Former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani has apologised to the people of Afghanistan for fleeing the country as the Taliban approached the capital, but said he did so to ‘save Kabul and her six million citizens’.
In a statement shared on Twitter, Ghani said: ‘I left at the urging of the palace security, who advised me that to stay risked setting off the same street-to-street fighting the city had suffered during the civil war of the 1990s.’
Ghani abruptly left Afghanistan as Taliban militants advanced on the capital on 15 August, and took refuge in the United Arab Emirates.
He said that ‘(leaving) Kabul was the most difficult decision of my life’.
The BBC reports that Ghani denied the ‘baseless’ allegations that he had travelled to the UAE with about $169m.
The 72-year-old Ghani said that, having devoted 20 years to helping Afghanistan become a ‘democratic, prosperous and sovereign state’, it was a ‘deep and profound regret that my own chapter ended in similar tragedy to my predecessors’.