The former Afghan president, who fled the country and deserted his people when the Taliban marched into Kabul, said he made a run for it to “keep the guns silent”, according to The New York Post.
Ashraf Ghani said he decided to leave at the urging of palace security officials who feared his presence could spark “horrific street-to-street fighting” like Kabul saw during the civil war in the 1990s.
“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,” Ghani, who had been Afghanistan’s president since 2014, wrote on Twitter on Wednesday.
He fled to the United Arab Emirates on Aug. 15 as Taliban fighters toppled the government and took over the Presidential Palace — where they posed for photos, marking the extremist group’s lightning-fast takeover in the wake of President Biden’s hasty withdrawal of US troops.
The Biden administration was also forced to deploy additional forces to evacuate US citizens from the Kabul airport.
Amid the disorder, an ISIS-K terrorist detonated a suicide bomb, killing 13 American military members and scores of Afghans, including women and children.
Ghani later apologized for leaving the Afghan people.
”It is with a deep and profound regret that my own chapter ended in a similar tragedy to my predecessors — without ensuring stability and prosperity,” he said. “I apologize to the Afghan people that I could not make it end differently.”
In the tweet, written in English, Ghani said the time will come to parse his actions of that day.
“Now is not the moment for a long assessment of the events leading to my departure,” he said, adding, “I will address them in the near future.”
The Daily Wyvern 