Former Afghan President Ghani Says He Was the Last Person Fleeing the Country

Mohammad Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, the former president of Afghanistan, claimed that he was the last person to leave the country in his first in-person interview a year after fleeing Kabul.

In an interview with the recently established media outlet ABN, former president Ghani, who had been living in exile for a year, claimed that “according to the constitution, I was the president. Until the people of Afghanistan legally hand over the power to someone else, I am the president.”

He said that he was the last person to leave the country because over half of the cabinet, including the defense minister and other top government officials, had already fled the country before the Taliban entered Kabul.

Then-President Ghani of Afghanistan claimed he left the nation out of concern for his safety in order to prevent a repeat of history’s painful experience.

Mohammad Najibullah, Afghanistan’s president, was detained and executed by the Taliban after seizing control of Kabul in 1996.

The former Afghan commander in chief responded that Bismillah Khan Muhammadi, the country’s defense minister, had already left Afghanistan by plane and that no one else was present in the ministry when pressed to explain his claim of being the last to leave.

On the morning of the collapse, the US embassy in Afghanistan burned its documents before leaving for the airport for evacuation, he further stated.

He stated that the US embassy evacuated thousands of Afghan combat forces at a time when Afghanistan most needed them, including important special corps members of the National Directorate of Security (NDS).

Ghani doubted the US’s motives, saying that if they backed the republic government, they should not have evacuated the Afghan forces.

Ghani stated that “the key point was whether we surrender the republic by force?” in regard to the process of Kabul’s fall, justifying his position for fleeing Kabul without legitimizing a bloody coup.

When questioned about his strategy of sharing power with the Taliban, the former leader responded that this was not feasible because the Taliban had already rejected the Istanbul proposal, which called for a power-sharing arrangement between the Taliban and the republic government.

The interview comes at a time when the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) final report came to the conclusion that the accusations against the Afghan president were unfounded.

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