LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Ahmed Shah Massoud: Panjshir Valley
built 615 days ago
Ahmed Shah Massoud was [K]nown as the Lion of Panjshir. He was a man who prayed, hoped, dreamed, and fought for a free Afghanistan. He spent his entire adult life in service to his country and her people. Massoud was a man of peace forced into war. He was assassinated on September 9, 2001 by al-Qaeda suicide bombers who feared him more than any other man in the country.
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Ahmed Shah Mas’ud was born to an army family in 1953 in the Panjshir Valley north of the Afghan capital Kabul. His father was a colonel in the Afghan Army and enrolled his son at Kabul’s Lycee Istiqlal High School. Upon graduation Mas’ud joined Kabul's Polytechnic Institute. In 1973 King Zahir Shah was deposed and exiled by his cousin Muhammad Daud.
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Having ascertained that an uprising against the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan would be backed by the people, Massoud made his way to the Panjshir, and started a new insurrection on July 6, 1979. The fight lasted 40 days, during which the whole Panjshir, Salang, and Bola Ghain were in open revolt against Kabul. After these 40 days Massoud's leg was injured and the troops under his command had no more weapons and ammunition. Despite 600 relief fighters from Nuristan, the government troops finally defeated them.[4] Drawing the lessons from this failure, Massoud decided to avoid direct confrontation with the enemy and to wage a guerrilla war. He set about creating bases and giving his men adequate training.[5]
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Massoud was a man of character. In 1980, a young soldier took advantage of the darkness and shot at Massoud’s car from only three metres away. Massoud told him: “Friend, your hands are trembling and you are not used to shooting anyone,” and let the attacker go. Moscow tried to poison, shoot and blow up Massoud, but was never successful. On one occasion, Dr Najibullah, later President and at that time chief of the puppet Afghan government’s intelligence service, sent an agent named Kamran to Panjshir where Massoud gave him the traditional and celebrated Afghan hospitality. Kamran finally came to understand Massoud’s reason for resisting the Communists and handed over the muffled firearm he had been given by the Afghan government to carry out the planned assassination. Kamran then took refuge in Germany, asking for political asylum.
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As a politician, Massoud failed badly. He had genuinely sought to bring together Afghanistan’s diverse ethnic and tribal groups as part of a new government of unity, but there was too much distrust and the Pashtuns considered him too powerful. By the time the Taleban took control in 1996, Massoud and his Panjshiris — once the heroes of the Jihad — had become overwhelmingly unpopular both in Kabul and many other parts of the country.
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Forced back to the Panjshir in 1996 by the Taliban and its Qaeda and Pakistani allies, Massoud began a new, anti-Taliban phase of resistance. From 1999 he was isolated in northeastern Afghanistan but survived even though he had lost easy access across the border to Tajikistan, his only outlet to the outside world.
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