The National Resistance Front (NRF) of Afghanistan, Mr Masoud’s political movement, denied the Taliban’s claims. Others browsed the collection of helicopters at the governor’s house, eager to add to their ragged air force.
Some posed in front of the town’s gates, under a portrait of Masoud senior gazing benignly down at them. Videos circulating on social media showed triumphant Talibs hoisting their black and white flag in Bazarak, the provincial capital. Yet whereas Masoud senior parried Soviet and Taliban blows for over a decade, his son’s resistance has crumbled in less than a month.Īfter a weekend of fierce fighting, on September 6th a spokesman for the Taliban said that the group had taken “complete control” of Panjshir province. In recent weeks it is Masoud’s 32-year-old son, Ahmad Masoud, who has holed up in the valley, alongside Amrullah Saleh, vice-president of the government that was toppled by the Taliban on August 15th (and a former aide to the older Masoud). It was in the Panjshir, too, weeks later on September 26th, that America began its war in Afghanistan with a small CIA team sent to meet Masoud’s comrades. So tenacious was Masoud’s resistance that on September 9th 2001, days before the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda sent two bombers to assassinate him in co-ordination with a Taliban advance.
Each one was driven away by Ahmad Shah Masoud, a legendary anti-Soviet-and, later, anti-Taliban-commander whose photograph adorns Kabul airport. THE PANJSHIR VALLEY, a slender and rugged groove cut into the mountains 150km north of Kabul, populated by ethnic Tajiks, was subjected to wave after wave of Soviet assaults in the 1980s.
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