“In the 1990s, we have already experienced a similar situation, we are ready to face the difficult days. ” At World who questioned him at the end of August, Fahim Dashti, one of the assistants of Ahmad Massoud, the son of the famous commander Ahmad Shah Massoud known as the “Lion of Panchir”, assured that the men who form the anti-Italian coalition of the National Resistance Front (FNR) were ready to resist. On Sunday September 5, Fahim Dashti died in action in the Panchir Valley, almost twenty years to the day after having miraculously survived the suicide bombing perpetrated by Al-Qaida which claimed the life of Ahmad Shah Massoud, of whom he was near, on September 9, 2001.
On Monday, September 6, the Taliban claimed to have taken control “Complete” of the valley where resistance had been organized against them since their seizure of power in mid-August. “With this victory, our country is now completely out of the doldrums of war. The Panchir, which was the last hideout of the fleeing enemy, is conquered ”, welcomed Zabihullah Mujahid, one of the movement’s spokespersons, while promising the inhabitants of the region – mainly from the Tajik minority – that they would be safe and would not be subject to any discrimination. He assured that electricity and telecommunications would be restored in the province.
Since August 22, the Taliban had massed troops on the outskirts of this landlocked province, surrounded by mountain peaks, a hundred kilometers north of Kabul. The valley is home to the last hotbed of armed opposition to the Taliban, who seized power on August 15 after a lightning military campaign.
Serious caveats
Gathered around the former vice president of the deposed regime, Amrullah Saleh, and Ahmad Massoud, several thousand men – former soldiers and local militiamen – had sworn to fight to the death. The valley, whose access opens by a narrow defile with walls that fall steeply into the river and which is closed to the north by massifs culminating at 6,000 meters above sea level, had escaped, between 1996 and 2001, to the attempts of occupation by the Taliban, while they ruled the country until the American intervention. A decade earlier, its inhabitants had put up fierce resistance to the Soviet occupation troops, between 1979 and 1989.
“The comrades have gone to the mountains and are getting together to fight back. The telephone network hasn’t worked for two or three days. Bazarak [la capitale du Panchir] fell. The Taliban are in the streets ”, explains a relative of Ahmad Massoud, who is hiding in a place he prefers not to name. The telephone networks being cut, the man contacts the combatants at Panchir every two or three hours by satellite telephone.
You have 56.57% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.