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Ahmad Shah Massoud

Afghan military leader (1953–2001)

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Massoud came from a Tajik Sunni Muslim background in the Panjshir Valley in northern Afghanistan. He began studying engineering at Polytechnical University of Kabul in the 1970s, where he developed Islamist and anti-communist views. He joined the Jamiat-i Islami of Burhanuddin Rabbani and, in 1975, participated in a failed uprising against President Daoud Khan's government. During the Soviet–Afghan War, he successfully resisted the Soviets from taking the Panjshir Valley. In 1992, he signed the Peshawar Accord, a peace and power-sharing agreement, in the post-communist Islamic State of Afghanistan. He was appointed the Minister of Defense as well as the government's main military commander. The accord was opposed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and other warlords, who attacked Kabul and initiated the Second Afghan Civil War (1992–1996).

Following the rise of the Taliban in 1996, Massoud, who rejected the group's extremist interpretation of Islam, returned to armed opposition. He became the military leader of the Northern Alliance, which by 2000 controlled only 5–10% of the country. In 2001, he visited Europe and urged European Parliament leaders for humanitarian aid to combat the Afghan people's conditions under the Taliban. On September 9, 2001, Massoud was killed in a suicide bombing by two al-Qaeda assassins. Two days later, al-Qaeda operatives carried out the September 11 attacks in the United States. Within weeks, American and NATO forces invaded Afghanistan, allying with the Northern Alliance and toppling the Taliban from power. By December 2001, the coalition had secured control over the country.

Regarded as one of the most influential guerrilla leaders in modern history, Massoud became an icon of several anti-imperialist movements and gained the status of a cult of personality. He was posthumously named the national hero of Afghanistan by the order of President Hamid Karzai after the Taliban were ousted from power in 2001. The date of Massoud's death, 9 September, was observed as "Martyrs' Day" under the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. His son Ahmad Massoud is leading the National Resistance Front (NRF) against the Taliban.

Early life

Ahmad Shah Massoud was born in c. 1953 in the small village of Jangalak, Bazarak in the Panjshir Valley to an ethnic Tajik family. He was named 'Ahmad Shah' after Ahmad Shah Durrani (r. 1747–1772), founder of the Durrani Empire, later taking the name 'Massoud' as a nom de guerre in 1974 when he joined the resistance movement against the forces of President Daoud Khan. Massoud's father, Dost Mohammad Khan, was a colonel in the Royal Afghan Army; his mother, Bibi Khorshid has been described as a "modern-minded" woman who taught herself to read and write determined to educate her daughters no less than her sons.

Moving along with his father's postings, the adolescent Massoud attended primary school in Afghanistan's western city of Herat before his father was dispatched to Kabul. There, Massoud was sent to the Franco-Afghan Lycée Esteqlal (lit. Independence High School) where he attained his proficiency in French. Massoud's experience at Lycée would be formative and, as he would later remark, was the happiest period of his life. At Lycée his classes were taught by French and Afghan tutors educated in France and the students donned Western jackets, neckties, trousers, scarves, and stockings. Although his knowledge of the French language would earn him greater affinity among French journalists and politicians, later ultraconservative Islamist opponents such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Taliban would derogatorily dub him "the Frenchman" or "the Parisian" suggestive of his sympathies to Western culture.

While at the Lycée, Massoud was described as an intellectually gifted student, hardworking, religiously devout, and mature for his age with a particular interest in ethics, politics, universal justice. Friends and family recall an instance where Massoud, returning from school, came to the defense of a younger boy leaving the three bullies knocked-out on the pavement. More formatively, Massoud followed closely reports of the 1967 Six-Day War and the defiant statements of Arab leaders like Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. He later told researcher Peter DeNeufville that, at fourteen, the war left him determined to be a soldier and gave him a new regard for pan-Islamism after hearing the stories told by Jordanian, Egyptian, and Syrian soldiers defending their homelands. Massoud refused repeated suggestions to apply for a scholarship to study in France expressing his desire to remain in Afghanistan and apply to the nation's military academy in Kabul.

Despite the objections of his father and eldest brother, Massoud enrolled at Kabul Polytechnic Institute, then Kabul University's newest and most prestigious addition founded, financed, and operated by the Soviet Union. Massoud studied engineering and architecture but never attempted to learn Russian. There he found interest in politics, political Islam, and anti-communism which often put him and his pious peers at odds with communist-inspired students. According to Soviet intelligence reports on Massoud, in 1974–1975, he was trained in guerilla warfare tactics in Lebanon and Egypt where he took part in combat operations and terrorist attacks with armed Palestinian resistance groups such as the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).

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