To resist the Taliban who have regained power in Kabul, Ahmad Massoud, son of Commander Ahmed Shah Massoud assassinated in 2001 by Al-Qaeda, calls for American support in arms and ammunition for his militia in Afghanistan, he said. in a column published this Wednesday by the daily Washington post.
“America can still be a great arsenal for democracy” by supporting its Mujahedin fighters “who are again ready to face the Taliban”, he assures us.
National hero
His father was a hero of the anti-Soviet resistance who then fought against the Taliban. He was elevated in 2019 to the rank of national hero in Afghanistan by presidential decree, even if the troops of the “Lion of Panchir” also left mixed memories with the inhabitants of Kabul, trapped in the early 1990s in the fighting between rival mujahedin .
Ahmad Massoud, who heads a political formation called “Front for the Resistance”, had already published Monday a column in the French review Rules of the Game founded by the writer Bernard-Henri Lévy, claiming to want to make his father’s fight “his” and calling on the Afghans to join him “in our bastion of Panchir, which is the last free region of our dying country”. In his column published by the Washington Post, he claims to have been joined in the Panchir by soldiers of the Afghan army “disgusted with the surrender of their commanders” as well as by former members of the Afghan special forces.
“You are our last hope”
Images circulating on social media show former vice-president Amrullah Saleh and Ahmad Massoud together in the Panchir Valley, appearing to be laying the foundation stone for what would be a rebellion against the new regime in place. This valley, difficult to access, never fell into the hands of the Taliban during the civil war of the 1990s, nor a decade earlier during the occupation of the country by the Soviets. “But we need more weapons, more ammunition, more equipment”, insists Ahmad Massoud, assuring that the Taliban also constitute a threat outside the country.
“Under the control of the Taliban, Afghanistan will undoubtedly become a base for radical Islamist terrorism; plots against democracies will again be hatched here ”. Since their return to power on Sunday, twenty years after being ousted in 2001 by an international coalition led by the United States following the attacks of September 11, the Taliban have displayed stocks of arms and equipment seized from the Afghan forces, most of them supplied by the United States. Ahmad Massoud believes that during these twenty years, Americans and Afghans have shared “ideals and struggles”. He asks Washington to continue to support “the cause of freedom” and not to abandon Afghanistan to the Taliban. “You are our last hope,” he assures us.