Ahmad Shah Massoud
Ahmad Shah Massoud was an Afghan military leader and politician. Known as the "Lion of Panjshir", he was the foremost commander of the Afghan mujahideen against Soviet occupation during the Soviet–Afghan War from 1979 to 1989. Later, in the 1990s, he led the government's military wing against rival militias, and actively fought against the Taliban and their allies, from the time the regime rose to power in 1996, and until his assassination in 2001.
Massoud came from a Tajik Sunni Muslim background in the Panjshir Valley in northern Afghanistan. He began studying engineering at Polytechnical University of Kabul in the 1970s, where he became involved with religious anti-communist movements around Burhanuddin Rabbani, a leading Islamist. In 1975, Massoud participated in a failed uprising against President Daoud Khan's government. He later joined Rabbani's Jamiat-e Islami party, and became a military commander. During the Soviet–Afghan War, he successfully resisted the Soviets from taking the Panjshir Valley. In 1992, he signed the Peshawar Accord, a peace and power-sharing agreement, in the post-communist Islamic State of Afghanistan. He was appointed the Minister of Defense as well as the government's main military commander. The accord was opposed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and other warlords, who attacked Kabul and initiated the Second Afghan Civil War.
Following the rise of the Taliban in 1996, Massoud, who rejected the group's extremist interpretation of Islam, returned to armed opposition. He became the military leader of the Northern Alliance, which by 2000 controlled only between 5–10% of the country. In 2001, he visited Europe and urged European Parliament leaders to pressure Pakistan on its support for the Taliban. He also asked for humanitarian aid to combat the Afghan people's gruesome conditions under the Taliban. On September 9, 2001, Massoud was injured in a suicide bombing by two al-Qaeda assassins; he lost his life while en route to a hospital across the border in Tajikistan. Two days later, al-Qaeda operatives carried out the September 11 attacks in the United States. Within weeks, American and NATO forces invaded Afghanistan, allying with the Northern Alliance and toppling the Taliban from power. By December 2001, the coalition had secured control over the country.
Massoud has been described as one of the greatest guerrilla leaders of the 20th century and has been compared to Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and Josip Broz Tito. Massoud was posthumously named the national hero of Afghanistan by the order of President Hamid Karzai after the Taliban were ousted from power. The date of Massoud's death, September 9, was observed as a national holiday known as "Massoud Day" until the Taliban takeover in August 2021. His son Ahmad Massoud is leading the National Resistance Front against the Taliban.
Early life
Ahmad Shah Massoud was born in in the small village of Jangalak, Bazarak in the Panjshir Valley to an ethnic Tajik family. He was named 'Ahmad Shah' after Ahmad Shah Durrani, founder of the Durrani Empire, later taking the name 'Massoud' as a nom de guerre in 1974 when he joined the resistance movement against the forces of President Daoud Khan. Massoud's father, Dost Mohammad Khan, was a colonel in the Royal Afghan Army; his mother, Bibi Khorshid has been described as a "modern-minded" woman who taught herself to read and write determined to educate her daughters no less than her sons.Moving along with his father's postings, the adolescent Massoud attended primary school in Afghanistan's western city of Herat before his father was dispatched to Kabul. There, Massoud was sent to the Franco-Afghan Lycée Esteqlal where he attained his proficiency in French. Massoud's experience at Lycée would be formative and, as he would later remark, was the happiest period of his life. At Lycée his classes were taught by French and Afghan tutors educated in France and the students donned Western jackets, neckties, trousers, scarves, and stockings. Although his knowledge of the French language would earn him greater affinity among French journalists and politicians, later hardcore Islamist opponents such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Taliban would derogatorily dub him "the Frenchman" or "the Parisian" suggestive of his sympathies to Western culture.
While at the Lycée, Massoud was described as an intellectually gifted student, hardworking, religiously devout, and mature for his age with a particular interest in ethics, politics, universal justice. Friends and family recall an instance where Massoud, returning from school, came to the defense of a younger boy leaving the three bullies knocked-out on the pavement. More formatively, Massoud followed closely reports of the 1967 Six-Day War and the defiant statements of Arab leaders like Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. He later told researcher Peter DeNeufville that, at fourteen, the war left him determined to be a soldier and gave him a new regard for pan-Islamism after hearing the stories told by Jordanian, Egyptian, and Syrian soldiers defending their homelands. Massoud refused repeated suggestions to apply for a scholarship to study in France expressing his desire to remain in Afghanistan and apply to the nation's military academy in Kabul.
By protest of his father and eldest brother, Massoud enrolled at Kabul Polytechnic Institute, then Kabul University's newest and most prestigious addition founded, financed, and operated by the Soviet Union. Massoud studied engineering and architecture but never attempted to learn Russian. There he found interest in politics, political Islam, and anti-communism which often put him and his pious peers at odds with communist-inspired students. According to Soviet intelligence reports on Massoud, in 1974–1975, he was trained in guerilla warfare tactics in Lebanon and Egypt where he took part in combat operations and terrorist attacks with armed Palestinian resistance groups such as the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
1975 rebellion in Panjshir
In 1973, former prime minister Daoud Khan was brought to power in a coup backed by the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, and the Republic of Afghanistan was established. These developments gave rise to an Islamist movement opposed to the increasing communist and Soviet influence over Afghanistan. During that time, while studying at Kabul University, Massoud became involved with the Muslim Youth, the student branch of the Jamiat-e Islami, whose chairman then was Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani. Kabul University was a center for political debate and activism during that time.Infuriated by the arrogance of his communist peers and Russian professors, a physical altercation between Massoud and his Russian professor led Massoud to walk out of the university, and shortly after, Kabul. Two days later, Massoud and a number of fellow militant students traveled to Pakistan where, goaded by another trainee of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence, Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, Massoud agreed to take part in a coup against Daoud with his forces rising up in the Panjshir and Hekmatyar's elsewhere. In July 1975, Massoud, with help from the ISI, led the first rebellion of Panjshir residents against the government of Daoud Khan. While the uprising in the Panjshir saw initial success, even taking the military garrison in Rokha, the promised support from Kabul never came and the rebellion was suppressed by Khan's forces sending Massoud back into Pakistan where he would attend a secret, paramilitary ISI training center in Cherat. Dissatisfied, Massoud left the center and returned to Peshawar where he committed himself to personal military studies. Massoud read Mao Tse-tung's writings on the Long March, of Che Guevara's career, the memoirs of General de Gaulle, General Võ Nguyên Giáp, Sun Tzu's Art of War, and an unnamed handbook on counterterrorism by an American general which Massoud called "the most instructive of all".
After this failure, a "profound and long-lasting schism" within the Islamist movement began to emerge. The Islamic Society split between supporters of the more moderate forces around Massoud and Rabbani, who led the Jamiat-i Islami, and more radical Islamist elements surrounding Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who founded the Hezb-i Islami. The conflict reached such a point that Hekmatyar supposedly tried to kill Massoud, then 22 years old.
Resistance against communism
Resistance against the PDPA (1978)
The government of Daoud Khan tried to scale back the communist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan's influence, dismissing PDPA members from their government posts, appointing conservatives to replace them, and finally dissolved the PDPA, with the arrests of senior party members. On 27 April 1978, the PDPA and military units loyal to it killed Daoud Khan, his immediate family, and bodyguards in a violent coup, and seized control of the capital Kabul declaring the new Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The new communist government, led by a revolutionary council, did not enjoy the support of the masses. It implemented a doctrine hostile to political dissent, whether inside or outside the party. The PDPA started reforms along Marxist–Leninist and Soviet lines. The reforms and the PDPA's affinity to the Soviet Union were met with strong resistance by the population, especially as the government attempted to enforce its Marxist policies by arresting or executing those who resisted. Between 50,000 and 100,000 people were estimated to have been arrested and killed by communist troops in the countryside alone. Due to the repression, large parts of the country, especially the rural areas, organized into open revolt against the PDPA government.With religious elders declaring a jihad against the government, in May 1979 Massoud prepared in Peshawar to oppose the new communist government in Panjshir. Along with twenty-four of his friends, Massoud took a bus to Bajaur and, with arms-smuggling Pashtun tribesmen, marched on foot into the Panjshir Valley. Massoud's group seized control over a number of government outposts in the Valley, entered the Shomali Plain to capture Gulbahar, and cut off the Salang Highway, the main supply route between Kabul and the Soviet border raising alarm in both Kabul and Moscow which brought upon Massoud and his group a government counterattack.
Believing that an uprising against the Soviet-backed communists would be supported by the people, Massoud, on 6 July 1979, started an insurrection in the Panjshir, which initially failed. Massoud decided to avoid conventional confrontation with the larger government forces and to wage a guerrilla war. He subsequently took full control of Panjshir, pushing out Afghan communist troops. Oliver Roy writes that in the following period, Massoud's "personal prestige and the efficiency of his military organization persuaded many local commanders to come and learn from him."