Warlord Survival by Romain Malejacq;

Author:Romain Malejacq;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)

Ahmad Shah Massoud: The Lion of Panjshir

Genesis and Rise

Ahmad Shah Massoud was born in Jangalak, a village located in the lower Panjshir Valley, in the early 1950s, to an esteemed Tajik family. On his father’s side, they belonged to the prestigious Sarkarda clan. His father, Dost Mohammad Khan, a former colonel in the Royal Afghan Army of King Zahir Shah, was employed by the Ministry of Interior. His paternal grandfather, Yahya Khan, was a well-respected elder who had worked for King Amanullah Khan. His maternal grandfather, an attorney from the neighboring town of Rukha, also came from a prominent Panjshiri clan, the Bakhshi. Although he was born in Panjshir, the young Ahmad Shah—who would adopt “Massoud” (the fortunate one) as a nom de guerre years later—spent most of his childhood and teenage years in Kabul, where he learned French at the Lycée Estiqlal. In the early 1970s, he enrolled at the Kabul Polytechnic Institute for Engineering and Architecture, where he was involved in Jamiat’s student branch, Sazman-i Jawanan-i Musulman, which was becoming increasingly popular among university students.

After Daoud came to power in the 1973 coup d’état and started cracking down on the Islamists, Massoud went into hiding for a few months in Panjshir while others left for Pakistan. He briefly came back to Kabul to partake in a coup attempt led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the leaders of the Islamist movement, and flew to Peshawar, Pakistan, after their plan was discovered by the government. Yet again, in 1975, Massoud joined Hekmatyar in another effort to topple the regime of Mohammad Daoud Khan. This time, the rebellion was to combine a military coup in the capital with simultaneous uprisings in various provinces. Massoud was charged with starting the uprising in Panjshir, but his efforts failed, in part due to strong popular resistance that he did not expect. About half of his men were killed or wounded, while Massoud and nearly twenty others from his group hid in the mountains. In Kabul, the coup never took place. Massoud blamed Hekmatyar, who, he believed, had never intended to implement the plan. Infuriated, Massoud returned to exile in Pakistan, where he and other members of the Islamist movement started secret military training under the authority of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Before long, Hekmatyar left to create his own party, Hezb-i Islami (henceforth Hezb), as explained in chapter 1. When the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan came to power in 1978, Massoud first left Pakistan to join the uprising that had started in Nuristan—the province between Panjshir and the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. There he learned a great deal about war and adopted the pakol, a traditional Nuristani top-rounded woolen hat that would become his men’s signature apparel.

In the summer of 1979, Massoud followed the Nuristani example and drew on the networks he had acquired on the eastern front to return to Panjshir, upward of two dozen men, this time all from the valley, to stir up a revolt against the new communist regime.5 At that time, he was only in his mid-twenties and mostly unknown to the local population.

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