Ahmad Shah Massoud
Ahmad Shah Massoud was the commander of the Panjshir valley through the Soviet war, the defence minister of the mujahideen government in Kabul from 1992 to 1996, the leader of the Northern Alliance against the Taliban after that. He was the man al-Qaeda killed two days before 11 September 2001 so that the Taliban's enemy should have no head when the Americans came. That is the order of events that made him, in death, the country's national hero and, in the Panjshir, its saint. He was a Tajik, the son of a colonel. He was an engineering student at Kabul polytechnic who joined Rabbani's Islamist students against the communists. He fled to Pakistan in 1974 after Daoud's arrests. He led a failed rising in the Panjshir in 1975 and a successful one in 1979. From then he held the valley, seventy miles long and the road to the Salang tunnel, against nine Soviet offensives between 1980 and 1985, each of which took the valley floor and lost it, fighting from the side valleys with a few thousand men whom he paid, trained, rotated and disciplined as no other commander did. With them he signed a truce with the Soviets in 1983 that the other parties called treason and that let him take the north-east. He took Kabul on 25 April 1992 ahead of Hekmatyar. That was the beginning of the war between them that destroyed the city. His forces' sack of the Hazara quarter of Afshar in February 1993 is the thing his enemies hold against him and his biographers pass over. He lost Kabul to the Taliban in September 1996 without a fight, taking his army and the state's records north. He held the Panjshir and Badakhshan for five years against them and the Pakistani and Arab volunteers who fought with them, the only commander who did. He went to Strasbourg in April 2001 to tell the European Parliament that al-Qaeda was in Afghanistan and would strike the West. Nobody wrote it down. He was killed at Khwaja Bahauddin on 9 September 2001 by two Tunisians with Belgian passports posing as television journalists, whose camera was the bomb. His death was kept secret for six days while the alliance decided what to do. He was born in Bazarak in the Panjshir and is buried on a hill above it. The pakol cap he wore is on the monuments, the posters and the windscreens of a state that his lieutenants governed and lost, and whose sons are back in the valley.
- Lived: 1953 CE – 2001 CE
- Nationality: Afghan
- Roles: guerrilla commander, minister, military leader
