Taliban rapidly controlling more districts in Afghanistan

The Taliban’s march in north Afghanistan got momentum overnight with the capture of some states from fleeing Afghan forces, several hundred of whom left over the border into Tajikistan, officials said.

More than 300 Afghan army groups crossed from Afghanistan’s Badakhshan region as Taliban soldiers moved towards the border, Tajikistan’s State Committee for the National Security announced in a report on Sunday. The Afghan groups have spent over at about 6:30 pm local time on Saturday.

“Guided by the laws of humanism and good neighbourliness,” the Tajik authorities released the retreating Afghan state officials to cross into
Tajikistan said the statement.

Since mid-April, when US President Joe Biden said the end to Afghanistan’s “forever war”, the Taliban is creating disturbance throughout the country. But its most significant gains have been in the northern half of the country, a common centre of the US-allied strongmen who helped defeat them in 2001.

The Taliban is now roughly in control of a third of all 421 districts in Afghanistan.

In recent days, there are many gains in northeastern Badakhshan province that have often come to the protected group out a battle, said Mohib-ul Rahman, a provincial assembly member. He blamed Taliban successes on the poor spirit of troops who are mostly outnumbered and lacking supplies.

“Unfortunately, most of the districts went to the Taliban without any fight,” said Rahman. In the last three days, ten districts easily went to Taliban, eight without a fight, he said.

Hundreds of Afghan soldiers, police and intelligence troops abandoned their military outposts and fled to the Badakhshan provincial capital of Faizabad, said Rahman.

Even as a security conference was being held early on Sunday to plot the strengthening of the border around Faizabad, some senior rural officials were leaving the city for the Afghan capital Kabul, he said.

In late June, the Afghan government resurrected volunteer militias with a projection of crude violence to support the beleaguered Afghan forces, but Rahman said many of the fighters in the Badakhshan districts put up only a half-hearted fight.