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Tomas Avenarius and Tobias Matern
So now Kandahar too. The city is the breeding ground of the Taliban; this is where the Islamists first appeared in 1994; this is where their unofficial power center for the crude Islamic regime they maintained from 1996 to 2001 was. And now, 20 years later, the former Koran students have taken this very Kandahar again. Like dominoes, the provinces and their capitals have fallen into the hands of the Taliban in the last few days: Herat in the west, Kunduz in the former deployment area of the Bundeswehr in the north, Ghazni in central Afghanistan. And Kandahar, the country’s second largest city in the south.