“I am the son of Ahmad Shah Massoud; surrender is not part of my vocabulary.” “We are ready to give blood,” says Ahmad Massoud
Massoud is the son of Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was known as the Lion of Panjshir and led the strongest resistance against the Taliban from his stronghold in the valley until he was assassinated two days before 9/11 by al Qaeda terrorists of Moroccan origins.
The Panjshir Valley, which never fell to the Taliban during the civil war of the 1990s and was not conquered by the Soviets a decade earlier, is now Afghanistan’s last remaining holdout against the Sunni Pashtun forces.
Ahmad Shah Massoud was a powerful guerrilla commander who led the resistance against the USSR and then went on to lead the Afghan government’s military wing against rival militias in the 1990s. After the Taliban gained control, he was the main opposition commander against their rule, until his assassination in 2001.
Despite information warfare by the Taliban that it is negotiating with Northern Alliance resistance in Panjshir Valley, Ahmad Massoud, the leader of the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan and son of Ahmad Shah Massoud has said he will follow in his father’s footsteps and won’t surrender to the Taliban, who have seized the country after the US and allied forces virtually ran away from Kabul.
French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy said, “I just spoke to Ahmad Massoud on the phone. He told me: “I am the son of Ahmad Shah Massoud; surrender is not part of my vocabulary.” This is the start. The Resistance has just begun.
“My father, Commander Massoud, our national hero, bequeathed to me a legacy: and that legacy is to fight for Afghans’ freedom. That fight is now irreversibly mine. My companions in arms and I are ready to give our blood. We call on all free Afghans, all those who reject servitude, to join our bastion of Panjshir, the last free region in our tormented land. To Afghans of all regions and tribes, I say: do fight with us!” Massoud said in a letter to Levy on August 16.
“They want to defend, they want to fight, they want to resist against any totalitarian regime,” Massoud said.
Meanwhile, on Monday, the Taliban claimed to have captured three areas of the Panjshir Valley from the Northern Alliance, with Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid tweeting that “the districts of Banu, Bel Hisar, and De Salah were completely cleansed from evil.”
However,on Sunday, a spokesperson for Massoud’s National Resistance Front (NRF) said they believe that a decentralized government was the “only solution.”
“We are in favor of peace — but peace does not mean surrendering to the enemies’ demands and one force to dominate the politics of the country. Our conditions for lasting peace in Afghanistan are decentralization of power and wealth, democracy, political and cultural pluralism, moderate Islam, and equal rights and freedom for all citizens,” NRF spokesman Ali Nazary told CNN.
Reports say the Taliban who launched a campaign against the resistance suffered a major setback when 300 of their militants were killed in an ambush. Panjshir is the last post standing free. Taliban say they have sent hundreds of fighters to the holdout valley to establish control over it.
The NRF has clearly indicated that it is not going to give up in anyway to the Taliban, they are ready to fight but will never give up.
