deal in return for an end to fighting, according to a member of the government’s team in Doha who asked not to be named.
A second negotiator, Ghulam Farooq Majroh, said the Taliban had been given an offer about a “government of peace” without providing more specifics. Authorities in Kabul have now effectively lost most of northern and western Afghanistan and are left holding a scattered archipelago of contested cities also dangerously at risk of falling to the Taliban.
The conflict has escalated dramatically since May, when US-led forces began the final stage of a troop withdrawal due to end
later this month following a 20-year occupation.
The loss of Ghazni will likely pile more pressure on the country’s already overstretched airforce, needed to bolster Afghanistan’s dispersed security forces who have increasingly been cut off from reinforcements by road.
Pro-Taliban social media accounts also boasted of the vast spoils of war their fighters had recovered in recent days, posting photos of armoured vehicles, heavy weapons, and even a drone seized by the insurgents at abandoned Afghan military bases. —