In Taliban’s 7-day march to power, a stunning string of wins

By MATT SEDENSKY
AP National Writer

Just a week before Afghanistan’s collapse, things looked staggeringly different, but even for a country scarred by generations of war, the weeklong string of victories by the Taliban stood out as a remarkable turn of events. A stunning rout, in just days, seemed to declare two decades of American occupation a failure. After years clawing back to power by slowly retaking rural areas of the country, the Taliban sealed its success with a climactic week in which, one after another, the country’s major cities fell in succession, with a new era ushered in Sunday as the militants overtook Kabul and the president fled.