The first Vice President of Afghanistan Amrullah Saleh said that he was in Afghanistan and the “legitimate caretaker president” after President Ashraf Ghani fled the country as Taliban took the Kabul.
Saleh was appointed by Massoud to serve as Northern Alliance’s liaison office inside the Afghan Embassy in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, handling contacts to international non-governmental (humanitarian) organizations and intelligence agencies in 1997. After resigning from the NDS in 2010, Saleh created a pro-democracy and anti-Taliban movement called Basej-e Milli (National Mobilization) and Green Trend.
He was appointed as State Minister for Security Reforms by President Ashraf Ghani in March 2017. He was appointed as the Interior Minister by Ghani . He resigned as the Interior Minister on January 19, 2019 to join Ashraf Ghani’s election team and was appointed as first Vice President of Afghanistan.
In a series of tweets on Tuesday, Saleh said that it was “futile” to argue with US President Joe Biden, who has decided to pull out US forces.
He called on Afghans to show that Afghanistan “isn’t Vietnam & the Talibs aren’t even remotely like Vietcong”.
A video of desperate Afghans trying to clamber on to a US military plane as it was about to take off bore evoked a photograph in 1975 of people trying to get on a helicopter on a roof in Saigon during the withdrawal from Vietnam.
Saleh said that unlike the United States and NATO “we haven’t lost spirit & see enormous opportunities ahead. Useless caveats are finished JOIN THE RESISTANCE.”
Saleh, whose whereabouts were unknown, said that he would never “under no circumstances bow” to Taliban.
He said he would “never betray” Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance who was assassinated by two al Qaeda operatives just before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States
