As of this writing, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan did not yet exist. Officially at least. But that would be shortly before the Taliban announced that on Sunday they had captured Kabul, the capital, the last point of resistance to the government whose leader during that day fled the country.
The Taliban entered the Afghan capital after a lightning military attack. Three of its senior officials stated that the rebels had captured the presidential palace and were forming a security council.
Meanwhile, Al Jazeera TV is broadcasting footage of a large group of Taliban fighters inside the presidential palace in the Afghan capital.
They are now expected to announce the seizure of power from the palace and the new name of the country.
A spokesman for the radical Islamist movement, which ruled Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, told the BBC that the Taliban intended to take power in Afghanistan “in the coming days” through a “peaceful transition” 20 years after they were ousted by the United States. – He led the coalition, for its refusal to extradite al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The Afghan president, who left Afghanistan today when the Taliban were at the gates of the capital, announced that he had fled the country to “avoid the bloodbath,” acknowledging that “the Taliban have won.”
In Portugal, the Minister of Defense, who has already announced that his country is cooperating in the operations of the European Union and NATO and is ready to receive Afghan refugees, strongly criticized the agreement signed between the United States and the Taliban in February 2020 on the withdrawal of foreigners. Troops from Afghanistan.
“After this agreement, what is happening today will happen at some point, and unfortunately, this agreement between the United States and the Taliban was implemented in a very imperfect manner, and was arrived at with a unilaterally negotiated timetable for the withdrawal of foreign forces by the United States and not NATO”.
The government official stressed that “this outcome has become inevitable” and that “it took a few months or less” for that to happen.
“There are many lessons to be learned from this process, and it is a very unfortunate process that Western countries cannot be proud of,” the defense minister said.
The next few days are as uncertain as they are fragile and fragile as the remainder of 20 years of international aid to Afghanistan.
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