Taliban leaders marched into Kabul yesterday, preparing to take full control of Afghanistan two decades after they were removed by the US military.

The militant group said it has occupied the presidential palace and planned to soon declare a new “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan”.

The Al Jazeera network broadcast what it said were live images of armed Taliban fighters roaming the presidential palace and posing at desks.

Hours earlier, American-backed President Ashraf Ghani fled the country.

Mr Ghani said on his Facebook page that he left Afghanistan to avoid bloodshed. “In order to avoid the bleeding flood, I thought it was best to get out,” he said.

Local media reported he was bound for neighbouring Tajikistan along with some close aides.

Hamid Karzai, Afghan president from 2004 to 2014, said last night that he and others would form a coordinating council to manage a peaceful transfer of power.

The mechanism of such a handover was unclear given the Taliban’s occupation of all major cities and the government’s collapse.

The Taliban swept through Afghanistan in a matter of weeks, taking world leaders by surprise as they entered a vacuum created by departing US and Nato forces working against the August 31 deadline imposed by US President Joe Biden to end America’s longest war.

In many cases, the militants encountered little or no resistance from Afghan’s US-trained military. Key provincial centres close to Kabul and in far-flung corners of the nation fell in quick succession.

Skies over Kabul buzzed yesterday with American military helicopters ferrying passengers from the US embassy. The American flag at the embassy was lowered.

Afghanis lined up for cash and many headed to the airport, desperate to book a flight out of the country.

“We’re relocating the men and women of our embassy to a location at the airport,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said. “That’s why the president sent in a number of forces to make sure that, as we continue to draw down our diplomatic presence, we do it in a safe and orderly fashion.”

The acting US ambassador was among those evacuated to the airport. The US embassy said on its website that the airport was taking fire, and advised US citizens to shelter in place.

CNN reported earlier yesterday that the US will pull out all embassy personnel by tomorrow, leaving a small core of staff to operate from the airport.

To many, images of helicopters over Kabul were an echo of the American departure from Saigon in 1975, at the end of the Vietnam War.
Ms Blinken rejected that analogy.

“This is not Saigon. We went to Afghanistan 20 years ago, with one mission, and that mission was to deal with the folks who attacked us on 9/11, and we’ve succeeded,” he said.
Top Biden administration officials briefed members of Congress yesterday, many of whom were furious about the visible chaos to end a campaign that has cost about 2,400 American lives and close to $1trn.

“This disaster, the catastrophe that we’re watching unfold right now across Afghanistan, did not have to happen,” said Republican Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, whose father, then-vice president Dick Cheney, was one of the architects of the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan.

Taliban fighters reached the outskirts of Kabul early yesterday after a three-week offensive. Just a day earlier, they were estimated to have seized about half of Afghanistan’s provincial capitals.

The militant group now controls all of Afghanistan’s border crossings, leaving Kabul’s airport as the only way out of the country.

On Saturday, President Biden

defended his decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan after 20 years.

“I was the fourth president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan – two Republicans, two Democrats,” Mr Biden said. “I would not, and will not, pass this war on to a fifth.”

Thousands of Afghanis fled to Kabul in the face of the Taliban advance as the crisis threatened to spill outside the country’s borders and send waves of refugees as far afield as Europe. People also flocked to the airport hoping to catch a flight out.