Taliban takes over Kabul; Afghanistan president flees

Afghanistan's President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani fled the nation on Sunday, a top official said, effectively ceding power as the Taliban reached the capital, Kabul, to seal a nationwide military victory in just 10 days.

"The former Afghan president has left the nation, leaving the people to this situation," Abdullah Abdullah, the head of the Afghan National Reconciliation Council, said in a video on his Facebook page.

"God hold him accountable, and the people will have their judgment."

The Taliban ordered its members to enter Kabul, a spokesman for the group said on Sunday.

A statement by Zabihullah Mujahid, spokesman for the Taliban, said the purpose was to ensure that order was maintained in the capital.

Two Taliban officials said on Sunday there would be no transitional government in Afghanistan and that the group expects a complete handover of power.

The Afghan people, especially civilians, have suffered from deaths, injuries and chaotic ways of life since the US-led invasion in 2001.

After more than a decade of systematically documenting the impact of the war on civilians, the United Nations found that by 2019, the number of civilian casualties had surpassed 100,000.

The UN's "Afghanistan Annual Report on Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict: 2019" documented that 3,403 civilians were killed and 6,989 injured in 2019 alone. It was the sixth consecutive year that the number of civilian casualties had exceeded 10,000, according to Tadamichi Yamamoto, former UN special representative for Afghanistan. Yamamoto was the head of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan from 2016 to 2020.

Now, experts have said, the sudden withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan has created another humanitarian crisis.

Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Center for Research and Security Studies in Pakistan, said the current conflict has exposed common Afghans to "displacement, loss of livelihoods, atrocities because of the cross-fire and denial of medical treatment to scores of injured people".

Salman Bashir, former foreign secretary of Pakistan, said the speed of Taliban success on the ground has upset the wrong assumptions of the US and Western analysts about the Taliban.

Xinhua and AFP contributed to this story.

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