KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban seized a major strategic and propaganda prize early Sunday, capturing the crucial northern commercial hub of Kunduz and then breaking through in two other regional capitals later the same day.
The rapid fall of Afghan cities on Sunday — including Kunduz, Sar-i-Pul and Taliqan, all northern capitals — comes just weeks before U.S. forces were set to complete a total withdrawal from Afghanistan. It is a crucial challenge for President Biden, who in recent weeks has insisted the American pullout would continue despite the Taliban’s advances.
After sweeping through the country’s rural areas, the insurgents’ military campaign has shifted to brutal urban combat in recent weeks. They have pushed into the edges of major cities like Kandahar and Lashkar Gah in the south and Herat in the west.
TURKMENISTAN
Sheberghan
Mazar-i-Sharif
AFGHANISTAN
Kandahar
Lashkar Gah
The strategy has exhausted the Afghan government’s forces and overwhelmed the local militia forces that the government has used to supplement its own troops.
Kunduz, the capital of a province of the same name, is a significant military and political prize. With a population of 374,000, it is a vital commercial city near the border with Tajikistan, and a hub for trade and road traffic.
“All security forces fled to the airport, and the situation is critical,” said Sayed Jawad Hussaini, the deputy police chief of a district in Kunduz city.
Clashes between government forces and Taliban fighters were continuing in a small town south of the city, where the local army headquarters and the airport are situated, security officials said.
“We are so tired, and the security forces are so tired,” Mr. Hussaini said. “At the same time we hadn’t received reinforcements and aircraft did not target the Taliban on time.”
Security forces, who had retreated to the town earlier in the morning, began an operation to flush Taliban fighters out of the city on Sunday evening, according to security officials.
In the two preceding days, the Taliban had taken two other provincial capitals: Sheberghan, the capital of Jowzjan Province in the north, and Zaranj, the capital of Nimruz Province on the Afghanistan-Iran border.
The Taliban briefly seized Kunduz in 2015 and again in 2016, gaining control of a province for the first time since American forces invaded in 2001. Both times, Afghan forces pushed back the insurgents with help from American airstrikes. Kunduz is also where an American gunship mistakenly attacked a Doctors Without Borders hospital in 2015, killing 42 people.
Since the U.S. withdrawal began, the Taliban have captured more than half of Afghanistan’s 400-odd districts, according to some assessments. Their attacks on provincial capitals have violated the 2020 peace deal between the Taliban and the United States. Under that deal, which precipitated the American withdrawal from the country, the Taliban committed to not attacking provincial centers like Kunduz.
WASHINGTON — The Taliban’s military victories have not moved President Biden to reassess his decision to end the U.S. combat mission by the end of the month, senior administration officials said Sunday. But the violence shows just how difficult it will be for Mr. Biden to end 20 years of war while insisting that he’s not abandoning Afghanistan.
In a speech defending the U.S. withdrawal last month, Mr. Biden said the United States had done more than enough to empower the Afghan police and military to secure the future of their people.
But the administration’s sink-or-swim strategy has not shown promising results. Over the past week, Taliban fighters have moved swiftly to retake cities around Afghanistan, assassinated government officials, and killed civilians in the process. Throughout, American officials have publicly held out hope that Afghan forces have the resources and ability to fight back, while at the same time negotiating a peace deal with the Taliban that seems more unlikely by the day.
Leon E. Panetta, who served as defense secretary under President Barack Obama, said he was surprised not to see more air support from the U.S. military on Sunday, but he did not hold out hope that the situation would improve much even with the help of American forces.
“Let’s face it,” Mr. Panetta said in an interview. “The most you can hope for now is some kind of stalemate” between Afghan forces and Taliban fighters, who have demonstrated little interest in reaching an accord since the American troop withdrawal was announced.
At the Pentagon, where senior leaders have reluctantly cut off most military support to Afghanistan, officials were on phone calls Sunday about the unfolding events around Kunduz, a northern Afghanistan city of some 350,000 that the United States has twice in the past intervened to retake from the Taliban.
But defense officials said there were no plans to take action beyond a series of limited airstrikes, similar to what the United States has done in response to Taliban advances over the past three weeks. The attacks, carried out by armed Reaper drones and AC-130 aerial gunships, targeted Taliban equipment, including heavy artillery, that threaten population centers, foreign embassies and Afghan government buildings, officials said.
One official acknowledged that with only 650 American troops remaining on the ground in Afghanistan, a concerted air campaign is unlikely to change the inroads the Taliban has made.
Taliban fighters captured another northern provincial capital on Sunday afternoon, local officials said, marking the third city to fall to the insurgent group in a single day.
The fighters had been contained at the gates of Taliqan, the capital of Takhar Province, since June. But as the Kunduz city center fell to the Taliban on Sunday, the insurgents moved into Taliqan, just a few miles away, pushing back government forces there in a bout of vicious fighting.
By sunset, the Taliban had seized the police headquarters and the provincial governor’s office, said an Afghan official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the developing situation.
Keramatullah Rustaqi, a Takhar provincial council member, said that the city had fallen to the Taliban and that “security forces left Taliqan to retreat to Farkhar,” a neighboring district.
Mr. Rustaqi added that government forces were ambushed along the way.
Taliqan, an ethnically diverse city with Uzbek, Tajik, Pashtun and Hazara residents, is symbolic to many in the north, and like Kunduz it borders Tajikistan. The city was the operations center of Ahmad Shah Massoud, an anti-Taliban militia commander who was killed just before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.
“A large number of the Taliban came from Kunduz and the districts of Takhar to capture Taliqan city, and there is fighting in four directions,” said Karimullah Bek, a pro-government militia commander in Taliqan, a few hours before the city fell. “We need reinforcements.”
The exhaustion described by government militia members fighting in Taliqan is common among security forces across Afghanistan after months of trying to hold back the Taliban. In addition to Kunduz, the insurgents have in just three days seized three other provincial capitals: Sheberghan, the capital of Jowzjan Province; Zaranj, the capital of Nimruz Province on the Afghanistan-Iran border; and Sar-e-Pul, the capital of a northern province of the same name.
“The situation is chaotic, and the front lines are not clear now,” said Mohammed Omar, a district governor in Takhar who is leading militia fighters in Taliqan.
By Sunday afternoon the Taliban had freed hundreds of inmates from the prison in Taliqan after security forces there fled, said Wafiullah Rahmani, the head of the Takhar provincial council. Breaking into jails and prisons has long been a central part of the insurgent group’s military strategy.
The Taliban’s capture of Taliqan is a significant blow to the militia forces that are once again rising to prominence in an echo of the 1990s, when an ethnically charged civil war tore Afghanistan apart and helped the Taliban come to power.
Mr. Massoud’s son is now trying to assemble a force much in the way that his father did after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan more than 40 years ago. But the rise of these militia forces has had uneven effects on the battlefield.
The Taliban’s recent gains have put them in a position to consolidate their fighters and strengthen an offensive on Mazar-i-Sharif, an important economic hub near the Uzbek border and the capital of Balkh Province.
And once more the Afghan government has been presented with a dilemma: battle to retake the cities they have lost, or focus on defending what cities and provinces remain.
KABUL, Afghanistan — Of the three cities seized by the Taliban in northern Afghanistan on Sunday, Sar-i-Pul, the capital of the province with the same name, garnered fewer headlines and less concern from the international community.
Because of its remoteness, the city had been widely neglected by both the Afghan government and the international aid agencies that flocked to Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion in 2001.
But on Sunday, after more than a month of fighting and airstrikes, the city finally fell to the insurgents, leaving residents grappling with a new power structure and facing the prospect of more violence.
From a military standpoint, the province is of lesser strategic importance. But Sar-i-Pul offers access to untapped natural resources, including oil fields that were recently drilled near the provincial capital and taken over by the Taliban.
By the end of June, the Taliban had captured four districts in Sar-i-Pul as part of their broader offensive in the north. With the province now mostly under their control, the insurgents have positioned themselves to attack Mazar-i-Sharif, an economic hub and capital of Balkh Province, from two different directions: Sar-i-Pul and Jowzjan in the west, and Kunduz in the east.
Sar-i-Pul province itself has a population of around 621,000 people and is ethnically diverse, with ethnic Uzbeks making up a plurality.
What does it look like when a city falls in Afghanistan?
The rapid seizure of provincial capitals across Afghanistan by the Taliban in the last three days has raised the specter of more setbacks for the Afghan government as it struggles to cling to cities in the west and south and carry out counterattacks to retake what was lost.
As Afghans brace themselves for what might come next — an attack on Kabul, the country’s capital, or more provincial hubs under siege — those stuck in the cities that fell in the last three days, among them Kunduz, Sheberghan, Sar-i-Pul, Zaranj and Taliqan, are contending with a new and brutal reality.
Those within Kunduz city, with a population of 374,000, and taken over twice by the insurgent group in 2015 and 2016, have entered a sort of purgatory. In the immediate future, they are contending with Taliban fighters on street corners, and the return of their hard-line Islamic rule.
Then there is the threat of errant shelling or airstrikes.
Given the strategic importance of the city, in the coming days, the government will almost certainly counterattack. The fighting is likely to be ferocious, and it will be taking place on the doorsteps of those residents still in the city. Innocent people will undoubtedly die in the crossfire; thousands of Afghans have already been wounded and killed since May, when the Taliban began their swift offensive.
In Kunduz on Sunday, shops were closed. Some had been set aflame. And public utilities such as electricity, cellphone service and running water were anything but certain. When the Taliban seize territory, they often destroy or disable cell towers to prevent government forces from communicating.
In some districts captured by the Taliban in recent months, the insurgents made an effort to keep civil servants employed and public utilities operational to maintain some form of continuity, however fierce their opposition to the Afghan government.
But in Kunduz city, what comes next is unclear. But any time a military force seizes territory, civilians ultimately pay the price.
Sayed Najib Hashimi, 41, a shopkeeper, said Sunday that there was no electricity in the city and that the insurgents had begun cutting holes in walls so they could move between homes without being seen from the air. Many residents, he said, had fled to Kabul, or were trying.
“When the Taliban entered the city, the Taliban treated the people well during the fighting,” Mr. Hashimi said. “But after the fall of the city, one of them slapped a young man face because he was smoking.”
With almost all U.S. forces out of Afghanistan, the Taliban mounted a summer-long military campaign that has forced widespread surrenders and retreats by Afghan government forces.
By late July, the Taliban had seized control of approximately half of the country’s roughly 400 districts. Government troops abandoned scores of outposts and bases, often leaving behind weapons and equipment. In many cases, they surrendered without a fight, sometimes after the intercession of village elders dispatched by the Taliban.
The Taliban military victories, especially in northern Afghanistan, where opposition to the militants has traditionally been strongest, provided a violent coda to the U.S. military mission in America’s longest war.
President Biden, declaring that the United States had long ago accomplished its mission of denying terrorists a safe haven in Afghanistan, said in April that all American troops would leave the country by Sept. 11. That date has since been moved up to Aug. 31, at which time the White House has said that all military operations against the Taliban will cease. Troops from NATO countries also have withdrawn.
Mr. Biden conceded that after nearly 20 years of war, America’s longest on foreign soil, it was clear that the U.S. military could not transform Afghanistan into a modern, stable democracy.
Mr. Biden’s decision to withdraw American troops followed a 2020 agreement signed between the Trump administration and the Taliban that called for all American forces to leave Afghanistan by May 1 of this year. In return, the Taliban pledged to cut ties with terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan, reduce violence and negotiate with the American-backed Afghan government.
The primary objectives of the 2020 deal were for Afghan leaders and the Taliban to negotiate a political road map for a new government and constitution, reduce violence and ultimately forge a lasting cease-fire.
But violence continued as the Taliban raced across Afghanistan, securing strategic victories and raising questions about the country’s short-lived experiment with democracy, gender equality and the rejection of extremism.
With the fate of Kunduz hanging in the balance on Sunday, Afghan security forces began a military operation to flush out Taliban fighters, officials said.
Lt. Col. Masoud Nijrabi, the commander of a commando battalion in Kunduz, had vowed earlier in the day that the push would begin by nightfall, saying, “We are going to start a clearing operation to recapture the provincial capital by this evening.”
The Taliban are already in control of the city proper, while government forces have regrouped at an airport to the south. So the battle to recapture Kunduz will be difficult and will come down to the efficacy of the government’s air and commando forces.
Since the Taliban’s nationwide offensive began in May, the commandos have served as the nation’s firefighters, sent to hot spots with hopes of turning the tide against the insurgent group.
In reality, what were once considered elite forces have transformed into foot soldiers who are some of the only troops capable of defending territory under attack by the Taliban.
The insurgent group, which has launched offensives on key cities in the north, west and south, has exhausted the commando forces by forcing them to deploy them constantly, along with the Afghan military’s small but competent air force.
Another factor is whether the United States commits bombers and drones to help the beleaguered Afghan forces. In recent weeks, the U.S. military has stepped up its muted air campaign in an effort to assist Afghan forces but has been limited by the amount of resources available.
With no American combat aircraft in the country, U.S. forces have to fly hundreds of miles from outside Afghanistan.
Trapped amid these escalating levels of violence — including government airstrikes, shelling and the Taliban fighting from people’s homes — are Afghan civilians. The war, which has moved from combat in more rural areas to populated cities, has resulted in a surge of civilian casualties.
The Taliban seized Kunduz on Sunday after two days of intense fighting in the city’s streets, and the siege offered a grim indication of the toll that the conflict is taking on civilians as the fighting reaches deeper into cities across Afghanistan.
Ahmad Shokur Ghaznawi, a Kunduz resident, said he had heard a barrage of gunfire throughout Saturday and into Sunday as government forces and Taliban fighters clashed in the alley just outside his home.
As the fighting intensified, about 50 members of the Afghan security forces gathered in the alley in an effort to repel the insurgents. But the government soldiers appeared worn down.
“They said that they were hungry — they had run out of bread,” Mr. Ghaznawi said, adding that the soldiers had retreated by Sunday morning.
On Sunday morning, Taliban fighters flooded into the streets of central Kunduz and raised their flag over its main square, a video recorded by a resident showed. Two of the city’s main markets, where shopkeepers sell fabrics and footwear, caught fire, sending dark plumes of smoke over the city.
At least 15 people were killed in the siege, and 86 people who were wounded arrived at the city’s regional hospital on Saturday and early Sunday, according to Dr. Naim Mangal, the head of the hospital.
Yet many others who were wounded could not make it to the hospital as fighting raged in the city’s streets. Two nurses and a man who was helping transport an injured resident were wounded on their way to the hospital, which was hit by four mortar shells on Saturday, Dr. Mangal said. By Sunday afternoon, only two doctors remained at the hospital after the rest of the staff fled.
Earlier this summer as Taliban fighters were stalking the streets of Kunduz, and with skirmishes breaking out, Times journalists went there to assess situation. Here is an excerpt from the report by Adam Nossiter and Najim Rahim.
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan — The Afghan way of war in 2021 comes down to this: a watermelon vendor on a sweltering city street, a government Humvee at the front line just 30 feet away, and Taliban fighters lurking unseen on the other side of the road.
When the shooting starts, the vendor makes himself scarce, leaving his melons on the table and hoping for the best. When it stops, selling resumes, to customers now all too rare.
“I don’t have a choice. I’ve got to sell the melons,” said the vendor, Abdel Alim, speaking to New York Times journalists while he kept an eye on a lane within Kunduz city from which he said Taliban had emerged. “Most people have left,” he said. “There is fighting all the time.”
The Taliban are pressing in on all sides of Kunduz. For weeks, the insurgents have captured vulnerable districts across the country’s north, sometimes without even firing a shot.
It is all part of a broader strategy to tighten the noose around the Afghan capital, Kabul. The insurgents are sewing up the Afghan countryside, cutting off the road network, and squeezing the increasingly enfeebled central government.
In late June, the Taliban entered Kunduz city, testing their limits against soldiers and police — the ones who haven’t given up — in the provincial capital’s streets. The Times journalists went there to assess the heavy toll the fighting is taking on a crucial city.
Civilians in the crossfire are paying the price. Dozens have been killed and injured; up to 70 a day are brought to the hospital, said Mohammed Naim Mangal, the director of Kunduz Regional Hospital. Just on Monday night, two young residents were killed in the cross fire near Mr. Alim’s watermelon stand.
The jagged front line of combat is often just a block or two away from wherever you happen to be, down quiet streets lined with dusty sycamore trees and low mud brick dwellings baking in the heat. The Taliban are inside the city and outside of it, keeping bedraggled soldiers and police awake all night. The sound of their mortar fire mingles with the call to prayer as the sun goes down.
As of mid-July, the Taliban are inside four out of this city’s nine municipal districts, battling for control with the government forces.
Much of the fighting happens at night when the fierce heat diminishes. During the day, the city center bustles with vendors, but there are few shoppers. There is risk here for seller and buyer. Closest to the front lines, the shops are shuttered, metal canopies drawn tightly down, glass windows blasted out.
“It’s permanent war,” said Mustafa Turkmen, a carpet seller. “No one can come here, and no one can leave. Every night when I wake up, I hear gunfire.” He comes to his shop nonetheless.
With the U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan nearly completed, the Taliban’s military campaign this summer has prompted widespread surrenders and retreats by Afghan government forces.
The military victories are providing a violent coda to the U.S. military mission in America’s longest war on foreign soil. How have the Taliban managed to hang on this long?
Weeks after Al Qaeda attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2011, President George W. Bush announced that American forces had launched attacks against the terrorist group and Taliban targets in Afghanistan.
Inside Afghanistan, American troops quickly toppled the Taliban government and crushed its fighting forces as 2001 drew to a close. And that December, the Taliban’s spokesman offered an unconditional surrender, which was rejected by the United States.
But in 2003, with 8,000 American troops still in Afghanistan, the United States began shifting combat resources to the war in Iraq. The Taliban slowly rebuilt their fighting capabilities, with support from the Pakistani military, despite a steady influx of American and NATO troops, who sought to win over Afghans with promises of new schools, government centers, roads and bridges.
By 2009, with the Taliban posing an enhanced military threat, President Barack Obama deployed thousands more troops to Afghanistan as part of a “surge,” reaching roughly 100,000 by mid-2010. But the Taliban only grew stronger, inflicting heavy casualties on Afghan security forces despite American combat power and airstrikes.
By this year, even before the White House’s announcement in April that U.S. forces would withdraw, the Taliban seemed emboldened, promoting a message that they had already won the war, while also showing little outward interest in compromise with the Afghan government, or of going along with the dominant American idea, power-sharing.
The Taliban’s rhetoric was propaganda, but the grim sense of Taliban supremacy has contributed to falling morale among the already-crippled Afghan security forces, which is further compounded by a lack of resources and the American departure.
Since the U.S. withdrawal began on May 1, the group has captured more than half of Afghanistan’s 400-odd districts in its ruthless land-grabbing offensive, according to some assessments. Districts were not always taken through sheer military force. Some fell because of poor governance, others because of rivalries between local strongmen and low morale among the security forces.
Simultaneously, the Taliban have been trying to rebrand themselves as capable governors and a better alternative to the U.S.-backed Afghan government. The combination is a stark signal that the insurgents fully intend to try for all-out dominance of Afghanistan once the American pullout is finished.
A classified intelligence assessment presented to the Biden administration this spring said that Afghanistan could fall largely under Taliban control within two to three years after the departure of international forces.
The threat assessment concluded: “The Taliban is likely to make gains on the battlefield, and the Afghan government will struggle to hold the Taliban at bay if the coalition withdraws support.”
President Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan this summer has prompted deep fears about the Afghan security forces’ ability to defend what territory remains under government control.
For nearly two decades, the United States and NATO have engaged in the nation-building pursuit of training, expanding and equipping Afghanistan’s police, army and air forces, spending tens of billions of dollars in an attempt to build government security forces that can safeguard their own country.
But interviews in April with two dozen security and government officials, military and police officers and militia commanders across the country described a bleak result: Despite this enormous effort, the undertaking has produced only a troubled set of forces that are woefully unprepared for facing the Taliban, or any other threat, on their own.
In the months that followed, it became apparent that the Afghan forces deployed across the country could not stop the Taliban offensive that took roughly half of Afghanistan’s 400-odd districts as it swept across the country this summer.
In the last few days alone, the insurgents have seized four of the country’s 34 provincial capitals: Zaranj, Sheberghan, Sar-e-Pul and Kunduz.
It is easy to portray the Afghan military and police as corrupt, predatory and ineffective, as they at times are. But those same forces have suffered terribly, far more than Westerners, in what often feels like a losing war of attrition.
Numerous outposts and bases have been surrendered after negotiations between the Taliban and government forces, according to village elders and government officials. With morale diving as American troops leave, and the Taliban seizing on each surrender as a propaganda victory, each collapse feeds the next in the Afghan countryside.
The Taliban have negotiated Afghan troop surrenders in the past, but never at the scale and pace of the base collapses in recent months. The tactic has removed hundreds of government forces from the battlefield, secured strategic territory and reaped weapons, ammunition and vehicles for the Taliban — often without firing a shot.
As districts in the countryside collapse, the Taliban have begun to encroach on major cities like Herat in the west and Kandahar in the south. This multipronged attack has exhausted the Afghan commandos and air force, the two most viable units in the Afghan military, as they struggle to counter the insurgents in almost every part of the country.
The United States, despite pledging to end military operations by Aug. 31, has committed more aircraft and drones — now based outside the country — to help beat back the Taliban through airstrikes. The last-ditch effort to prop up the Afghan security forces helped in some areas, but still provincial capitals fell.
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