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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-49192495, retrieved on September 5, 2021

https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/war-afghanistan, retrieved on September 5, 2021

https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/16/middleeast/taliban-control-afghanistan-explained-intl-hnk/index.html, retrieved on September 5, 2021

https://www.itv.com/news/2021-08-11/talibans-advance-in-afghanistan-how-has-it-happened-so-fast, retrieved on September 5, 2021

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April 2021: Joe Biden announced that US military forces would leave Afghanistan by September 2021

Taliban continued to capture and contest territory across the country even though there were ongoing peace talks with the Afghan government

May: withdrawal of the US military groups is accelerated

June 7: more than 150 Afghan soldiers are killed in less than 24 hours as the government begins to lose ground

June 22, the fighting spreads to the north, away from the Taliban's traditional strongholds in the south of the country and they seize several districts

End of July: US had completed 95 percent of its withdrawal, leaving just 650 troops in Kabul

August 6, a new rapid offensive by the Taliban begins and they claim their first provincial capital, Zaranj, in the south of the country

August 8, the Taliban seize control of three more provincial capitals in the north, Sar-e-Pul, Taloqan and the large and strategically important city of Kunduz

August 12, Afghanistan's second and third largest cities, Kandahar and Herat, were captured

August 15, The insurgents entered the presidential palace in the capital of Kabul and said they would soon declare the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. President Ashraf Ghani left the country

—> The speed of the Taliban‘s territorial gains and collapse of both the ANDSF and Afghan government surprised the US officials and allies

—> Biden administration authorized the deployment of an additional six thousand troops to assist with the evacuation of US and allied personnel, as well as thousands of Afghans who worked with the US and were attempting to flee

—> The speed of the Afghan government’s collapse threatens a mass of refugees from Afghanistan and has exacerbated an already dire humanitarian crisis

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Women protest in Afghanistan for female representation in Taliban’s new cabinet

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another key player

Taliban co-founder

released in 2018 after being captured in 2010 in Karachi

heads the group‘s political committee

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was named as the Taliban‘s leader in 2016 after the group‘s previous  leader Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour was killed in an US airstrike in Pakistan

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formed in 1994 made up of former Afghan resistance fighters

aimed to impose their interpretation of islamic law on the country and remove any foreign influence

they refer to themselves as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and are a religious-political movement and military organization in Afghanistan

the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996 and put in place strickt rules: women had to wear head-to-toe coverings, weren‘t allwowed to study or work, were forbidden from traveling alone, TV, music and non-islamic holidays were banned

on september 11, 2001 19 men hijacked four commercial planes in the US, crashing into the World Trade Center towers, one into the Pentagon and another, destined for Washington , into a field in Pennsylvania

–> more than 2700 people were killed

–>attack was organized by al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden,   who operated from the inside of Taliban- controlled Afghanistan

–> less than a month after the attack US and allied forbes invaded Afghanistan to stop the Taliban and to stop al Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a base of operations for terrorist activities

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Introduction: The situation - An overview

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Introduction: The situation - An overview

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CNN’s Clarissa Ward Reports on Taliban Takeover from Kabul