Ahmad Shah Massoud

Ahmad Shah Massoud (Dari/Pashto:, ; September 2, 1953 – September 9, 2001) was an Afghan politician and military commander.

Ahmad Shah Massoud was born in 1953 in the small village of Jangalak, Bazarak in the Panjshir Valley (now administered as part of the Panjshir Province), to a well-to-do family native to the Panjshir Valley.

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.

By protest 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.

He began studying engineering at Polytechnical University of Kabul in the 1970s, where he became involved with religious anti-communist movements around Burhanuddin Rabbani, a leading Islamist.

He participated in a failed uprising against Mohammed Daoud Khan's government.

He later joined Rabbani's Jamiat-e Islami party.

During the Soviet–Afghan War, his role as a powerful insurgent leader of the Afghan mujahideen earned him the nickname "Lion of Panjshir" (شیر پنجشیر) among his followers.

Supported by Britain's MI6 and to a lesser extent by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), he successfully resisted the Soviets from taking the Panjshir Valley.

Massoud's name at birth was 'Ahmad Shah' after King Ahamad Shah Durrani, founder of the modern, unified state of Afghanistan, later taking the name 'Massoud' as a nom de guerre in 1974 when he joined the resistance movement against the forces of Daoud Khan.

Massoud's father, Dost Mohammad, was a colonel in the Royal Afghan Army; his mother, Bibi Khorshaid 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 renowned 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, skirts, scarves, and stockings.

Although his knowledge of the French language would earn him greater affinity among French journalists and politicians, later conservative Islamist opponents such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Taliban would derogatorily dub him "The Frenchmen" or "The Parisian" suggestive of his sympathies to Western culture.

While at the Lycée, Massoud was described as an intellectually-gifted student, hard-working, 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.

He was a powerful guerrilla commander during the resistance against the Soviet occupation between 1979 and 1989.

In the 1990s, he led the government's military wing against rival militias; after the Taliban takeover, he was the leading opposition commander against their regime until his assassination in 2001.

Massoud came from an ethnic Tajik, Sunni Muslim background in the Panjshir Valley of Northern Afghanistan.

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.

His militia fought to defend Kabul against militias led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and other warlords who were bombing the city, as well as later against the Taliban, who laid siege to the capital in January 1995 after the city had seen fierce fighting with at least 60,000 civilians killed.

Following the rise of the Taliban in 1996, Massoud, who rejected the Taliban's fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, returned to armed opposition until he was forced to flee to Kulob, Tajikistan, strategically destroying the Salang Tunnel on his way north.

He became the military and political leader of the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan or Northern Alliance, which by 2000 controlled only between 5 and 10 percent of the country.

In 2001 he visited Europe and urged European Parliament leaders to pressure Pakistan on its support for the Taliban.

He also asked for humanitarian aid to combat the Afghan people's gruesome conditions under the Taliban.

On September 9, 2001, Massoud was injured in a suicide bombing by two al-Qaeda assassins, ordered personally by the al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden himself; he lost his life while en route to a hospital across the border in Tajikistan.

Two days later, the September 11 attacks occurred in the United States, which ultimately led to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization invading Afghanistan and allying with Massoud's forces.

The Northern Alliance eventually won the two-month-long war in December 2001, removing the Taliban from power.

Massoud has been described as one of the greatest guerrilla leaders of the 20th century and has been compared to Josip Broz Tito, Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara.

Massoud was posthumously named "National Hero" by the order of President Hamid Karzai after the Taliban were ousted from power.

The date of Massoud's death, September 9, was observed as a national holiday known as "Massoud Day" until the Taliban takeover in August 2021.

His followers call him Amer Sāhib-e Shahīd (آمر صاحب شهید), which translates to "(our) martyred commander".

He has been posthumously honored by a plaque in France in 2021, and in the same year was awarded with the highest honor of Tajikistan.