Anti-Taliban Opposition Unites Forces in Panjshir Valley
The vice president of Afghanistan, Amrullah Saleh, is said to have collaborated with the leader of Panjshir, Ahmad Massoud, the son of the late war commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. Both are now mobilizing tribal insurgents and the rest of Afghanistan’s elite military forces.
According to unconfirmed reports, the anti-Taliban opposition on Wednesday began expanding out of the Panjshir Valley and occupying the Charikar district, not far from Bagram, a former US military base north of Kabul.
Various media reported that the Hazara minority group also began to come to the Panjshir valley to seek refuge.
“I will not disappoint the millions of people who still want to hear me. I will never live under the same sky with the Taliban. Never,” wrote Amrullah Saleh via Twitter on Sunday (15/8), ahead of the fall of the capital Kabul to the Taliban. .
Panjshir Valley flanked by stone towers typical of the Hindu Kush mountains has an anker reputation as an impenetrable natural fortress. Its geographical conditions made the whole valley easy to defend with a small number of troops.
The ethnic Tajik area, 100km from the capital Kabul, used to protect the Afghan Mujahideen from the onslaught of the Soviet Union in the 1970s, and is now the new headquarters for the remnants of the anti-Taliban coalition.
Even during the era of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, this area was recognized as the safest, where foreigners could work outside without being escorted by armed forces.
“We will not allow the Taliban to enter Panjshir, and will fight with all our might and efforts,” a local resident told AFP.
The emergence of anti-Taliban leaders
The Panjshir Valley is controlled by the Massoud family who are now represented by their youngest son, Ahmad Massoud, who is 32 years old. The young man who underwent an officer training by the British military offered his territory as the last anti-Taliban bastion.
Location of the Panjshir Valley, which is 100 kilometers north of the capital Kabul, Afghanistan.
Saleh, who lost his parents as a child, fought under the late Shah Massoud against the Taliban in the 1990s. Having joined the government formed by the Mujahideen in the early 1990s, he was forced to flee Kabul when the Taliban seized power in 1996.
The Islamists claimed to have tortured Saleh’s sister, and put her on the death list. “My views on the Taliban changed forever because of what happened in 1996,” he wrote in a column for Time magazine last year.
After the US invasion, Saleh, who has become an asset of the US Secret Service, the CIA, was assigned to head the Directorate of National Security (NDS). During his tenure, he dismantled one jihadist network on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Saleh believes the expansion of the Taliban in 2020–2021 is financed and supported by Islamabad. He received a series of assassination attempts during his tenure, including last September, when an improvised bomb killed 10 people in the vice president’s motorcade.
After the conquest of Kabul by the Taliban, last Sunday (15/8), Saleh declared himself the new president as mandated by the constitution. “We will continue to fight,” he said.
