Taliban capture Kandahar, Herat, Lashkar Gah; embassies getting staff out

US, Britain send troops to get staff out from Afghanistan; UN warns of 'catastrophic' impact of fight for Kabul

Taliban insurgents tightened their grip on Afghanistan on Friday, wresting control of its second and third biggest cities while Western embassies prepared to send in troops to help evacuate staff from the capital, Kabul.

The capture of the second-biggest city of Kandahar in the south and Herat in the west after days of clashes are a devastating setback for the government as the deadly Taliban insurgency turns into a rout of the security forces.
 

"The city looks like a front line, a ghost town," provincial council member Ghulam Habib Hashimi said by telephone from Herat, a city of about 600,000