Taliban Seize Kandahar, Prepare to March on Kabul

The U.S. has already launched the drawdown of its large embassy in Kabul, sending troops to evacuate most of the staff as its cuts the diplomatic presence to an essential core. Other Western embassies are readying similar plans, fearing that the Taliban could lay siege to the Afghan capital within days.

Commercial flights from Kabul were booked solid, with expatriates and Afghans holding visas for foreign countries attempting to leave. Tens of thousands of people escaping the Taliban’s advances in the provinces, meanwhile, flocked into the Afghan capital, sleeping in city parks and mosques.

“The Taliban don’t care about people, they just like war, and now you see the city filling up with displaced people,” said Yama Rashid, a 29-year-old seller of mobile-phone cards. “They say that the U.S. is going to help people who worked for them. But what about the rest of us? Should we just burn?”

Kandahar, where Taliban founder Mullah Omar donned the cloak of Prophet Muhammad and proclaimed himself the commander of the faithful in 1996, holds an enormous significance for the insurgent group. It is also a major economic center, with over 600,000 residents. Kandahar and nearby Helmand were the main focus of the U.S. military surge in 2010-14, accounting for a large part of the 2,450 American military deaths in the country.

“The capture of Kandahar is by far the most significant victory for the Taliban,” said Ibrahim Bahiss, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, saying that in the minds of the insurgents it symbolizes the return of the Islamic Emirate that was proclaimed by Mullah Omar.

Pashtana Durrani, a female university student who runs an education organization, said she had to leave all her possessions behind as she escaped Kandahar on Friday. “The city was taken with no resistance. There was celebratory fire, and people are also so scared,” she said. “We’ve left behind all the books that my father and grandfather had given me, every memory, and we’ve had to burn all our pictures.”

On Friday, the Taliban entered Pul-e-Alam, the capital of Logar province just south of Kabul, and seized the capitals of Ghor in the center and of Uruzgan in the south. The only big cities that the Afghan government still holds besides Kabul are Jalalabad in the country’s east and the northern hub of Mazar-e-Sharif, which is surrounded by the Taliban.

Some of the provinces that fell to the Taliban over the past week were surrendered in negotiated deals, as happened Thursday in Ghazni, whose governor was subsequently arrested by Kabul. In Herat, however, commando troops and a militia led by warlord Ismail Khan put up stiff resistance. That resistance collapsed Thursday night, and Mr. Khan and the province’s top security officials were captured by the insurgents.

Photos released by the Taliban on social media showed Mr. Khan—a checkered turban above his gray beard, an ammunition rack on his chest—sitting on a blue plastic chair, with Hesco barriers usually used to secure military bases in the background. The Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, said in a statement that Mr. Khan, thousands of his men, the governor of Herat and other senior officials had switched sides and joined the Taliban.

In a short video interview released on social media, a dazzled Mr. Khan said that he wasn’t prepared for the city’s sudden collapse. He said that his message to government forces was that “we have to finish this war and have a peaceful life.”

The Taliban launched their offensive soon after President Biden announced in April that all U.S. forces would leave Afghanistan by Sept. 11. Though some American troops still remain in the country and the U.S. Air Force conducts airstrikes, the Taliban have been able to overwhelm Afghan security forces with a speed that stunned Afghan and Western officials alike.

—Ehsanullah Amiri, Saeed Shah and Alan Cullison contributed to this article.

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com