Kabul is asking for mercy now...
Kabul offers Taliban power-sharing to end violence: reports
AFP |
Dawn.comPublished August 12, 2021 - Updated about 6 hours ago
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A Taliban fighter stands guard at the entrance of the police headquarters in Ghazni on Thursday as Taliban move closer to Afghan capital after taking Ghazni city. — AFP
Afghan government negotiators in Qatar have offered the Taliban a power-sharing deal in return for an end to fighting in the country, a government negotiating source told
AFP on Thursday.
“Yes, the government has submitted a proposal to Qatar as mediator. The proposal allows the Taliban to share power in return for a halt in violence in the country,” the source said.
A government source also told
Al Jazeera that the Afghan government offered the Taliban a share in power so long as the rising violence in the country comes to a halt.
Al Jazeera, AFP quote Kabul govt sources, claim proposal submitted in Doha to allow Taliban share in power if they end violence.
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Taliban claim to have captured Kandahar as grip on Afghanistan grows
Claim follows earlier fall of Herat with militants overrunning government positions
Peter Beaumont and
Rowena Mason
Thu 12 Aug 2021 14.04 EDT
The Taliban have claimed the capture of Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city and the place where the hardline Islamist group first emerged in the 1990s, as its fighters rapidly extend their control over vast swathes of the country.
The claim came as Afghanistan’s
third city of Herat, in the country’s west, fell fully to Taliban on Thursday with insurgents overrunning government positions and flying their flag over the city. With the Taliban in full control, they promised in a message to residents to “bring security” as its fighters fired into the air in celebration and as local officials fled to an army base in the city’s outskirts.
The latest
Taliban advances leave the capital, Kabul, isolated from the rest of the country and facing a rapidly escalating threat as provincial capitals have toppled one after another in the past seven days.
The US and other western countries have accelerated
planning for the evacuation of their embassies in Kabul and the US embassy website has ordered its citizens to leave Afghanistan immediately.
The advances came amid reports of a power-sharing offer made by the beleaguered Afghan government’s negotiating team to the Taliban office in Doha, an approach the group has reportedly rejected.
The fall of Kandahar on top of Herat would be a catastrophic blow to the Afghan government which has watched its forces crumple as the Taliban have swept through Afghanistan’s cities in a lightning offensive.
Confirming that Kandahar was on the brink of falling, a senior local official in the city told the Guardian: “There is heavy street-to-street fighting in the heart of the city. The Taliban has almost captured Kandahar. As far as I know, only the governor’s compound is now in government hands. The city could fall in hours.”
Images on social media showed Taliban fighters near Martyrs Square in the centre of the Kandahar, barely 24 hours after the group
overran the city’s central prison, releasing about 1,000 prisoners.
US and others laying groundwork for Afghan embassy evacuations
The fall of Kandahar – from where the Taliban launched their first insurgency in 1996 before rapidly taking over the country, and which served as the group’s capital until 2001 – would be hugely symbolic.
