Afghanistan spiraling rapidly toward humanitarian disaster as Taliban advances

Afghanistan is spiraling rapidly toward a humanitarian catastrophe, international officials say, as tens of thousands of people flee their homes amid the swift advance of Taliban insurgents across the country.

Taliban militants overran three key cities on Friday, inching the country closer to collapse in the final days of the U.S. withdrawal. Insurgents launched a multi-pronged assault early Saturday on Mazar-e Sharif, a major city in the north, and seized a province just south of the country’s capital, Afghan officials told the Associated Press. The Taliban’s advance, staggering in speed and scale, leaves the insurgents holding half of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals and controlling large parts of the country. More than a dozen major cities fell to the Taliban in the past week.

Civilian casualties are mounting and hospitals are overflowing, according to the United Nations. Food and medical supplies are dwindling. Roads and other critical infrastructure are being destroyed. Fears are growing that an assault on the capital Kabul is imminent as militants close in on the city.

“Afghanistan is spinning out of control,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres told reporters in New York on Friday, as he called on all sides to do more to protect civilians. “This is the moment to halt the offensive. This is the moment to start serious negotiation. This is the moment to avoid a prolonged civil war, or the isolation of Afghanistan.”

As the fighting intensifies, the United States and its allies are racing to extract embassy staff and local Afghans who have assisted the U.S.-led coalition during their 20-year mission. The first of some 3,000 combat troops being deployed to Kabul to assist with the evacuations arrived Saturday, Reuters reported. The Pentagon has said two battalions of Marines and one Army combat unit already deployed in the region will arrive in Kabul by Sunday evening.

About 1,200 Afghans have been transported to the United States in recent days, and the Biden administration has committed to temporarily relocating another 4,000 applicants and their families to other countries while their immigration paperwork is finalized.

Canadian officials on Friday committed to bringing 20,000 refugees to the country, focusing on those most in danger, including women leaders, human-rights advocates, journalists, LGBTQ individuals, persecuted religious groups and families of interpreters already resettled in Canada. No timeline was given for the resettlements.

Those official rescue efforts account for only a fraction of Afghans displaced by the conflict. A quarter-million people have fled their homes since May, the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR said Friday. Of those, most â€" 80 percent â€" are women and children. Some 400,000 people have been displaced since the start of the year.

“The situation has all the hallmarks of a humanitarian catastrophe,” Tomson Phiri, a spokesman for the United Nations World Food Program, said in a statement Friday, noting that the conflict has accelerated “much faster than we all anticipated.”

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said on Twitter Saturday it had assisted 13,500 people with food, cash, health and household items as many "flee to Kabul to escape fighting across Afghanistan.”

In Kabul, some observers described scenes reminiscent of the mid-'90s â€" with families selling everything and doing whatever they could to flee the country. Many fear a return to the repressive and brutal rule the Taliban inflicted when it was last in power, rooted in an extreme interpretation of Islamic law. Civilians are already reporting shuttered girls’ schools, poor families forced to cook food for ravenous fighters and young men pressured to join the ranks of the militants.

UNHCR on Friday appealed to neighboring countries to “keep their borders open” or risk “innumerable civilian lives.” In the past month alone, more than a thousand people have been killed or injured from indiscriminate attacks against civilians, notably in Helmand, Kandahar and Herat provinces, according to the United Nations.

Rory Stewart, a former international development secretary in the British government who has criticized the decisions by the United States and United Kingdom to withdraw troops, warned that millions of Afghans could become refugees.

“This is going to feel like Iraq and Syria,” he told Sky News. “This is going to be a barely governed space, teetering on the edge of civil war and run by an extreme Islamist group.”

The recent Taliban advances, largely achieved with little resistance from Afghan government forces despite years of U.S. training and support, are isolating the Afghan capital with stunning speed, increasingly weakening the administration of President Ashraf Ghani. A new U.S. intelligence assessment has indicated Kabul could be overrun within 30 to 90 days.

In the western city of Herat, an entire Afghan army corps crumbled, with hundreds of troops handing over their weapons to the Taliban and others fleeing, according to local officials. The surrender deal was brokered, they said, by a group of Taliban leaders who met with Afghan government and security forces at the military base where they were holed up after the city was overrun Thursday.

In the southern province of Helmand, where U.S. and British Marines sustained heavy casualties in a fraught, years-long fight to repel the Taliban and shore up the local government, hundreds of Afghan forces surrendered and ceded control of the capital, Lashkar Gah, according to Mirwais Khadem, a parliament member.

And in Kandahar, Afghanistan’s second-largest city, government control has shrunk to the local airport and adjoining military base. Sayed Ahmad Seylab, a provincial council member, said Afghan forces and officials retreated from the main government compound to “avoid civilian casualties and the destruction of Kandahar city.”

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on Friday called for a political solution to the conflict, saying that NATO allies are “deeply concerned about the high levels of violence caused by the Taliban’s offensive, including attacks on civilians, targeted killings, and reports of other serious human rights abuses.”

“The Taliban need to understand that they will not be recognized by the international community if they take the country by force,” Stoltenberg said.

Pannett reported from Sydney. George and Mehrdad reported from Kabul.

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