Re: Taliban overrun Afghan city of Kunduz
[h=1]Taliban Fighters Capture Kunduz City as Afghan Forces Retreat[/h]
KABUL, Afghanistan — After months of besieging the northern Afghan provincial capital of Kunduz,
Taliban fighters took over the city on Monday just hours after advancing, officials said, as government security forces fully retreated to the city’s outlying airport.
The
Taliban’s sudden victory, after what had appeared to be a
stalemate through the summer, gave the insurgents a military and political prize — the capture of a major Afghan city — that had eluded them since 2001. And it presented the government of President Ashraf Ghani, which has been alarmed about
insurgent advances in the surrounding province for a year, with a demoralizing setback less than a year after the formal end of the NATO combat mission in Afghanistan.
Afghan officials vowed that a counterattack was coming, as commando forces were said to be flowing by air and road to Kunduz. But by nightfall, the city itself belonged to the
Taliban. Their white flag was flying over several public areas of Kunduz, residents said.
Announcing their victory, the Taliban issued a statement saying that the group “has no intention” of looting or carrying out extrajudicial killings.
But witness accounts and videos posted to social media showed some scenes of chaos. The insurgents had set fire to police buildings, and witnesses reported that jewelry shops were being looted, though by whom was unclear.
The Taliban also appeared to have freed hundreds of inmates from the city’s prison. One video showed a crowd gathered around the city’s main traffic circle, responding to the chants of a Taliban fighter. “Death to America! Death to the slaves of America!” the fighter shouted into a megaphone, as the crowd responded: “Death to Mir Alam! Death to Nabi Gechi!” Both of those men are local militia commanders fighting on the side of the government.
The Taliban’s largest victory in years came just over a week before the American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John F. Campbell, is expected to return to Washington to testify before Congress about the course of the war and what America’s continued involvement should be. Some 10,000 American troops are in the country, many of them focused on training or advising the Afghan forces, and the White House has not yet decided whether to keep a force of that number here for another year or begin pulling them from the country in the coming months.
Hanging over that briefing will be the fall of a significant Afghan regional center that came about not so much because of an overwhelming offensive by the Taliban but because of a collapse under pressure by the country’s Western-trained security forces.
One security official briefed on the situation in Kunduz estimated that the Taliban force in the city numbered 500, a small fraction of the thousands of government security forces and allied militiamen based in the city and in the surrounding areas.
A district governor who had retreated to the airport on Monday, Zalmai Farooqi, estimated that the government may have had as many as 7,000 troops in the area. “The problem wasn’t lack of security forces,” Mr. Farooqi said, “but there was no good leadership to command these men.”
Now, the fall of Kunduz, which was
one of the centers of the American troop surge five years ago, stands as a direct challenge to assurances by American and Afghan officials that the Afghan security forces can hold the country’s most important cities.
The city of Kunduz, the capital of Kunduz Province, is an important northern hub of just over 300,000 residents, according to one Afghan government population estimate from 2013, although there has been a
large outflow of refugees this past year and the population is probably lower now.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/29/w...y-of-kunduz-in-northern-afghanistan.html?_r=0