Though many Afghan commandos escaped to the valley in mid-August, Mr Masoud was ultimately left with few experienced fighters and almost no heavy weapons. Other anti-Taliban leaders in northern Afghanistan, such as Atta Mohammad Noor, a fellow Tajik, and Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek warlord, had fled the country. Though Western intelligence agencies had kept in touch with Mr Masoud, few were willing to extend significant support while the evacuation of foreign nationals from Kabul was under way. This time round, the Taliban’s lightning advance largely surrounded the valley and cut off those lifelines.
In the 1990s Panjshiri fighters were supplied by Iran and India-a young Mr Saleh playing a key role-and benefited from supply lines from Tajikistan to the north. “I doubt it will be sustainable,” he adds. “Some groups will try to wage a kind of guerrilla war there,” says Antonio Giustozzi, an expert on the Taliban. The region’s geography, with smaller valleys branching off the main one, means that some sporadic resistance may continue even as the Taliban stream down the Panjshir river. But if he is still in the country, his prospects do not look good. In an audio message published later, Mr Masoud vowed to continue the fight “in the valleys of the Hindu Kush, Panjshir and Andarab”. “The struggle against the Taliban & their partners will continue.” Ali Nazary, the group’s head of foreign relations, said that Mr Masoud was safe and would soon deliver a message. “The NRF forces are present in all strategic positions across the valley to continue the fight,” a spokesman tweeted. 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.