![]() ![]() ![]() The Taliban say "hundreds" of their fighters are heading toward the Panjshir "after local. With Kabul secure and the Americans finally gone, the Taliban have turned their military attention to the rogue province. "The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan is home for all Afghans," he said in a speech.īut it may already be too late. "Anything less than this will be unacceptable to us, and we will continue our struggle and resistance until we achieve justice, equality, and freedom."įor the Taliban's part, one of its senior leaders, Amir Khan Motaqi, called on the Panjshir resistance to lay down its weapons and negotiate peace. In an interview by email with Foreign Policy magazine, Massoud elaborated: "If the Taliban are willing to reach a power-sharing deal where power is equally distributed and is decentralized, then we can move toward a settlement that is acceptable to everyone," he wrote. "We want to make the Taliban realize that the only way forward is through negotiation," Massoud told Reuters recently. Last week, delegations from the Taliban and the Panjshir resistance reportedly met in the northern Parwan province, but the three-hour meeting seems to have yielded little more than an agreement to keep talking. It may be too late for a negotiated settlementĭespite Massoud's bellicose-sounding Washington Post op-ed, he has suggested Panjshir might talk its way out of Taliban control. It is not "a monolithically Pashtun force," writes Anatol Lieven, a professor at Georgetown University in Qatar, noting that the militants have "gathered a good deal of support among other ethnicities by appealing to religious conservatism." But, he writes, the Taliban "leadership is still overwhelmingly Pashtun, and seen as such by most of the other peoples." That diversity stands in contrast with the Taliban, who are dominated by Afghanistan's majority Pashtuns. Panjshir's residents include a mix of ethnic Tajiks - like Massoud himself - along with Hazaras, a Shia Muslim minority, and others. Panjshir province - located about 80 miles northeast of Kabul, past the former U.S.-run Bagram Airfield and across the rugged Hindu Kush mountains - is a natural fortress against invaders. The ethnically mixed Panjshir is vulnerable The group is reportedly a coalition of militias and remnants of the Afghan army. It's difficult to gauge the strength of the self-styled National Resistance Forces led by Massoud. Saleh has called on his supporters to rally to Panjshir to continue the fight against the Taliban. Massoud recently has been joined in the Panjshir Valley by Amrullah Saleh, a former Afghan vice president who declared himself the country's rightful president after Ashraf Ghani fled as the Taliban took over Kabul. The U.K.-educated Ahmad Massoud (shown here in 2019) is the son of legendary commander Ahmad Shah Massoud and, like his father, is amassing resistance forces in Panjshir province. ![]()
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