Afghan Air Force plane crashes in Uzbekistan, hours after country's president flies to Tashkent fleeing Taliban advance on Kabul

A plane bearing the insignia of the Afghan Air Force has crashed in the neighboring nation of Uzbekistan as the country's top military and political leaders fled the advance of the Taliban, in the wake of the American withdrawal.

The Ministry of Defense in the former Soviet republic confirmed on Monday night that the aircraft had hit the ground in the Surxondaryo region, which borders Afghanistan. Spokesman Bakhrom Zulfikarov told TASS that the crash had occurred overnight, and that "details of the incident are currently being confirmed." Reports indicate that one Afghan serviceman was injured in the wreck, but that passengers had been able to bail out of the aircraft with parachutes.

The crash coincided with multiple reports that the country's exiled president, Ashraf Ghani, had arrived in Uzbekistan along with his wife and a small cohort of close advisers, after resigning and leaving his country. Other sources say he had set course for nearby Tajikistan. There has been an exodus of senior government figures and foreign diplomatic personnel over the weekend as the Taliban (a prohibited terrorist group in Russia) moved in to capture the capital, Kabul.

US forces, which had been supporting Ghani's government, announced that they would withdraw from the troubled Central Asian nation by the anniversary of the September 11 attacks next month. However, the speed with which militants assumed control of vast swaths of the country after the departure of American troops and contractors appears to have come as a surprise. Washington has ordered thousands of soldiers into Afghanistan to begin evacuating its diplomatic staff.

Later on Monday, Nikita Ishchenko, the press secretary of the Russian embassy in Afghanistan, said that Ghani had turned up at the airport ahead of his flight to Uzbekistan laden down with cash and valuables. "As for the collapse of the regime, it is best explained by how Ghani escaped from Afghanistan," the diplomat said. "Four cars were filled with money and they tried to shove the other part of the money into a helicopter, but not everything fit. And so, some of the money was left behind on the runway."

Ghani became President of Afghanistan in September 2014, marking the first time in the country's history that power was democratically transferred. Since his election, Ghani has enjoyed a close relationship with the US, which has pumped almost a trillion dollars into the country. According to a 2019 study by Brown University, Washington has spent around $978 billion in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2001.

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