Afghan military leader (1953–2001)
Ahmad Shah Massoud (Dari: , ; September 2, 1953 – September 9, 2001) was an Afghan military leader and politician. He was a guerrilla commander during the resistance against the Soviet occupation during the Soviet–Afghan War from 1979 to 1989. In the 1990s, he led the government's military wing against rival militia, and actively fought against the Taliban, from the time the regime rose to power in 1996, and until his assassination in 2001.
Massoud came from an ethnic Tajik of 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. He participated in a failed uprising against Mohammed Daoud Khan's government. He later joined Rabbani's Jamiat-e Islami party. During the Soviet–Afghan War, his role as an insurgent leader of the Afghan mujahideen earned him the nickname "Lion of Panjshir" () among his followers. Supported by Britain's MI6 and to a lesser extent by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 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. His militia fought to defend Kabul against militias led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and other warlords who were bombing the city, as well as later against the Taliban, who laid siege to the capital in January 1995 after the city had seen fierce fighting with at least 60,000 civilians killed.
Following the rise of the Taliban in 1996, Massoud, who rejected the Taliban's fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, returned to armed opposition until he was forced to flee to Kulob, Tajikistan, strategically destroying the Salang Tunnel on his way north. He became the military and political leader of the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan or Northern Alliance, which by 2000 controlled only between 5 and 10 percent 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, ordered personally by the al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden himself; he lost his life while en route to a hospital across the border in Tajikistan. Two days later, the September 11 attacks occurred in the United States, which ultimately led to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) invading Afghanistan and allying with Massoud's forces. The Northern Alliance eventually won the two-month-long war in December 2001, removing the Taliban from power.
Massoud has been described as one of the greatest guerrilla leaders of the 20th century and has been compared to Josip Broz Tito, Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara. Massoud was posthumously named "National Hero" 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 followers call him "Amer Sāhib-e Shahīd" (), which translates to "(our) martyred commander". A street in New Delhi was named after him in 2007. He has been posthumously honored by a plaque in France in 2021, and in the same year was awarded with the highest honor of Tajikistan.
Early life.
Ahmad Shah Massoud was born in 1953 in the small village of Jangalak, Bazarak in the Panjshir Valley (now administered as part of the Panjshir Province), to a well-to-do family native to the Panjshir Valley. Massoud's name at birth was 'Ahmad Shah' after King Ahamad Shah Durrani, founder of the modern, unified state of Afghanistan, later taking the name 'Massoud' as a "nom de guerre" in 1974 when he joined the resistance movement against the forces of Daoud Khan. Massoud's father, Dost Mohammad, 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 (lit. Independence High School) 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, skirts, scarves, and stockings. Although his knowledge of the French language would earn him greater affinity among French journalists and politicians, later conservative Islamist opponents such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Taliban would derogatorily dub him "The Frenchmen" or "The Parisian" suggestive of his sympathies to Western culture.
While at the Lycée, Massoud was described as an intellectually-gifted student, hard-working, 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 the Soviet intelligence reports, in 1974–75, 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 Mohammed Daoud Khan was brought to power in a coup d'état 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 (Sazman-i Jawanan-i Musulman), the student branch of the Jamiat-e Islami (Islamic Society), whose chairman then was the 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 (ISI), 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 Pakistani intelligence, 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 Daoud Khan's forces sending Massoud back into Pakistan (after a day hiding in Jangalak) 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 reportedly tried to kill Massoud, then 22 years old.
Resistance against communism.
Resistance against the PDPA (1978).
The government of Mohammed 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 April 27, 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 (DRA). 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. By spring 1979, unrest had reached 24 out of 28 Afghan provinces, including major urban areas. Over half of the Afghan army either deserted or joined the insurrection.
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 July 6, 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."
Resistance against the Soviet Union (1979–1989).
Following the 1979 Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, Massoud devised a strategic plan for expelling the invaders and overthrowing the communist regime. The first task was to establish a popularly based resistance force that had the loyalty of the people. The second phase was "active defense" of the Panjshir stronghold, while carrying out asymmetric warfare. In the third phase, the "strategic offensive", Massoud's forces would gain control of large parts of Northern Afghanistan. The fourth phase was the "general application" of Massoud's principles to the whole country, and the defeat of the Afghan communist government.
Massoud's mujahideen attacked the occupying Soviet forces, ambushing Soviet and Afghan communist convoys travelling through the Salang Pass, and causing fuel shortages in Kabul. The Soviets mounted a series of offensives against the Panjshir. Between 1980 and 1985, these offensives were conducted twice a year. Despite engaging more men and hardware on each occasion, the Soviets were unable to defeat Massoud's forces. In 1982, the Soviets