In the last few weeks, the Taleban have captured scores of district centres across Afghanistan. In this report, we look at the general reasons for the success of the Taleban onslaught, before focusing on the north, which has seen a collapse of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) of unprecedented speed and scale. The fall of districts there comes as the old Northern Alliance leaders have been speaking of the need to mobilise a ‘second resistance’. When the Taleban were in power in Kabul in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the north was where they faced their main battles. So targeting the north now looks like a pre-emptive strike to prevent a northern opposition from organising, argue Kate Clark and Obaid Ali, who trace which districts have fallen, the reasons for their fall and what may already be obsolete plans to defend Afghanistan’s north.