Afghan local police sit at the back of a truck near a frontline during a battle with the Taliban at Qalay-i-zal district, in Kunduz province, Afghanistan August 1, 2015.
The Taliban are suddenly in the headlines again, specifically in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz. Taliban insurgents on Monday overran Kunduz and have taken up positions across the city.
“Hundreds of Taliban militants, backed by regional insurgency groups, made their way into Kunduz and captured the city and are actually ruling the city at the moment,” says Harun Najafizada, a Kabul-based BBC reporter.
Afghan government troops have launched a counter-offensive, backed by American air support. They've attacked from different directions to attempt to take back the city. It appears the Afghan troops have recaptured control of the police headquarters, the prison and a residential area. Numbers of casualties are hard to come by, but “the situation is pretty tense at the moment,” says Najafizada.
Kunduz is a strategically important city — to the government and to the Taliban. ”For the Taliban … they have failed to capture the center of a district for the past 14 years, so the capture of Kunduz would mean a symbolic victory. Second, Kunduz connects several provinces of northeast Afghainstan, so establishing a footprint in Kunduz would mean effectively you would be able to bring other provinces such as Baghlan, Takhar and Samangan under attack.”
The success of the government’s ongoing counter-offensive is far from a forgone conclusion, says Najafizada. “If they do not free Kunduz from the Taliban in a day or two, it will be too late because in that case the Taliban will strengthen their positions and move into residential areas. In that sort of scenario, it will be hard for the Afghan government troops to push them back from those areas."
Michael Kugelman, senior associate for South Asia at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, agrees the Taliban takeover of Kunduz is "a big deal."
“It [has] essentially done something that few if any terror groups other than ISIS have done in recent years,” he says. And they've done it in an area far from their traditional strongholds, in the south and east of Afghanistan.
Kugelman says this is a major blow to the morale of the Afghan security forces. Clearly, he adds, the Kunduz takeover was in the works for quite some time.
“This wasn’t a total surprise,” he explains. “Really, since 2013, the Taliban and affiliated militants have been trying to build a presence in the northern regions.”
Making matters worse was the weaknesses in the Afghan forces. Kugelman says there's rampant drug abuse in the ranks as well as illiteracy and large desertion rates. As a result, he says, Afghan forces could not fight this insurgency on their own.
This is a wake-up call, both for the Afghans and the US.
“This Kunduz takeover will show that you can’t forget about the Taliban,” Kugelman says. “At the end of the day, it is the Taliban that remains the biggest bully on the block […] in terms of the militant group that still holds the most sway in Afghanistan.”