Afghan President Ashraf Ghani slipped out of his country Sunday in the same way he had led it in recent years a lonely and isolated figure.

Ghani quietly left the sprawling presidential palace with a small coterie of confidants and didnt even tell other political leaders who had been negotiating a peaceful transition of power with the Taliban that he was heading for the exit.

Abdullah Abdullah, his long-time rival who had twice buried his animosity to partner with Ghani in government, said that God will hold him accountable for abandoning the capital.

Ghanis destination was not immediately known. In a social media post from an unknown location, he wrote that he left to save lives. If I had stayed, countless of my countrymen would be martyred and Kabul would face destruction and turn into ruins that could result to a human catastrophe for its six million residents Ghani wrote.

Abdullah, as well as former President Hamid Karzai, who had beaten a path to Ghanis door on numerous occasions to plead with him to put compromise above retaining power, were blindsided by the hasty departure. They said they had still been hoping to negotiate a peaceful transition with the Taliban, said Saad Mohseni, the owner of Afghanistans popular TOLO TV.

He left them in them lurch, he said. Earlier Sunday, Karzai had posted a message to the nation on his Facebook page, surrounded by his three daughters, to reassure Kabul residents that the leadership had a plan and was negotiating with the Taliban.

Just hours later, he discovered the presidential palace had been abandoned.

Ghanis inability to unite the country and his proclivity to surround himself with his cadre of Western-educated intellectuals brought Afghanistan to this point, said Bill Roggio, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a U.S.-based research institute. As Afghanistan collapsed, he refused to deal with the problems and further isolated himself from the power brokers he needed to deal with the problem, and the Afghan people as well.