Afghan president Ashraf Ghani flees country as capital falls to insurgents – as it happened

We’ve launched a new blog at the link below and will be closing this one now – head there for the very latest developments:

The Guardian’s front page headline on Monday morning: “The Fall of Kabul”.

One of the Taliban’s most senior officials declared on Sunday that the movement’s swift victory over the Afghan government was an unrivalled feat but that the real test of governing effectively would begin now that it had won power, Reuters reports.

In a brief video statement, Baradar, the head of the Taliban’s political bureau, said the victory, which saw all of the country’s major cities fall in a week, was unexpectedly swift and had no match in the world.

However he said the real test would begin now with meeting the expectations of the people and serving them by resolving their problems.

We understand that there is currently “chaos” at Kabul airport, where it is 2.30am.

PBS correspondent Jane Ferguson says that she is hearing “multiple accounts accounts of civilians being injured in scenes of chaos on tarmac in #Kabul Airport as desperate people try to get flights”.

She points out that those who decide to leave the airport now face Taliban checkpoints on their way home. She calls the situation a “nightmare”.

Here is video of the scenes from Natalie Amiri, correspondent for Germany’s ARD

Hi, Helen Sullivan here taking over from Joanna.

I’ll be bringing you the very latest for the next while. If you are in Kabul, see something you think we may have missed, or have any questions, the best place to find me is on Twitter @helenrsullivan.

It’s been an extraordinarily dramatic 24 hours in Afghanistan as the Taliban has taken over the capital, Kabul, essentially sweeping to power in the country. They have yet officially to declare victory and that they are now in control of the nation, but it is considered only a matter of time before that happens.

It’s approaching 3am local time in Kabul now and the night sky is noisy with the thumping whir of large helicopters, widely understood to be the US military evacuating US nationals and Afghan support individuals from the country as fast as it possibly can.

The Guardian US team is now handing over this live blog to our terrific colleagues in Australia, who will keep it running and continue to bring you all the developments promptly.

There were reports earlier that the extremist insurgency was about to formally declare, from the captured presidential palace in Kabul following the escape of Afghanistan’s president Ashraf Ghani, that the country would henceforth be known as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

This is the title the country was given during the previous control by the Taliban, before they were ousted in late 2001 by US-led forces following the terrorist attacks on the US, which were masterminded from the country by Islamist fundamentalist group Al Qaida, led by Osama Bin Laden. An emirate refers to a land or a reign by an emir, a Muslim religious military commander, chief or ruler.

US president Joe Biden has not made any public comments so far today but is expected to address the American public and the world in the next few days.

British prime minister Boris Johnson gave a TV interview earlier and said the Taliban should not be recognized as holding power in Afghanistan and that the country must not once again become a “breeding ground” for global terrorism.

Here is a summary of the main events of the day. You can also keep abreast of developments via Guardian stories on the site from my colleagues on the Taliban and Afghanistan.

• The Taliban has said from Kabul that the war in Afghanistan “is over”.
• The US is sending another 1,000 troops, directly to Kabul, bringing US military numbers expected in Afghanistan up to 6,000 in an attempt to execute the safe withdrawal of US nationals and Afghan support staff - between two and three times the number of soldiers that were there last week.
• Afghanistan’s erstwhile president Ashraf Ghani is reported to have fled to Tashkent, the capital of neighboring Uzbekistan.
• Ghani put out an extraordinary message on Facebook saying he left the country to try to avoid, essentially, a bloody war in Kabul, instead enabling the Taliban to, it seems, take control with almost no fighting.
• US secretary of state Antony Blinken spent a bunch of Sunday on TV defending the Biden administration, talking about the big picture plan that was always in place for the US to leave Afghanistan but often sidestepping questions about the chaotic nature of this rushed withdrawal itself. He did acknowledge that events in the last few days had happened more quickly than anticipated.
• The United Nations Security Council will hold an emergency meeting in New York at 10am local time on Monday to discuss the crisis in Afghanistan.
• A Nato official said all commercial flights have been suspended from the airport in Kabul and only military aircraft are currently allowed to operate. The airport is now the only way out of Afghanistan. The Taliban control all land crossings.
• The Taliban are on the verge of declaring that they have taken control of the country and that it is now the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
• British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in a live TV interview after emergency meetings with relevant senior department heads in London: “Nobody wants Afghanistan to be a breeding ground for terror … or to lapse back into the pre-2001 situation.” He said he believed Britain could brings its remaining nationals and Afghan support staff out safely.
• The Stars & Stripes flag was lowered at the US embassy in Kabul and the evacuation of the compound was completed. Only a handful of security contractors were left behind.
• Taliban commanders and fighters took control of the Afghan presidential palace in Kabul. This followed the arrival of the Taliban on the outskirts and then into the heart of Kabul earlier on Sunday - days, weeks, if not months more quickly than most expected.

The spokesman for the Taliban’s political office has told Al-Jazeera TV today that the war is over in Afghanistan and that the type of rule and the form of regime will be clear soon.

Reuters reports:

“We assure everyone that we will provide safety for citizens and diplomatic missions. We are ready to have a dialogue with all Afghan figures and will guarantee them the necessary protection,” spokesman Mohammad Naeem told the Qatar-based channel.

Afghanistan’s fallen and president Ashraf Ghani slipped out of his country earlier today, with no warning to the outside world, in the same way he had led it in recent years: a lonely and isolated figure.

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The Associated Press has this analysis:

Ghani quietly left the sprawling presidential palace with a small coterie of confidants and didn’t even tell other political leaders who had been negotiating a peaceful transition of power with the Taliban that he was heading for the exit.

Abdullah Abdullah, his long-time rival who had twice buried his animosity to partner with Ghani in government, said that “God will hold him accountable” for abandoning the capital.

Abdullah, as well as former President Hamid Karzai, who had beaten a path to Ghani’s door on numerous occasions to plead with him to put compromise above retaining power, were blindsided by the hasty departure.

They said they had still been hoping to negotiate a peaceful transition with the Taliban, said Saad Mohseni, the owner of Afghanistan’s popular TOLO TV.

“He left them in them lurch,” he said. Earlier Sunday, Karzai had posted a message to the nation on his Facebook page, surrounded by his three daughters, to reassure Kabul residents that the leadership had a plan and was negotiating with the Taliban.
Just hours later, he discovered the presidential palace had been abandoned.

“Ghani’s inability to unite the country and his proclivity to surround himself with his cadre of Western-educated intellectuals brought Afghanistan to this point,” said Bill Roggio, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a U.S.-based research institute.

“As Afghanistan collapsed, he refused to deal with the problems and further isolated himself from the power brokers he needed to deal with the problem, and the Afghan people as well.”

Ghani’s style of rule was often characterized as cantankerous and arrogant, rarely heeding the advice of his government and often publicly berating those who challenged him.

He was accused by ethnic minorities of championing the ethnic Pashtuns, like himself, seeing himself as a counter to the Taliban, who are mostly from the same ethnic group. He alienated other ethnic minorities and the gap between Afghanistan’s ethnic groups grew ever wider.

As he campaigned for the presidency in 2014, Ghani was taking an anger management course. It seemed to have faltered as multiple tribal elders in meetings with the president have spoken of his verbal lashings.

Ghani’s critics say his heavy-handed leadership style is to blame, to some degree, for the rapid disintegration of the Afghan army and an anti-Taliban alliance of warlords who fled or surrendered to the insurgents rather than fight for a widely unpopular president.

“His downfall was his insistence on centralizing power at all costs and a stubborn refusal to bring more people under his tent,” said Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program at the U.S.-based Wilson Center.

“Later on, his inability to develop a clear strategy to address the Taliban insurgency and perceptions that he was obstructing the peace process hurt him as well.”

Ghani, 72, spent most of his career overseas as a student and academic before returning to Afghanistan in 2002.

The Taliban, who entered the Afghan capital Kabul today after president Ashraf Ghani fled, previously governed the Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, imposing a strict interpretation of Islamic sharia law before being ousted and launching an insurgency.

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The Taliban originated among young Afghans who studied in Sunni Islamic schools called madrassas in Pakistan after fleeing Afghanistan during the 1979-1989 Soviet occupation.

They take their name from talib, the Arabic word for student.

In the early 1990s, with Afghanistan in the chaos and corruption of civil war, the Taliban was formed in the southern province of Kandahar under the leadership of one-eyed warrior-cleric Mullah Omar.

Mullah means a Muslim learned in Islamic theology and sacred law.

Agence France Press (AFP) futher reports taht:

Omar, who led them until his death in 2013, was from a stronghold of the powerful Pashtun ethnic group from which most Taliban fighters come.

Haibatullah Akhundzada is now the top leader, while Taliban co-founder Mullah Baradar heads the political wing.

They drew substantial support from Pakistan and initially had the tacit approval of the United States.

In 1994, they seized the city of Kandahar almost without a fight.

Equipped with tanks, heavy weapons and the cash to buy the support of local commanders, they steadily moved north, before capturing the capital Kabul on September 27, 1996.

President Burhanuddin Rabbani had already fled. Taliban fighters dragged former communist president Mohammed Najibullah from a United Nations office where he had been sheltering, and hanged him in a public street after torturing him.

The Taliban government imposed the strictest interpretations of sharia, establishing religious police for the suppression of “vice”.

Music, television and popular pastimes such as kite-flying were banned. Girls’ schools were closed, while women were prevented from working and forced to wear an all-covering burqa in public.

Taliban courts handed out extreme punishments including chopping off the hands of thieves and stoning to death women accused of adultery.

By 1998, they had control of 80 percent of the country, but were only recognised as the legal government by Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

In 2001, they blew up 1,500-year-old giant statues of the Buddha in the central Bamiyan valley.

Mullah Omar was based mostly in Kandahar where he lived in a house reportedly built for him by Osama bin Laden.

The Taliban allowed Afghanistan to become a sanctuary for Al-Qaeda, which set up training camps.

The September 11, 2001 attacks that killed around 3,000 people in the US were immediately blamed on Al-Qaeda.

Accusing the Taliban of refusing to hand over Bin Laden, the US and allies launched air strikes on Afghanistan in October.

By early December, the Taliban government had fallen, its leaders fleeing to their strongholds in the south and east, or across the border into Pakistan’s tribal zone.

At first written off as a spent force, the Taliban rebuilt to lead an insurgency against the new Western-backed government.

Here’s my colleague Julian Borger on Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.

The United States is is sending an additional 1,000 troops to Afghanistan, raising the US deployment to roughly 6,000.

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A defense official told the Associated Press today that 1,000 troops from the 82nd Airborne are going directly to Kabul instead of going to Kuwait as a standby force.

The defense official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a deployment decision not yet announced by the Pentagon, the AP said, adding:

On Saturday, Joe Biden authorized the U.S. troop deployment to rise to roughly 5,000 by adding about 1,000. Since then, the Taliban have entered the capital of Kabul and Afghanistan’s president has fled the country.

Helicopters have been evacuating personnel from the U.S. Embassy, and several other Western missions also are preparing to pull their people out.

The US announced last week that it was dispatching 3,000 extra troops rapidly to Afghanistan, to join the roughly 2,000 there already, and that those extra soldiers would be expected to arrive over the weekend.

Now the US is adding 1,000 more soldiers and expressing them towards Kabul, as the American public and wider world waits to hear anything from Joe Biden today.

The US president is at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland, where he flew in the Marine One helicopter from Wilmington, Delaware, his personal home when he’s not at the White House, on Friday afternoon, without answering questions posed by the press as he left.

Secretary of state Antony Blinken has been on TV today defending the Biden administration’s abrupt pull-out from Afghanistan which comes in the season when the Taliban are usually at the peak of their fighting , while acknowledging that the taking of control by the insurgents has “happened more quickly than we anticipated”.

Leaders of the Taliban extremist insurgency have been shown resting their guns on desks in the Afghan presidential palace in Kabul and milling around, holding weapons, loud-hails and flashing triumphal grins since taking control earlier today after the Afghan president Ashraf Ghani fled the country.

Media outlet Al Jazeera English published exclusive pictures and video clips showing the fundamentalist fighters inside the palace.

It’s been a dramatic few hours in Afghanistan news. Even though it’s now just into the earliest hour of Monday in Kabul, there is still plenty of news, reaction and analysis to keep you abreast of as it develops, so do stay tuned.

Here are the main events of recent hours, in terms of what has happened. Well have a longer summary in a bit about who has been saying what, too:

• Ashraf Ghani, now essentially being regarded as the former president of Afghanistan, although he has not pubicly relinquished the title and Afghanistan does not currently have a formal leader in the country, has flown to Uzbekistan.
• Ghani said on Facebook that he left the country to try to avoid bloodshed.
• The United Nations security council in New York will hold an emergency meeting on Monday morning, at 10am local time.

Please be in touch if you have any news from the ground in Afghanistan or environs, or we’ve missed anything really important. You can ping me on Twitter: @JoannaWalters13.

Afghanistan’s official president Ashraf Ghani, who fled without public warning earlier today in the face of Taliban extremist fighters entering the capital city, Kabuyl, is currently in Uzbekistan, according to the news outlet Al Jazeera, which has been subsequently reported by Reuters.

He is with his wife, his chief of staff and his national security adviser, in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, about 700 miles (1,100 km) north of Kabul.

Al Jazeera are citing a personal bodyguard of Ashraf, whom those left from the Afghan government inside Kabul are publicly calling the former president amid reports earlier that he had escaped and expectations that the Taliban is going to declare that Afghanistan is now once again an “Islamic Emirate” under its control.

The United Nations security council is to hold an emergency meeting at 10am local time in New York (3pm in London, 6.30pm in Kabul) tomorrow.

That loud banging noise you can hear in your head is the sound of stable doors being closed after the horses have bolted.

The UN secretary General, Antonio Guterres, will brief council members on the latest situation, AP said, following the Taliban takeover of Kabul today.

As one of several leaders engaged in futile public finger-wagging, Guterres on Friday had urged the Taliban to immediately halt their offensive in Afghanistan and negotiate in good faith and noted that he was “deeply disturbed” by early indications (which many have predicted and are not surprised at) that the Taliban are imposing severe restrictions in the areas under their control.

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Meanwhile, UK troops have now arrived in Kabul to help evacuate remaining Britons, the British government has just said and the AP has reported.

Ashraf Ghani, who until a few hours ago was the president of Afghanistan, but has fled to an unknown location, says further in a post he just put out on Facebook – his first public comments since leaving the country – that he left in order to avoid clashes with the Taliban that he said would endanger millions of Kabul residents, Reuters has reported.

Clearly, the millions of people in Kabul remain in grave peril, with the Taliban believed to be on the verge of declaring total power.

In the post, Ghani said: “If there were still countless countrymen martyred and they would face the destruction and destruction of Kabul city, the result would have been a big human disaster in this 6 million city. The Taliban have made it to remove me, they are here to attack all Kabul and the people of Kabul. In order to avoid the bleeding flood, I thought it was best to get out.”

He continued that the Taliban has won by “the judgment of sword and guns” not hearts and that many were now in fear.

“It is necessary for Taliban to assure all the people, nation, different sectors, sisters and women of Afghanistan, to win the legitimacy and the hearts of the people. Make a clear plan to do and share it with the public. I will always continue to serve my nation with an intellectual moment and a plan to develop. Lots more talk for the future. Long live Afghanistan.”

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The Guardian’s Emma Graham-Harrison has drawn my attention to this: