KABUL, Sept 6 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Taliban fighters have advanced deep into Afghanistan’s holdout Panjshir Valley, with resistance fighters saying they are keeping the Islamists at bay.
Italian aid agency Emergency, which runs a hospital in Panjshir, said Taliban forces had reached the village of Anabah, where they run a surgical centre.
“Many people have fled from local villages in recent days,” Emergency said in a statement, adding it was continuing to provide medical services.
“There has so far been no interference with Emergency’s activities,” it said, adding “We have received a small number of wounded people at the Anabah Surgical Centre.”
Anabah lies some 25 kilometres north inside the 115-km-long valley, but unconfirmed reports suggested the Taliban had seized other areas too.
Both sides claim to have inflicted heavy losses on each other.
Fighters in Panjshir held out for a decade against the Soviet military and also the Taliban’s first regime from 1996-2001.
Ali Maisam Nazary — who is not in Panjshir but remains a spokesman for the resistance — boasted Sunday that the resistance “will never fail”.
But former vice-president Amrullah Saleh, who is holed out in Panjshir alongside Ahmad Massoud — the son of legendary anti-Taliban commander Ahmad Shah Massoud — warned of a grim situation.
Saleh in a statement spoke of a “large-scale humanitarian crisis”, with thousands “displaced by the Taliban onslaught”.
Pro-Taliban social media have boasted of capturing swathes of the valley.
The Panjshir Valley, surrounded by jagged snow-capped peaks, offers a natural defensive advantage, with fighters melting away in the face of advancing forces, then launching ambushes firing from the high tops down into
the valley. — NNN-AGENCIES
