Two of India's most powerful regional strongmen fled in the northern city of Mazar-i - Sharif to the Taliban and security forces abandoned the city in a headlong rush up the highway to the safety of neighboring Uzbekistan on Saturday.
Atta Mohammad Noor, the former governor of Balkh province and ethnic Uzbek leader Abdul Rashid Dostum have been involved in the conflict in Afghanistan since the days of the Soviet invasion. He was among Taliban's fiercest enemies.
Noor, commanding local militia forces when Mazar-i - Sharif fell to the Taliban, said both he and Dostum were safe and blamed the fall of the city on a conspiracy.
Afghan security forces entered the city practically unopposed as security forces escaped the highway to Uzbekistan, provincial officials said. Unverified pictures on social media showed Afghan Army vehicles and men in uniforms crowding the iron bridge at the Hairatan crossing.
Despite our firm resistance, all the government and the ANDSF-equipments were handed over to the Taliban as a result of a big organised cowardly plot, Noor wrote on Twitter. They orchestrated the plot to trap Marshal Dostum and me too, but they didn't succeed.
The flight of Noor and Dostum underlines the collapse not only of the dominant government in Kabul as the insurgents have swept forward, but also of a generation of powerful regional leaders from the anti-Soviet Mujahideen who fought the Taliban.
Earlier in the week, Ismail Khan, one of the leaders of the original uprising that triggered the 1979 Soviet invasion, was captured by the Taliban in the western city of Herat and photographed surrounded by grinning insurgent fighters.
The importance of such leaders, often described as warlords, stemmed not from any personal position in government but from their administrative authority and regional power base and clashed with President Ashraf Ghani.
For years, they were accused of corruption and human rights abuses, with Dostum forced to spend a period in exile as recently as 2018 over allegations that he ordered a political opponent to be sexually assaulted.
Noor, considered one of the richest men in Afghanistan, faced repeated accusations of corruption, which he denied.
However as the Taliban crumbled in the face of U.S. forces after the withdrawal of militias, they returned to the front lines in the hopes that their local power base would provide more effective resistance.
Our paths won't end here, Noor wrote.