Taliban reaches near Kabul, Afghan govt says we stand firm

Amid Taliban domination, the Afghan government has claried its stand. Afghan first vice president Amrullah Saleh has said that the country will continue its fight against the Taliban and the government would do all it could to support the Afghan forces and the public uprising forces. In the meeting on national security chaired by President Ashraf Ghani, it was decided with conviction and resolve that we stand firm against Taliban terrorists and do everything to strengthen the national resistance by all means and ways,” Saleh said in a tweet on Friday. Saleh also said the Taliban will be defeated and that he will never surrender to the group, according to the Tolo News channel. He said he will not bow to any deal named peace with the nature of surrender. “I will never accept Taliban domination on the people of Afghanistan under any deal that is dictated and imposed by Taliban,” Saleh added.

Meanwhile, The Taliban seized more major cities on Friday as they raced towards full control of Afghanistan and inched closer to Kabul. According to media reports the Taliban has captured 18 provinces till Friday. Kandahar, Helmand, Herat, Badghis, Ghor, Logar, Zabul and Oruzgan provinces fell to the Taliban in the past 24 hours. The Afghan government still holds Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif and Jalalabad, near the Pakistani border in the east. The Taliban has in a statement asked government officials to surrender to them and that they will be forgiven. Tolo News reported citing some politicians and lawmakers as saying that the current situation in Afghanistan is due to the government’s “wrong policies.” “Nowhere in the world, it is in a way that those who are responsible do not feel their responsibility towards the people and the government… and apply policies that do not favour national interests,” former vice president Ahmad Zia Massoud was quoted as saying by the news channel.

As many as 400,000 civilians have been forced to flee from their homes since the start of the year and 250,000 of them since May, a UN official said. Many of them who have escaped the violence have been camping out in a Kabul park. "The situation has all the hallmarks of a humanitarian catastrophe," Thomson Phiri of the UN World Food Programme told a briefing. Several countries, including the US, the UK and India, have asked their citizens to leave the war-torn country immediately. The United States and the United Kingdom have said they will send troops to help evacuate embassy staff and their nationals