Former Afghanistan president Ashraf Ghani on Wednesday said that he was in talks with the Taliban to return home. Ghani made his first public appearance on Wednesday, days after he fled Kabul. He had left Kabul on Sunday after the Taliban encircled Kabul and sought to take control of the government. Ghani’s departure resulted in Taliban completely taking over the government. In a recorded video message on Wednesday, Ghani said that he had no intention of remaining in exile.

“For now, I am in the Emirates so that bloodshed and chaos is stopped,” Ghani said in the video. The United Arab Emirates acknowledged Wednesday that the Gulf nation had taken him and his family in on humanitarian grounds.

He also said that he had left the country to avoid more bloodshed. “Do not believe whoever tells you that your president sold you out and fled for his own advantage and to save his own life. These accusations are baseless… and I strongly reject them.”

“I was expelled from Afghanistan in such a way that I didn’t even get the chance to take my slippers off my feet and pull on my boots,” he said.

The clarification came amid reports that Ghani has transferred large sums of money out of the country. Denying the allegations, Ghani said that he had arrived in the UAE empty-handed.

In an early sign of protest to the Taliban’s rule, dozens gathered in the eastern city of Jalalabad and a nearby market town to raise the tricolor national flag, a day before Afghanistan’s Independence Day, which commemorates the 1919 treaty that ended British rule. They lowered the Taliban flag — a white banner with an Islamic inscription — that the militants have raised in the areas they captured.

Video footage later showed the Taliban firing into the air and attacking people with batons to disperse the crowd. Babrak Amirzada, a reporter for a local news agency, said the Taliban beat him and a TV cameraman from another agency.