Taliban occupy Herat city as Afghan troops retreat-News

The Taliban took over Herat, Afghanistan’s third largest city, on Thursday, and occupied another important regional capital just 150 kilometers (95 miles) from Kabul.

A senior security source from Herat told AFP that government forces and administrative officials have retreated to military camps outside the city.

“We had to leave the city to prevent further destruction,” he said.

However, a Taliban spokesperson wrote on Twitter that “soldiers put down their weapons and joined the Mujahideen.”

An Agence France-Presse reporter earlier filmed the Taliban flag flying over the police headquarters in Herat, while the insurgents wrote on Twitter that “the enemy has fled… dozens of military vehicles, weapons and ammunition fell into it. In the hands of the jihadists”.

More details of the Taliban’s presence in the city could not be immediately obtained, but it has been under siege for several weeks.

Herat-about 150 kilometers from the Iranian border-is the hometown of the veteran warlord Ismail Khan, who has been rallying troops against the Taliban for weeks.

Earlier, the Ministry of the Interior confirmed the fall of Ghazni, which is located along the main Kabul-Kandahar highway and is the gateway between the capital and the southern militant stronghold.

“The enemy is in control,” spokesman Mirwais Stanikzai said in a message to the media after the governor of the city was arrested by the Afghan security forces.

A video on Twitter supporting the Taliban showed that he was escorted out of Ghazni by Taliban militants and escorted him on the road with the convoy. This sparked speculation in the capital that the government was angry at the provincial government’s easy surrender.

According to a member of the government’s Doha team who asked not to be named, as the security forces withdrew across the country, Kabul submitted a proposal to the Taliban negotiators for a power-sharing agreement in exchange for ending the fighting.

The second negotiator, Gulam Farouk Majero, said that the Taliban had received a proposal for a “peace government” but did not provide more details.

The Kabul authorities have now effectively lost most of the northern and western parts of Afghanistan, and the remaining scattered and disputed city islands are also at risk.