Justice Warrior by Fatema Nushin

*“If we stop fighting, terrorism will spread all over the world.”*

## **Ahmad Shah Massoud- احمد شاه مسعود**

Ahmad Shah Massoud was an Afghan politician and military commander. He was a powerful guerilla 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 and, after the Taliban takeover, was the leading opposition commander against their regime, which he fought against until his assassination in 2001.  Massoud came from an ethnic Tajik, Sunni Muslim background in the Panjshir valley of northern Afghanistan. He began studying engineering at the Polytechnical University of Kabul in the 1970s, where he became involved with religious anti-communist movements around Burhanuddin Rabbani, a leading Islamist. He was part of 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 mujahideen insurgent leader earned him the nickname of "Lion of Panjshir" among his followers as he successfully resisted the Soviets from taking Panjshir Valley. In 1992 he signed the Peshawar Accord, a peace, and power-sharing agreement, in the post-communist Islamic State of Afghanistan, and was appointed as the Minister of Defense as well as the government's main military commander. His militia fought to defend the capital Kabul against militias led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and other warlords who were bombing the city—and eventually, the Taliban, who started to lay 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 eventually fled 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 in high-level meetings with the European Parliament urged leaders to pressure Pakistan on its support for the Taliban. He also asked for humanitarian aid to help the people's gruesome conditions under the Taliban. Massoud was assassinated at the instigation of al-Qaeda and Taliban in a suicide bombing on September 9, 2001.“ Massoud had warned the West about an impending attack and said if we stop fighting terrorism, the terrorism will spread all over the world. Said the European Parliament in 2001.” In which happened two days after his death, the September 11 attacks in the United States occurred, which led to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation invading Afghanistan, allying with Massoud's forces. His forces eventually won the two-month-long war in December 2001, removing the Taliban from power.

Massoud was posthumously named "National Hero" by Loya jirga ( Grand assembly) after the Taliban were ousted from power. The date of Massoud's death, September 9, is observed as a national holiday known as "Massoud Day". His followers call him Amer Sāhib-e Shahīd, which translates to " martyred commander." Massoud has been described as one of the greatest guerilla leaders of the 20th century and has been compared to Josip Broz Tito, Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara. One of the reasons for this was that he successfully managed to repeatedly defend his local Panjshir Valley from being taken by the Soviets and thereafter by the Taliban. This is one of the most important political movements in Afghanistan’s history. Because Ahmad Shah Massoud  "National Hero" was a founding father of the resistance against the Soviet invasion in the 1980s and then fought against the Taliban and al Qaeda in the 1990s. Because the Soviet army and the Afghan communist army were mainly defeated by Massoud and his mujahideen in numerous small engagements between 1984 and 1988. After describing the Soviet Union's military engagement in Afghanistan as "a bleeding wound" in 1986, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev began a withdrawal of Soviet troops from the nation in May 1988. On February 15, 1989, in what was depicted as an improbable victory for the mujahideen, the last Soviet soldier left the nation.

Ahmad Shah Massoud was a "National Hero '' and there is a holiday called Massoud day in Afghanistan many books and articles have been written about him and one of the books written about him called him Afghan Napoleon and he has many honors outside of Afghanistan. He has been posthumously honored by a plaque in France in 2021, and in the same year was awarded the highest honor in Tajikistan.

***And now his son Ahmad Massoud the leader of the Afghan National Resistance Front***

Ahmad Massoud in born 1989 is an Afghan politician who is the founder and President of the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan. He is the eldest son of anti-Soviet military leader Ahmad Shah Massoud. He was appointed as the CEO of Massoud Foundation in November 2016. On 5 September 2019, he declared his father's successor at his mausoleum in the Panjshir Valley.After attending high school in Iran, Massoud trained at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. In 2012, he commenced an undergraduate degree in war studies at King's College London, where he obtained his bachelor's degree in 2015. He obtained his master's degree in international politics from City, University of London in 2016. His undergraduate and postgraduate dissertation topics were the Taliban.Since March 2019, Massoud has officially entered politics, a widely anticipated move for one referred to in Panjshir as the "predestined." He has endorsed his father's idea of a Swiss model for internal power relations in Afghanistan, saying that the decentralization of government and the de-concentration of power from Kabul would give a more efficient allocation of resources and authority to provinces in the country, thereby bringing prosperity and stability to the country as a whole.

The National Resistance Front of Afghanistan (NRF), also known as the Second Resistance,  is a military alliance of former Northern Alliance members and other anti-Taliban fighters who remain loyal to the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, created after the 2021 Taliban offensive, under the leadership of Afghan politician and military leader Ahmad Massoud. The group exercised de facto control over the Panjshir Valley, which is largely contiguous with Panjshir Province and, as of August 2021, was "the only region out of the Taliban's hands".The alliance constitutes the only organized resistance to the Taliban in the country and is possibly planning an anti-Taliban guerilla struggle. The resistance has called for an "inclusive government" in Afghanistan; one of their objectives is speculated to be a stake in the new Afghan government. A mountainous region, Panjshir was a formidable base of operations for anti-Soviet fighters and later for the original Northern Alliance. It was the birthplace of anti-Soviet and Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud. Ahmad Shah Massoud's son, Ahmad Massoud, is widely seen as his successor. In July 2021, during the 2021 Taliban offensive, the remnants of the Northern Alliance began mobilizing under an umbrella called Resistance II. On 9 September, the NRF announced that a parallel government will be created in response to the Taliban's formation of its government in Kabul. It was announced on 29 September that Amrullah Saleh will lead the government in exile, according to a statement published by the Afghan Embassy in Geneva, Switzerland, which also backs the NRF. On 1 November, it was reported that the NRF has opened a liaison office in Washington DC after being registered with the US Justice Department in order to carry out lobbying missions to various politicians working in the city. On 23 November, Sibghatullah Ahmadi was appointed as the new spokesman of the NRF. The position was previously held by Mohammad Fahim Dashty, who was killed during the Taliban offensive into Panjshir on 5 September.