Afghanistan's embattled vice president, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, left Kabul for Turkey on Friday night, according to Afghan officials, amid unresolved accusations that he ordered his men to abduct, beat, and rape a political rival last year.
Officials declined to say whether his departure was linked to Afghan authorities' investigation of the incident. His spokesman Bashir Ahmad Tayanj said he had left for a medical checkup and would be back soon after the treatment.
Ahmad Ishchi, a former ally of the vice president, claimed he had been abducted from a sports match and then tortured and raped by General Dostum and his guards. Dostum has not been charged with any offence and the status of the government's investigation remains unclear.
After those accusations were made public, the government of President Ashraf Ghani and his Western backers made a strong initial push to get General Dostum to surrender for questioning. Instead, he holed up, and it has become increasingly clear that the government has begun to favour exile as a solution rather than openly moving against the vice president, according to the New York Times.
Twice, President Ghani had spoken to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and a Turkish plane once came to Kabul to pick up General Dostum, but he refused to go, Afghan officials said. On Friday, they said, General Dostum, a powerful ethnic Uzbek warlord, showed no such hesitation, with his eldest son, Batur, playing an important role in persuading his father to leave.
Ishchi has been involved in politics in the north for decades and helped General Dostum found the Junbish party.
At a game of buzkashi last year, General Dostum was seen publicly yelling at Ishchi, the former governor of the vice president’s home province of Jowzjan, and then having his guards drag the man away. Ishchi later said that during 10 days in captivity, he had been tortured and then raped by rifle barrels on General Dostum’s orders.
In 2008 he left for Turkey amid similar accusations that his men had abducted, beaten and sexually assaulted another political rival in Kabul, then fired on police responding to the incident.
Dostum later returned and re-entered Afghan politics, eventually becoming vice president to President Ashraf Ghani in the 2014 elections.
