"President isolated"- 65 % controlled by Taliban
Mohammad Jan Rasoulyar is the deputy governor of Helmland province in Afghanistan.
In an open Facebook post, this brave patriot has now made a desperate plea to President Ashraf Ghani in Kabul, warning about the dire situation in the south of the country.
In just the past two days, Mr Rasoulyar informed him, 90 soldiers had been killed there.
He blamed Mr Ghani’s entourage for not telling the President that the entire province could indeed fall to the Taliban:
“Helmand will collapse to the enemies and it’s not like Kunduz, where we could launch an operation from the airport to retake it. That is just impossible and a dream” (…) “Be quick and act on this! Protect Helmand from this life and death situation and distance yourself from the circle of those lawyers who tell you everything is OK and the situation is normal.”
The fact that he had to address openly the President via Facebook reveals that internal communications are not working properly in Afghanistan, and Mr Rasoulyar admitted as much.
He says the president is surrounded by advisors who have isolated him from the realities of the conflict and he needed to find a way to break through to him.
Mohammad Jan Rasulyar, informed that the city of Sangin had been overrun by the Taliban late on Sunday:
“The Taliban have captured the police headquarters, the governor’s office as well as the intelligence agency building in Sangin. Fighting is escalating in the district.”
In the east, a Taliban attack near Bagram killed six American soldiers.
The head of Helmand’s provincial council, Muhammad Kareem Atal, said that 65 percent of Helmand is now controlled by the Taliban.
Helmand (hel-mund; Pashto/Dari: هلمند) is one of the 34 provinces of Afghanistan, covering 58,584 square kilometres (20,000 sq mi) area. The province contains 13 districts, encompassing over 1,000 villages, and roughly 879,500 settled people. Lashkar Gah is the provincial capital.
Helmand is part of the Greater Kandahar region, traditional with strong influence by the Taliban. Until 2014 the British Camp Bastion and U.S. Camp Leatherneck were located near Lashkar Gah
While our Globalo view is more positive and the Afghan Army has been successful overall in keeping the Taliban at bay, it is lacking resources and struggles to fight a war that is increasingly flaring up at multiple fronts within the large country.