Witnesses and the Taliban say they have seized Afghanistan’s third-largest city, Herat.
The seizure happened on Thursday night, putting the insurgents in control of 11 of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals.
Witnesses told The Associated Press that sporadic gunfire still echoed near one government building in the city. Otherwise, the insurgents held the rest of the city after its defensive lines collapsed in the afternoon.
The Afghan government and security forces did not immediately acknowledge Herat’s fall.
Earlier on Thursday the Taliban captured Ghazni, a strategic provincial capital near Kabul, in a weeklong sweep across Afghanistan just weeks before the end of the American military mission there.
Seizing Ghazni cuts off a crucial highway linking the Afghan capital with the country’s southern provinces, which similarly find themselves under assault as part of an insurgent push some 20 years after US and Nato troops invaded and ousted the Taliban government.
While Kabul itself is not directly under threat, the loss of Ghazni tightens the grip of a resurgent Taliban estimated to now hold some two-thirds of the nation, and thousands of people have fled their homes.
The latest US military intelligence assessment suggests Kabul could come under insurgent pressure within 30 days and that, if current trends hold, the Taliban could gain full control of the country within a few months.
The Afghan government may eventually be forced to pull back to defend the capital and just a few other cities.
The Taliban also captured a police headquarters in a provincial capital in southern Afghanistan teetering toward being lost to the insurgents as suspected US airstrikes pounded the area, an official said.
Fighting raged in Lashkar Gah, one of Afghanistan’s largest cities in the Taliban heartland of Helmand province, where surrounded government forces hoped to hold on to the capital after the militants’ week-long blitz in which they have already seized nine others around the country.
Afghan security forces and the government have not responded to repeated requests for comment over the days of fighting.
However, President Ashraf Ghani is trying to rally a counter-offensive relying on his country’s special forces, the militias of warlords and American air power ahead of the US and Nato withdrawal at the end of the month.
