Three rockets hit the night of Saturday to Sunday, August 1, the airport in Kandahar, a large city in southern Afghanistan, in the suburbs of which the Taliban and Afghan forces have been clashing for several weeks, officials told AFP.
"
Two of the rockets damaged the runway (...) for this reason all flights to and to the airport were canceled,
" said Kandahar airport boss Massoud Pashtun, confirmed by a responsible for civil aviation in Kabul.
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The Taliban, which has been leading an all-out offensive across Afghanistan for three months, has moved closer in recent weeks to Kandahar, the cradle of their movement, reaching the limits of the second largest city in the country in terms of population (650,000 inhabitants).
Thanks to this offensive launched at the same time as the start of the final withdrawal of international troops from the country, now almost complete, the Taliban seized large rural portions of the territory.
But the Taliban have now seriously threatened several regional capitals in recent days: in addition to Kandahar, they have also moved closer to Herat, a large city in the west of the country, the third most populous in the country (600,000 inhabitants), and Lashkar Gah, capital of the province of Helmand (South), neighboring that of Kandahar.
The fall of Kandahar, which the Taliban had made the epicenter of their regime when they ruled Afghanistan (1996-2001), imposing their ultrarigorist version of Islamic law, would be a disaster for the Afghan authorities.
The Afghan forces, which have so far offered little resistance to the advance of the Taliban, essentially control only the main major axes and the provincial capitals.