Reports Panjshir has fallen as rebel leader calls for peace talks
The Taliban says they have taken control of Panjshir province north of Kabul, the only province they had not seized during their blitz across Afghanistan last month.
Thousands of Taliban fighters overran eight districts of Panjshir overnight, according to witnesses from the area who spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing for their safety. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said yesterday that Panjshir was now under the control of Taliban fighters.
The anti-Taliban forces holding out had been led by the former vicepresident, Amrullah Saleh, and also the son of the iconic antiTaliban fighter Ahmad Shah Massoud who was killed just days before the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States.
Nestled in the towering Hindu Kush mountains, the Panjshir Valley has a single narrow entrance. Local fighters held off the Soviets there in the 1980s and also the Taliban a decade later under the leadership of Massoud.
Massoud’s son Ahmad had earlier called for an end to the fighting in recent days. The young British-schooled Massoud said his forces were ready to lay down their weapons but only if the Taliban agreed to end their assault. Late on Sunday, local time, dozens of vehicles loaded with Taliban were seen swarming into Panjshir Valley.
There has been no statement from Saleh, who had declared himself the Acting President after President Ashraf Ghani fled the country in midAugust as the Taliban reached the gates of the capital.
Mujahid yesterday sought to assure residents of Panjshir that they would be safe — even as scores of families reportedly fled into the mountains ahead of the Taliban’s arrival.
“We give full confidence to the honorable people of Panjshir that they will not be subjected to any discrimination, that all are our brothers, and that we will serve a country and a common goal.”
The Taliban stepped up assault on Panjshir on Sunday, tweeting that their forces had overrun Rokha district, one of largest of eight districts in the province. Several Taliban delegations have attempted negotiations with the holdouts there, but talks has failed to gain traction.
Fahim Dashti, the spokesman for the anti-Taliban group, was killed in a battle on Sunday, according to the group’s Twitter account. Dashti was the voice of the group and a prominent media personality during previous governments.
He was also the nephew of Abdullah Abdullah, a senior official of the former government who is involved in negotia
tions with the Taliban on the future of Afghanistan.
Meanwhile, at least four planes chartered to evacuate several hundred people seeking to escape the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan have been unable to leave the country for days, officials said, with conflicting accounts emerging about why the flights weren’t able to take off as pressure ramps up on the US to help those left behind to flee.
An Afghan official at the airport in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif said the would-be passengers were Afghans, many of whom did not have passports or visas, and thus were unable to leave the country.
The top Republican on the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, however, said that the group included Americans and they were sitting on the planes, but the Taliban were not letting them take off, effectively “holding them hostage.” The final days of America’s 20-year war in Afghanistan were marked by a harrowing airlift at Kabul’s airport to evacuate tens of thousands of people — Americans and their allies.