Afghanistan: Kandahar airport damaged by rocket fire

Members of the Afghan special forces after fighting with the Taliban in Kandahar, July 13, 2021. REUTERS - DANISH SIDDIQUI

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3 min

One month before the total withdrawal of foreign troops, the Taliban are continuing their offensive against the Afghan security forces who are struggling to repel them.

Three provincial capitals are directly threatened by religious fundamentalists.

As the fighting continues in the suburbs of Herat, the large city in the west of the country, in southern Afghanistan Lashkar Gah and Kandahar are surrounded. 

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The runway at Kandahar airport was damaged overnight from Saturday to Sunday by rockets.

All flights to or from Afghanistan's second largest city with 650,000 inhabitants are canceled.

The Kandahar airport compound and its only runway house a military air base, essential for supplying Afghan forces.

The airport is located in the suburbs of the provincial capital where fighting has been raging for several weeks, reports our correspondent in Kabul, 

Sonia Ghezali

. The people of Kandahar City, the birthplace of the Taliban movement, hear the gunfire exchanged every day by Taliban fighters and Afghan security forces.

Over the

past three months,

the Taliban have seized large

rural areas of the country, in an all-out offensive launched in favor of the final withdrawal of international forces from the country, now almost completed.

The Afghan forces, which have so far offered little resistance, essentially control only the main roads and the provincial capitals, some of which are surrounded.

Three encircled provincial capitals

The fall of Kandahar, which the Taliban had made the epicenter of their regime when they ruled Afghanistan (1996-2001), imposing their ultrarigorist version of Islamic law, would be a disaster for the Afghan authorities and for the morale of their people. forces, already seriously undercut.

And it would reinforce the already big questions about the capacity of the Afghan army to prevent the Taliban from seizing power by force in Afghanistan.

In neighboring Helmand province, the Taliban are also at the gates of the provincial capital Lashkar Gah, tightening their grip on the Afghan security forces who are struggling to contain their advance.

In the northwest, in Herat, near the border with Iran, commercial flights have also been suspended

as fighting rages all around

.

Hundreds of families have found refuge in the provincial capital.

Self-defense militias support the Afghan army on the front line.

A disillusioned part of the population expects every day to see the Taliban seize the city as they seized a few weeks ago of Islam Qala, the border post with Iran.

Nothing seems to be able to stop their advance a month before the total withdrawal of foreign troops.

►Also listen: In Afghanistan, popular mobilization against the Taliban

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