Ashraf Ghani said ‘will fight to death’ and fled next day: Blinken

Putting to rest all speculation, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said America did not help former President of Afghanistan Ashraf Ghani flee on August 15 as Taliban fighters stormed Kabul. Blinken said that Ghani had told him the day before fleeing that he would ‘fight to the death.’

Speaking to TOLOnews on Wednesday, Antony Blinken said, “No, I was on the phone with Afghanistan President Ghani the night before he fled the country. In our conversation … we were talking about work that was being done in Doha, on the transfer of power, and in the absence of that succeeding, what he told me in the conversation the night before he fled is that he was prepared to fight to the death and in less than 24 hours he left Afghanistan.”

Also read | Leaving Afghanistan was the only way to keep guns silent: Ashraf Ghani

 Speaking about another allegation against Ghani, that he fled with millions of dollars, the top US diplomat said, “That I don’t know. What I do know, is that he left the country and again in very short period of time the security forces and its institutions collapsed and so did the government.”

Ghani also took to Twitter on Wednesday to address this concern. Offering his and his wife’s accounts for UN scrutiny, Ghani said, “My wife and I have been scrupulous in our personal finances.” Ghani.

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Ashraf Ghani, who was president between September 2014 and August 2021 added that it was never his intent to abandon the people. “Leaving Kabul was the most difficult decision of my life, but I believed it was the only way to keep the guns silent and save Kabul and her 6 million citizens.” he said in his Twitter post.

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Ghani, who fled to the UAE before the Taliban seized power last month, apologised to the people for leaving the country abruptly. “I owe the Afghan people an explanation for leaving Kabul abruptly on August 15 after the Taliban unexpectedly entered the city. I left at the urging of the palace security who advised me that to remain at risk of setting off the same horrific street-to-street fighting the city had suffered during the Civil War of the 1990s,” Ghani said.