(ETH) – The Taliban were in control of six Afghan provincial capitals on Tuesday after a blitz across the north that forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes for the relative safety of Kabul and other centers according to Arab News.
The insurgents now have their eyes on Mazar-i-Sharif, the biggest city in the north, whose fall would signal the total collapse of government control in a region that has traditionally been anti-Taliban. Government forces are also battling the hard-line Islamists in Kandahar and Helmand, the southern Pashto-speaking provinces from where the Taliban draw their strength.
The United States — due to complete a troop withdrawal at the end of the month and end its longest war — has all but left the battlefield. However, its special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad has been sent to Qatar to try and convince the Taliban to accept a cease-fire.
According to CNN, US officials are no longer talking about six months as the likely timeline for the government of Afghanistan to collapse; they now believe it could happen much more quickly, the two sources said. The US military began withdrawing from the country earlier this year and has completed more than 95% of the US troop withdrawal, which will be completed by late August.
Right now, the State Department is working to identify essential personnel in the embassy and it is likely that some kind of partial drawdown of personnel occurs in the coming days or weeks, the sources said.
The embassy already reduced the number of diplomats in Kabul earlier this year where hundreds serve and has slowly continued to cut back on the overall footprint in recent months. A partial drawdown would be a continuation of efforts to shrink the overall US footprint due to the security situation.
