They have already taken 19 of the 34 provincial capitals of Afghanistan. Now the Taliban are close to the capital Kabul. CDU politician Norbert Röttgen no longer wants to stand idly by.
The militant Islamist Taliban are continuing their advance in Afghanistan, moving ever closer to the capital Kabul. On Saturday morning there were fighting over Maidan Schar, capital of the Maidan Wardak province around 35 kilometers from Kabul, said MP Hamida Akbari of the German press agency. The Taliban already ruled most of the districts in the province.
Fighting between the Taliban and government forces continued in at least five provinces across the country. Mazar-i-Sharif, where the Bundeswehr had its headquarters until June, is also a clear target of the Islamists.
The Taliban tried to invade the city in the north on Saturday morning, but were pushed back, according to local politicians. The ex-provincial governor Mohammad Atta Nur and the former warlord Abdul Raschid Dostum have set up a line of defense in the province of Balkh, in which Mazar-i-Sharif is located. The Taliban have already taken surrounding provinces.
Afghanistan: second and third largest city in the hands of the Taliban
On Saturday, the Islamists were also able to take over the meanwhile 19 of the country’s 34 provincial capitals. Sharana, with its estimated 66,000 inhabitants in the Paktika province in the south-east of the country, went to the Taliban without a fight after mediation by elders, three local officials confirmed. Fighting over the provincial capitals of Paktia and Kunar has been reported in the east. This week, Herat and Kandahar, the third and second largest cities in the country, fell to the Islamists.
Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said in a short TV address on Saturday that he did not want the blood of innocent people to continue to be shed in Afghanistan. He had held consultations with political leaders in the country and international partners and wanted to share the results with his compatriots “soon”.
Norbert Röttgen calls for intervention from the West
Meanwhile, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Bundestag, Norbert Röttgen (CDU), has called for the West and the Bundeswehr to intervene against the Taliban. “You shouldn’t watch how people who were connected to us for a long time are slaughtered by the Taliban, how girls and women lose all hard-won rights again,” said Röttgen to the editorial network in Germany.
Inaction in the face of the Taliban’s advance “would be a massive self-damage to our credibility,” warned Röttgen. “To say after 20 years of commitment that this is an Afghan matter is really absurd and shameful,” added the CDU politician. It is not about turning Afghanistan into a modern democracy.
Röttgen emphasized that he was not in favor of reversing the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. “Nevertheless, the Taliban offensive has to be countered with something out of the responsibility after 20 years of service and because of our own security interests,” he told the RND. “It is not enough that we only nod in American decisions.”
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