Qatar paid ex-Afghan President Ashraf Ghani more than $110 million to not put up a fight against Taliban forces, an investigative report by an Italian journalist has alleged.
The report is based on the findings of Filippo Rossi, a noted Italian investigative journalist who reviewed several documents and spoke with people close to the erstwhile Afghan leader.
A signed document indicating payment of $110,478,000 from Qatari representative Dr. Mutlaq AL-Qahtani to Ajmal Ahmadi, the former head of the Central Bank of Afghanistan and Ashraf Ghani's special representative was allegedly found during his investigation.
Notably, the date of the aforementioned document was July 7, 2021, days before the Taliban takeover.
Archival data available on Qatar's Ministry of Foreign Affairs website confirms that Qahtani was in Kabul on that date, meeting the then-president at the Presidential Palace in Kabul.
Although the letter didn't mention for what purpose such a huge sum of money was paid to Ghani's close aide, the president escaped from Kabul and the Taliban took over the reins of power in the war-ravaged South Asian nation shortly after.
Ghani's escape was widely panned in Afghanistan and across the world, including by his vice-president, Amrullah Saleh, as "disgraceful."
In his report, Rossi highlighted that Ghani had urged the Afghans to take up arms to fight the advancing Taliban fighters in a speech in the parliament complex on August 2 at a time when the Islamic group was sweeping through provincial capitals and districts at an alarming rate.
According to the Italian journalist, the Afghan defense forces were ordered not to fight the Taliban and instead retreat from areas held under their control.
Before this, other reports also suggested that a few top officials in the security establishment claimed that Kabul had asked them not to engage the Taliban in battle.
Even General Murad Ali Murad, former deputy interior minister of defense, claimed in an interview that the Afghan National Army was fully equipped to take on the Taliban but a grand conspiracy forged at both the regional and global level led to the collapse of the country's democratically-elected government and the victory of the Taliban.
*under UN sanctions for terrorism