Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Massoud - An Intimate Portrait of The Legendary Afghan Leader
Massoud - An Intimate Portrait of The Legendary Afghan Leader
ISBN: 978-0-9821615-0-0
Image Gallery
Epilogue
Appendixes
Contributors
Glossary
References
I have read many books about Massoud,
the hero of my homeland and of my heart,
but Marcela’s book has reached my soul
and it has brought memories of 23 years of friendship,
of happy and not so happy moments,
and of the difficult times we spent together.
MASOOD KHALILI,
Afghan Ambassador in Spain and one of the
closest friends of Massoud
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My deepest gratitude . . .
Once upon a time, there was a man named Utta. He had his life well
organized, had a good job, and everything seemed to be in the proper
place in his world. Then one day, while he was strolling along a river,
he saw a man drowning. Before he could do anything, another man
jumped into the water, and, unseen by the drowning man, became a
floating log. This “log” drifted up to the man, who embraced it and
was able to get safely to shore. Then it continued floating down the
river, and soon became the mysterious stranger again.
This can only be Khidr, thought Utta. Remembering that the
legend said one must take hold of the bottom of Khidr’s robe to keep
him from disappearing, Utta ran forward, grabbed the edge of the
robe, which was still wet, and pleaded, “Please, please teach me!”
The man looked at him for a moment, then smiled, and said,
“Very well. Leave everything behind—work, family, and friends—and
meet me tomorrow at this very spot at this very hour.”
Utta went back to his village and did as Khidr had instructed.
Everybody thought he had gone mad, but he couldn’t explain. He
couldn’t even mention Khidr’s name, remember? The next day, when
he presented himself, the green one said, “Now, jump into the river.”
“But I cannot swim,” exclaimed Utta.
“You must obey without thinking,” said the mysterious one.
So Utta jumped in and had begun to drown when a fisherman
happened to rescue him. He was an illiterate man who immediately
understood that Utta was educated. “I’ll make a deal with you,” said
the fisherman. “You teach me to read, and I’ll provide you with room
and board.”
Utta remained with the fisherman for a year, learning all kinds of
things about fishing. Then one day at dawn, Khidr appeared at the
foot of his bed and, pointing to the road outside said, “Leave
immediately and take that road.”
Accustomed to the simplicity of his instructions by now, Utta did
as ordered. Soon he became lost. At a crossroads he met a shepherd.
After finding out that Utta had no particular purpose or destination,
the shepherd proposed that they could work together. Utta spent a
year with him and learned many things about sheep and wool. Then
Khidr appeared again and ordered him to leave everything behind and
go to Bokhara to become a green grocer.
Utta lived in Bokhara for several years, becoming successful as a
grocer, until one day Khidr appeared again. This time he said, “You
must leave everything behind and go to Samarkand to become a
carpet dealer.” Utta obeyed.
Several years passed, and he became a successful rug merchant.
Then a strange thing happened: people began to approach Utta,
asking him to teach them. People came from all over the world to see
him, and he became known as one of the important spiritual teachers
of his time.
Of course, when a great teacher appears, so do his biographers.
They came, wanting to know everything about Utta: with whom he
had studied and when and where. Utta agreed to tell them his story,
but since he was forbidden to speak the name of Khidr, he could not
mention the very thing that had been at the center of his development
and advancement. Instead, he repeated the bare facts: “I jumped in a
river, a fisherman saved me, I lived with him, fishing, for a year, then
I went down the road and met a shepherd who gave me housing in
exchange for my work with sheep. Then I left and went to Bokhara,
where I became a green grocer for several years. Finally, I came here,
where, as you can see, I sell rugs.”
But the bare facts of Utta’s life did not make much sense to the
biographers. They weren’t interesting or exciting. So they proceeded
to invent a biography—one which was more adequate, more uplifting,
and more becoming to such a great teacher.
And here we are, trying to do the impossible, trying to tell the life
story of Massoud without the secret element.
What cannot be named can only be traced by the perfume it leaves
behind.
May that perfume reach your heart.
1933 King Nadir Shah was assassinated, and his son, Mohammad
Zahir Shah, took the throne. Zahir Shah ruled for forty years.
1978 The PDPA assassinated Daoud and took over ruling power. Its
unpopular reforms and use of violence led to widespread
popular revolt. Massoud participated in one of the first
instances of revolt against the PDPA. The successful
insurrection occurred in the Nuristan Province in July of 1978,
and Massoud and other leaders determined that an open revolt
against the PDPA would be backed by the Afghan people.
Until this time, Afghanistan had been a popular tourist
destination for Europeans and other Westerners, beloved for
its beauty, hospitality, and rich cultural heritage. Many
travelers felt it was like no other place on earth and returned
time after time to partake of its exotic delights.
July 1979 Massoud returned to the Panjshir and, with the backing of the
people, rose up against the communist government. Massoud’s
forces were severely under-equipped and undermanned,
eventually leading to defeat. In addition to a leg injury,
Massoud emerged from the revolt with the belief that guerrilla
warfare was an essential tactic when fighting a better trained
and equipped army.
1999–2001 Massoud helped found the United Front (short for United
Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, also referred to
as the Northern Alliance, in the West and Pakistan) to battle
the growing power and dominance of the Taliban. The United
Front included diverse ethnic groups (Pashtun, Tajik, Usbek,
and Hazara). At times, the territory the United Front held was
reduced drastically by Taliban incursions, to perhaps as little
as 10 percent of Afghanistan.
During this period, the United Nations and most countries
continued to recognize the Rabbani government as the official
government of Afghanistan. Meanwhile, the Taliban leaders in
Kabul imposed increasingly punitive and vicious restrictions
upon ordinary Afghans, especially women. Amputations and
executions in the name of Islam became common.
2000 Massoud signed the Declaration of the Essential Rights of
Afghan Women in Dushambe, Tajikistan.
October–December After Taliban leaders refused the demands of the United States
2001 to extradite Osama bin Laden, American and British military
struck suspected Taliban and Al-Qaeda targets in Afghanistan.
The coalition then supplied ground forces, which joined with
the United Front and other anti-Taliban groups to oust the
Taliban and its leaders from power in Afghanistan.
In 1983, for the first time, we went to the north of Panjshir. Two
hundred people went, and fifteen or twenty of them were old people.
There was only one horse—Massoud’s. We had to walk for two days,
and I remember he took turns with these older people on the horse.
They rode for awhile and then he rode for awhile.
On the way, we arrived at a city, Khost-i-Freng, whose people
were expecting Massoud but didn’t know what he looked like. As we
walked into the city, a man named Mohammad Shah Khan happened
to be riding the horse, and Massoud was holding the reins as if he
were a servant. The townspeople thought that the man on the horse
was Massoud, and everybody was shaking his hand. We were
laughing because we knew that he wasn’t. Mohammad Shah Khan
wanted to get off the horse, but Massoud shook his head: “No, it’s
your turn.”
(Sher Dil Qaderi)
1
The family came to the Panjshir Valley from Samarkand, during the time of
King Timur Shah, around 1780. One of Massoud’s ancestors was a local chief
—a notable that was respected for having rendered services to the kingdom. In
fact, he was decorated twice with special documents signed by the king. These
remained in the family for many years. Another of his ancestors was a hero in
the war against the British, and Massoud’s father was an officer in the army,
so his family is one of the valley’s most significant ones.
When the communists invaded the Panjshir, the Soviet troops and their
Afghan Army burned down the family home. Sadly, all their documents were
burned in that fire, but over time we came to realize that Massoud had
surpassed all of his ancestors.
Among all of the voices that spoke to me, those of his
family resounded strongly with longing and love:
Mohammad Yahya, his older brother; Maryam, his
sister and herself a heroine of the Resistance; Ahmad
Wali, his youngest brother; Ahmad Zia, another
brother and presently vice president of Afghanistan;
and others. They talked with fervor about a man they
not only loved as a brother but also respected deeply
as their leader.
Although their stories were told at many times and
places, they gave me the sense that Massoud’s
brothers and sisters had gathered together to speak of
him to me, and I have presented their tales in this way,
as a sharing of memories.
YAHYA. Our father was famous in the Panjshir Valley because our
grandfather was famous. He had a title, “khan,” which means
“noble,” and he was an army officer and a devout man.
AHMAD WALI. Some of the things my brother learned were from him
—how devout he was, going to the mosque five times a day to become
strong spiritually. We learned positive things from him. But as far as
Massoud’s military career, I don’t think that came from our father. He
did not want Massoud to be in the Resistance or to become a military
leader.
YAHYA. Our father was not a poet, but he had many books about
poetry. When we were in Herat, Kabul, or Panjshir, he gave us private
teachers of literature and religion, because Hafiz [Khwaja Shamsu-d-
Din Muhammad-i-Hafiz], Bedil [Abdul Qadir Bedil], and other poets
are part of our culture. A lot of poets and wise men used to come to
our house to speak about prayers and to make comments about poets
and poetry. So from childhood we became acquainted with all that.
AHMAD WALI. But the main influence in Massoud’s life was our
mother, not our father. She was a very strong character. She was the
boss, and she was the one who made a strong impact on Massoud.
She was very sure of her principles. A woman of strong principles and
character.
MARYAM. Our mom had many special qualities. She did not go to
school, because in those times there were not many schools, especially
for women. Even if she never went to school, she taught herself to
write.
In smaller cities in Afghanistan, when there was a family problem
between a man and woman, they went always to an older person in
the town, and this person would decide for them, would tell them
what to do. But, when there were problems close to the family in our
town in the Panjshir, our father went to our mother and asked her,
“What do you think? How can we solve it?” It was always our mom
helping our dad. The good ideas came from mom.
THE BEGINNING
Here we are, all of us: in a dream-caravan.
A caravan, but a dream—a dream, but a caravan.
And we know which are the dreams.
Therein lies the hope.
—Bahaudin Naqshband, El Shah
THE JOURNEY
We spent a week traveling together, and at the end of that time he said
that he would tell me a lot of things to keep in mind when I went to
Europe and Peshawar. “You mean that I should leave Afghanistan?” I
asked, and he said that it would be better for me to go back and forth
between Peshawar, the world, and Afghanistan. So for six months I
would go all over Afghanistan and then I would be six months out of
the country.
But mostly I was with him, and I enjoyed that. I felt I had a friend
now who was worthy to be a friend—to love, respect, work for, and
always, when I was far away, to remember. When you have such a
friend and you admire and love him, then indeed you have the
motivation to fight for the cause. That is the irresistible attraction of a
leader in whom you believe, with whom you hope. In his eyes you see
the freedom of your country, of your people, of your own home.
Then, especially when he is honest, pious, and believes in people and
in liberty, you become proud of him. And then, you go through the
mountains a hundred times and you don’t feel it. You go with your
heart and you don’t get tired. That is the magnetism of a leader who is
such a friend that you feel him as part of your own soul, your own
heart, your own hope.
At one point he said, “Now you are really going to travel.” I had
gone out before through Bagram, which was flatter, easier, but this
time he said, “Why don’t you go through Nuristan?” My wife is from
Nuristan, and he knew that, so I said, “I will do that.” And then he
suggested, “I will give you everything, like for a picnic,” and he
counted the things with his fingers: “I will give you some rice, a mule,
some salt, some cooking oil, and that will do it.” I said, “Well, that
won’t be any picnic,” but he insisted, “It will be a marvelous five-star
picnic.” To go by mule on a ten-day walk through Nuristan—with the
lowest mountain more than thirteen thousand feet high and the
highest nearly twenty thousand feet—was a five-star picnic!
It was my first trip into Nuristan from the Panjshir. It took us two
days to reach the bottom of Paryam, and it was my first experience
being at the bottom of mountains so high, so gigantic, so rocky, so
rough, but oh, so beautiful. Like Sophia Loren—so rough but so
beautiful when she was fifty years old.
The trip was bad that first time, and we were so exhausted that we
never cooked the rice. It was hard going—ten days, seven high
mountains, and then all the other mountains and valleys, so deep that
it’s cold in July. There is snow in those mountains, and people die
from lack of oxygen. Even the mule could not go well. It was so cold,
and we had very thin blankets, no heaters, nothing—just the rice of
the Commander that we could not cook, and the cooking oil of the
Commander that we could not use, and the mule of the Commander
that we had to feed. Indeed, what the Commander gave us was not the
rice, not the mule, not the cooking oil, but beautiful, sweet,
unforgettable memories.
On this road, there are high mountains and passes like Sim Pass
and the Kantiwa Mountains and many more—all mountains, no flat
areas. I remember once that it was very cold and it was twilight, and
they wanted me to lead the prayers. It was the first time for me, and
we couldn’t find a big enough rock where five of us could stand, and
we couldn’t find a flat area, so we were facing down towards the river
rather than towards God. Suddenly, I was staggering and fell down. I
said, “Hold on. Take your prayers back because your mullah is down
now.” And everybody started laughing, we were all laughing. They
were holding their stomachs, and they asked, “What was that you told
us?” I said again, “Bye, bye. I am just going down, I don’t know
where, but you take your prayers back; I was not a good mullah for
you.” When I see my friends, we remember that.
Unfortunately, before reaching the last mountain I fell off the
mule. I could not jump down—it was a little bit high—so I brought
the mule close to a rock, and I jumped onto the rock. But the stupid
mule of the Commander left me when I got my legs down and I fell.
Really, I was more stupid than that mule, and I hurt my backbone.
Hasham, who now is the council general in Uzbekistan, had them put
me over a flat piece of wood. They strapped me to the wood, and they
put the wood on the back of the mule and for two days they carried
me that way. Each and every movement gave me a big pain; I could
feel everything that came under that mule’s feet. Any small rock and I
thought, ah that was a rock. And I would talk to the mule, “Please.”
We had no use for the rice, no use for the cooking oil, but we used the
mule. And that’s what happened the first time I went to Afghanistan.
I wrote in my diary that this man Massoud is impressive,
convincing; he has got something. Whether you want it or not, you
like him. That something I described was with Massoud throughout
his life; it was in his character. Many people fought to the death in
Afghanistan under his command, and not just because he was a big
commander. Once you were with him, you always wanted to be with
him.
(Masood Khalili)
3
ONE OF US
Oh rich man, if thou bring to God a hundred sacks of gold,
He will say, “Bring the Heart as a gift to My door:
Bring Me the Heart that is the Pole of the world
And the Soul of the soul of the soul of Adam!”
—Jalaluddin Rumi
HIS MEN
He trusted the men under his command and worked hard to maintain
their morale. He taught them ethics and piety more than military
issues, and he was kinder to them than a father, closer than a brother.
(Daoud Zulali)
WATCHING OVER THE TROOPS
When I joined the mujahideen in the Panjshir, I was with a group of
thirteen mujahideen staying in a house. Dinner was served. When we
were finished, Massoud checked to make sure that everyone had
enough, and then we prepared to sleep. Massoud had a room in the
same building. It was cold, maybe December or January, and at ten or
eleven when we were sleeping, Massoud came around to make sure
that everybody had blankets and enough clothes to stay warm through
the night. I have never seen a commander checking on his people like
that.
(Mohammad Shuaib)
BENDING LOW
When we went to Andarab, we crossed a very high mountain. On the
way we passed through a village where the people understood that
their hero would be coming. They were waiting, and they all wanted
to shake hands with Massoud. One man approached Massoud to kiss
his hand, and Massoud said, “I am not a shah; don’t do that,” and he
shook the man’s hand instead.
Massoud had been riding a horse, but three hundred meters before
the village he got off the horse. Why? He said, “If I see the people of
the village from a higher place it would not be proper, not polite.” So
he walked, and he shook the hands of each villager, down to the last
one. If I were the commander, maybe I would shake hands with one
or two, but he shook hands with everyone in the village.
In Afghanistan when people greet somebody they bend forward,
out of respect. When the village people bent before Massoud, he bent
even lower than they did. He did it with everybody. It was surprising
to me. He was a famous hero, and the others were village people,
unknown people, but he showed respect to every one.
(Hiromi Nagakura)
NO WALL
They told me this story after Massoud’s assassination:
When he was building his house in the Panjshir, there was to be a
wall between his house and the house of the lady who was his
neighbor. And there was a willow tree that grew from the lady’s yard,
leaning on Massoud’s wall and preventing him from completing it.
He went to the lady and asked her, “Would you let me cut some
branches off your tree so I can straighten the wall and build it
higher?” The lady said, “No,” and this man, a commander and the
defense minister with all his power, he just came back disappointed
and didn’t do anything more about it.
(Farid Amin)
THE ROOMMATE
When we had training, we all stayed in the same compound, and
sometimes we slept in the same room. While we were actually
training, Massoud was the trainer, but when we were in the house, he
was just a roommate. If we cooked, he cooked with us; if we washed
the dishes, he washed the dishes; when we cleaned the room, he
cleaned the room. Afterwards, when we would go to gather wood for
cooking, he would go with us. Even when we went to play baseball or
soccer, he played with us.
He was with us from 5 in the morning until almost 4 in the
afternoon, and then he would go to the city to work, to take care of
the business of the villages and the problems in his office. He would
work there until 2 or 3 in the morning, walk in the mountains, and
then sleep a few hours. While I was there, I heard that he did not sleep
more than four hours a night because he was always working.
(Sher Dil Qaderi)
THE LISTENER
If you had a problem, in your home or whatever, you would go to talk
to Massoud, and he would always listen. No matter whether it was a
kid or a hundred-year-old man, when people came to him, he listened.
He never said, “I am the leader, and this is your problem.” He took as
much time as you needed, and if you had a suggestion he would hear
that too. When he was walking and found a kid of eight or ten years
old he stopped; he never passed them by. If the child had some
question or idea he would listen. He encouraged that; he would say,
“It is a good idea. We should talk about it.” He was a real friend to
people. That made him different.
As long as I live, the memories are with me. I am one of the lucky
people who spent time with Massoud.
(Sher Dil Qaderi)
I SAW HIS FACE
Massoud gave me a gun, but he said, “You do not think, and someday
a mine will blow you up.” The time came when the Russians
withdrew from the Panjshir and left mines in a place called Rokha.
The local people started to clean them out, and I remembered what
Massoud had said. Then, there was the mine under my feet.
I remember opening my eyes and Massoud was there. He came to
see me when they were going to cut my leg. I wasn’t feeling anything
at that time, but when I saw Massoud I suddenly felt all the pain and
started to cry. He said, “Take him to a hospital and I will be there
soon.”
They took me to a hospital in Malaspa. When I was on the
operating table, I saw Massoud’s face again, then I passed out. After
three days, when they gave me the news of the amputation of my leg,
Massoud came to my room. I looked at him and started to cry again.
He said, “Don’t worry, you will walk again.” He talked about fixing
the leg and other stories so I would focus on something else. While I
was recovering, I was very happy every time I woke up to find myself
looking into Massoud’s eyes.
(Commander Gul Haidar)
LIKE A KING
He had so much popularity in Afghanistan that he could have lived
like a king, but he chose not to. He washed his own clothes, even his
socks. He was as down to earth as he could be with people, to make
sure they understood that it was not about power, it was about
working for people, defending people. He would insist, “This is not
about ‘I am the commander, you are not; I am at the top, you are
not.’”
(Sher Dil Qaderi)
NOT WORTH IT
Massoud was somebody who never, for one second, wanted to lose
anybody. He tried his best to avoid casualties. He was the master of
that; whether it was a commander, a civilian, or a soldier, it didn’t
matter. To avoid casualties was the most important thing. The soldiers
and the commanders knew that.
So many times the commanders insisted that they wanted to carry
out a military operation, but Massoud would say no. The
commanders would say, “We can do this. If we have casualties, they
will be very minor.” But Massoud said, “It is not worth it.”
(Ahmad Wali Massoud)
EVERY ONE
I remember after the first operation in which I took part in Farkhar, a
lot of young people had been killed. I saw that Massoud was very sad,
but he never cried, he never talked about it, and he was present at the
burial ceremony of every one of those young mujahideen.
(Daoud Mir)
“We walked back to the spot where we had met Massoud and found
him stretched out under a tree, having a nap. One of the Mujahedin
tiptoed up and gently covered him with a pattu.”
(Sandy Gall, Afghanistan: Agony of a Nation, London: The Bodley
Head, 1988, 177)
4
THE COMMANDER
A soft breeze touches the purple flower.
My eyes weep a river of tears.
Today my gazelle is burning with grief.
Oh God, break the arm of the butcher.
—Khalilullah Khalili
There is an old Afghan saying that anyone who wants to conquer Afghanistan
should beware, because under every rock of every mountain lies a sleeping
lion. When Massoud was fighting the Soviets, they said, “And the lion is
Ahmad Shah Massoud.”
—Roger Plunk, The Wandering Peacemaker (Charlottesville, Va.: Hampton
Roads, 2000).
THE CHANGE
Whenever Massoud stayed for more than one or two days in a place,
the Russians would start bombing that area, showing how strong their
intelligence was. He sometimes hid himself and his group for a week
or two, even from the rest of his fighters, to divert the enemy’s
attention and to get away so he could pray and find a little solitude.
In his first appearance after he had been hiding for some days, a
drastic change would be visible in his face. His eyes would have a
sleepy look, his cheeks would be rosy, he would have a more humble
step, and would speak more softly.
(Daoud Zulali)
STRATEGIC VISIT
Near a Russian base in the Panjshir, there was a Hezb commander
[short for Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami Party], and he was in contact
with the Russians. Massoud knew it and went to see him, showing his
connection with the man so the Russians thought this Hezb man was
playing it both ways. In fact, Massoud had no prior relationship with
him, but his visit stopped the game that commander was playing with
the Soviets.
(Farid Amin)
THE CHALKBOARD
One day I saw Massoud in the middle of this room that he had inside
of the mountain; at the end there was chalk and a blackboard. He was
reading books and walking back and forth, back and forth, putting
down marks: enemy, us, military strength, morale, resources, territory,
terrain, accessibility, foreign channel supplies, domestic channel
supplies. He put down all the positives and negatives so he could see
exactly where we stood.
In his mind, he divided the war into four stages. The first stage was
self-initiation—you mount the first resistance. You move from that to
strategic defense, then to strategic offense, and to national cohesion,
which is the entire nation coming together. In order to achieve the
final stage, you must work out the details at the beginning. You must
work on each stage and be able to guide your men by example—by
stories, by ethics, by teachings, by movements, by caring—all those
different elements.
(Haron Amin)
LOSING GROUND
We were in the Shamali Plains at one of the bases in 1996. Tony Davis
[an Australian journalist] asked Massoud, “Would you ever flee
Kabul?” Massoud said, “For me, the ground is not important. I know
my territory, and I know how to take it back. If I flee, it will be to
avoid harm to the people and, second, not to lose my fighters or my
guns.” You could see in his eyes, hear in his words, that he knew
exactly what terrain was in his hands, that there was no issue with
taking land or losing it. You knew that as long as he was there and
had the people to fight, he would take it back.
(Farid Amin)
AN INVISIBLE ENEMY
Guerrilla warfare is taking the war to the enemy; you don’t let them
bring the war to you. You organize and attack at point A. The enemy
tries to recapture point A, and you attack point B and point C so that
their resources are divided. If you lose point A, B, and C at the same
time, you withdraw your forces and what do you do? You attack
points D, E, F, G, and H, so the enemy thinks, “My God, I have an
enemy that is invisible and yet I keep losing people!”
Massoud mastered guerrilla warfare in the mountains of
Afghanistan. Nobody had done that before. When you are in flat land,
you have a certain ratio of the enemy resources versus yours. The
enemy has advantages: It has airplanes, helicopters, tanks, armored
personnel carriers, heavy artillery, battalions and platoons and
companies. What you do is, you attack the base from out of the
mountains, and then you move back into them.
Then, from these positions in the mountains what do you do?
Every hour or forty minutes, in no specific order, you shoot one
rocket so the enemy cannot sleep at night and during the day. The
enemy is not familiar with the territory, so you begin to play
psychological games.
As the enemy goes up in the mountain to claim the high positions,
what do you do? Very simple; you go farther up. Up in these steep
valleys, the enemy does not have support. Tanks are not able to come
up, the enemy does not have armored personnel carriers, the heavy
weapons are not with them. Now it is the enemy with light weapons
and you with light weapons. If it is a hundred against thirty, you split
your team ten-ten-ten. Then the enemy of each of your groups is
thirty. You take it further, and you divide each ten into three-three-
four and the enemy of each becomes ten. Then you choose which of
the ten you want to shoot.
So you take the war to the enemy, and you do it for a long period
of time because it is your land. Your ancestors were born there and
you are going to stay there. Time is on your side, but the enemy wants
to finish right away. This is what Massoud did.
(Haron Amin)
According to central reports, the resistance of mujahideen in the Panjshir Valley has
been crushed and all areas have come under Russian control. Since resistance has
ceased there, the Islamic Unity of Mujahideen of Afghanistan can no longer send aid
to the Panjshir Front.
With a smile on his face, Massoud had said at that time, “When
we started this path, we asked our God for help. We took this task up
for His sake. We will see what God Almighty does about this.” In a
very short but extremely hard period he restructured his forces,
proved himself a most powerful military force, and expanded his
territory beyond the Panjshir Valley to five other provinces.
(Daoud Zulali)
THE THIRST
He was an extremely good commander, and he read—he knew his
stuff. Once, I brought Massoud a book from a Swiss commander
about guerrilla warfare, and he asked me to bring him other books. I
would bring him books about the American Revolution and how the
American soldiers conducted their guerrilla warfare against the
British. He did not care if something was in English, French, or
another language. He would try to read it or ask somebody to
translate it. He had an incredible thirst for knowledge.
(Edward Girardet)
WAR GAME
He was an excellent chess player, and chess is a great school of war
because you are dispassionate. You do not blame the chess pieces for
acting the way they do, you accept the terrible limitations, and you
can see abstract patterns very clearly. That was the way Massoud’s
mind worked. It’s my conclusion from the way we played together. He
always had a portable chess set with him.
(Professor Michael Barry)
“There was a total of three destroyed tanks; Massoud thought they all
could be salvaged. One was stuck in an alleyway between two houses,
and the young commander said the passageway was too narrow for
them to drag it out. ‘Buy the houses, destroy them, and get it out,’
Massoud said. ‘Get two more tanks from Rostaq; that’s five. Paint
them like new and show them on the streets so people will see them.
Then the Taliban will think we’re getting help from another
country.’”
(Sebastian Junger, Fire, New York: Harper Collins, 2002)
THE BEST NEWS
When I was working in Peshawar, part of my work was to get the
news from the mujahideen and give it to the media. We were getting
at least a hundred reports from commanders all over Afghanistan
about attacks and casualties, but we checked how reliable they were in
terms of the casualties of Russians, because the Afghans tend to
exaggerate. If it was one tank, they might say ten; if there were two
soldiers they might say two hundred.
When the information was coming from Massoud, we knew that
we didn’t have to check. We gave the news reports that came from
him directly to the BBC, Voice of America, Reuters, Associated Press,
local news agencies, and they all knew that Massoud did not
exaggerate. He didn’t try to add things, and he included the
weaknesses of himself and his group. We trusted him completely, and
the media did too.
(Mohammad Shuaib)
MY WAY TO MASSOUD
A thing which is not to be found—that is my desire . . .
—Jalaluddin Rumi
(R.A. Nicholson, ed., Selected Poems from the Divani Shamsi Tabriz,
Cambridge: University Press, 1952)
WE HAD BRUNCH
I left Afghanistan when I was eleven years old because of the Russians,
and the first time I came back was in 1999. I made the trip because I
founded my own entity, Afghanistan Live On, to open schools for
women and girls, clinics, and other programs for women in
Afghanistan. Now we have five or six schools all around the country,
we have a little clinic and a women’s magazine called Rose, an Afghan
magazine with Afghan journalists, helped by Elle France. We have a
lot of projects.
The first time I met Massoud was when I came back. I was in
Tajikistan, and I wanted to go to Afghanistan and see what had
happened. I wanted to get inside because it would be the first time I
would be back in my country and the first time I would go into the
area of the Panjshir to tell the story that it was never conquered by the
enemy, but was free. Unfortunately, on the twelfth of July in that
summer the Taliban tried to attack the Panjshir. It was a hard period,
and Massoud was very busy on the front line.
I started with some schools. I went to the refugee camps, and I
talked with people there, and after three days I asked, “Why can’t I
meet Massoud?” [It was Massoud’s rule to see visitors only after three
days, so they could visit refugee camps, hospitals, and schools before
meeting him.] The people said, “Because he is at the front line.”
I was the guest of Massoud’s family in Badharak, in his home with
his wife, who is now a good friend of mine. After three days I asked
his wife’s brother to call Massoud, because I wanted to see him before
leaving for Paris. He called, and Massoud said, “No, I am very
occupied in the front line. It’s good that she came to help the women,
but unfortunately I cannot see her.” So I took the phone.
At this time I didn’t know him, and I wasn’t a big fan like, “Wow,
Massoud!” For me he was a commander like other commanders. I
asked to meet him because if I wanted to come back, I needed to
know what he was doing for people, for women. He said, “I am so
sorry I can’t come. As you know we are at war.” And I replied, “Do
you think it’s easy for me to come from France, for thousands and
thousands of kilometers? And you can’t come fifty kilometers to meet
me?”
In the room where I spoke to him there were three or four men,
and all those men said, “Oh my God, don’t speak like that to the
Commander!” But Massoud must have thought, this girl is not afraid
and she speaks like a normal person to me, because he said, “Okay,
then. Tomorrow morning.”
We had brunch together in the morning. We talked, and I said, “I
am twenty-four years old, I have finished all my studies, and I want to
have my own organization. I want to help with women and schools.”
And I was very surprised when he said, “Of course. I want women
like you to come back and help women with clinics and schools.”
If I am trying to do a lot for my country today, it is because of my
first meeting with Massoud, because he was so open-minded. He
knew everything from all around the world. We talked for an hour,
and then he said, “Okay, then you will come back in two months with
help for the women.” In three months I came back with a little help
and some projects.
He was not just a commander. We could speak about women’s
rights, schools, everything. Every time he saw me he said, “You are
very courageous. I think you are one of the women that I admire the
most.”
That’s what I am trying to explain to you. Sometimes people think
that Massoud was not open to women. If he was not open to women,
how could he have worked with a young woman who had grown up
in France and had come back like that? How could we have worked
together for years?
(Chekeba Hachemi)
ON A WHITE HORSE
The very first time I met Massoud, in 1984, I was with Tony Davis,
who had met him before. We were walking with the mujahideen, the
sun was going down, and its light was reflected on the mountains.
Suddenly they all stopped. There was a commotion, and they said,
“Massoud is coming. You are very, very lucky.” And along came
Massoud on a white horse, like some kind of ancient knight.
He stopped and said hello and was incredibly cheerful. Then he
leaned down and looked straight at me and said: “Now, would you
like to have a ride on the horse? Why don’t I give the horse to you and
I will walk? Are you tired?”
It was weird. You have to understand that Massoud was very
much “the man”; everything revolved around him. I had planned for
six months to make this trip with Tony, and he had been telling me
that Massoud was the savior of Afghanistan, that there was no
guerrilla commander who could come close to him. When he turned
up in the late afternoon dusk with the light in pink rays reflecting off
the mountain, it was all just too much.
So I was completely taken aback and said, “No, no. I could not
dream of taking your horse. I am very happy to walk.” He said,
“Well, if you are sure, then I will meet you in Dasht-i-Rewat and we
will have a good chat,” and he disappeared into the distance. It was a
very romantic introduction, and the most memorable moment of my
life.
(Chris Hooke)
I CANNOT EXPLAIN
I didn’t direct myself to Afghanistan from Algeria, thousands of miles.
I hadn’t learned about Massoud before in school. How lucky I was
that God sent me from Algeria to the inside of Afghanistan, to this
man! How lucky I was that when I went to Peshawar I didn’t come
under the influence of Hekmatyar. I could have become part of the
Arab forces which fought with Hekmatyar against Massoud.
Even today, I feel that I have energy preserved from Massoud from
the first time I met him in 1984. In my political life, in my business
life, in my relationships, with my enemies and friends, Massoud is a
light and a resource of energy for me. There are many things inside my
heart that I cannot explain to you in an academic way; he is like an
energy in my life.
When I first met Massoud, I went not to live with him but to give
him a report about one of his commanders. When I saw him,
something happened in my heart, and I decided that this was my
place, that I was going to stay for the rest of my life with this man. I
decided that in the first minute I saw him.
I wasn’t a political or military expert or a businessman; I was
twenty-four years old, and I don’t know what Massoud had that made
me stay, but when I met him I felt this special situation. When I tried
to find the reason, I found only one: thank God for giving me this
opportunity.
(Abdullah Anas)
A WARRIOR’S WILL
Can you walk on water? You have done no better than a straw.
Can you fly through the air? You are not better than a gnat.
Conquer your heart—then you may become somebody.
—Kwaja Abdullah Ansari of Herat (1005–1090)
NO SECRETS
One day, there were reporters in the room waiting to interview
Massoud, and he needed to meet with his commanders. When the
commanders arrived, he asked one of them, “Did you get those
guns?” The man responded yes, and Massoud asked him how many. I
think the man said six Kalashnikovs.
“Only six?”
“Yes.”
So Massoud picked up the walkie-talkie and contacted the
commander who had delivered the weapons. After saying assalam
aleikum to him, Massoud said suddenly into the radio, “You thief!”
“What are you saying?” we heard the commander ask. He
sounded scared.
Massoud said, “How many guns did you deliver?” The man told
him. Then, “Didn’t I tell you to give him such and such a number?
Why didn’t you give him the number I told you?”
The point that I am trying to make is that Massoud was not one
who hid anything. In front of the cameras, reporters, and other
commanders he called that commander a thief. Massoud was a man
who dealt with reality, not one of those generals who defend his
people at any cost.
(Farid Amin)
EIGHT GUYS
I had an extraordinary hour watching Massoud yell at his
commanders for making mistakes in a battle. They really looked like
schoolboys. Some of them were twenty years older, but they were like
ten years old with Massoud. What’s interesting is that afterwards,
Reza Deghati, the photographer that traveled with me, told me what
happened, but for two hours he allowed me to just watch people’s
body language, to watch Massoud talk and watch the others react.
Those are the kinds of things that you are blind to if you listen to
words; I was kind of forced to take it in visually.
It was an impressive sight, these twenty men, some in their sixties,
some in their twenties, all very capable in what they do. But some of
them had not followed Massoud’s battle plan, and, I think, eight guys
had been wounded by land mines. Probably half of them died. I saw
those guys right after they were wounded, and it was the most
horrible thing.
Massoud was just furious. It was his respect for people. These
were just the sons of peasants, just good soldiers in a militia. I have
been in wars in Africa and all over the place, and commanders don’t
care about those guys, but Massoud was furious. I was very impressed
with the concern that he had for these guys who were just very poor
people, twenty-year-old soldiers who had no say in anything.
(Sebastian Junger)
SPECIAL FAVOR
I think the most important thing about Massoud was his face. It was
so strong, and the way he looked at people. But this was only the
façade. The real thing is that when you started talking with him, you
immediately understood the power of the man—the power that was
behind his eyes and behind his face—the integrity of the person. He
never compromised; he never once compromised. He was very
straight, and he never played dirty political games.
One day, the chief of a village came to him. He said, “I need to ask
a favor. My son is twenty years old and he did something wrong. He
wounded someone.” He asked Massoud to get his son out of trouble,
out of jail. Massoud looked at him and said, “You know, until now I
thought you were a good commander and a good governor of your
region, but you have made me change my opinion about you.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because if you are asking me to do this for your son, it means
that your son may have done something against the law, and the judge
will decide about that, not me. We have a judge, we have a court—
people that take care of this. If your son is guilty he will go to prison;
if he is not guilty he won’t go to prison. But if you ask me to get him
out of trouble, you are a corrupt person and you may do other wrong
things.”
Not only did Massoud dismiss the idea of releasing the man’s son,
he also dismissed the man from his government post.
(Reza Deghati)
MY FAMILY IS HERE
There was a point where Massoud was cut off in the Panjshir and
surrounded by the Taliban and doing badly. The Taliban really had
him surrounded, and it was a very, very bad situation. They were
confident that they had finally got him.
Massoud had the freedom to fly out of Afghanistan anytime; he
had helicopters to go back and forth to see his family, which was in
Dushanbe. This time, he sent the helicopter to Dushanbe, got his wife
and children, and brought them into Afghanistan to be with him. He
wanted to make a statement to his men and the Taliban that he wasn’t
even considering surrender, because once your men start to wonder if
their commander is thinking about other possibilities—like maybe I
can escape from this, maybe I should negotiate this—the whole thing
falls apart. He brought in his family, and he said, “Your families are
stuck here. Now my family is here with me. We are not going to lose
it. We are not going to surrender.”
The Taliban were absolutely shocked. It made them reassess if he
was as weak as they thought he was, and in the end it worked.
Imagine an American military commander doing that!
(Sebastian Junger)
SOMETHING OF HIMSELF
The calm with which he conducted himself in the most violent
situations, amidst the most barbaric things that you find in wartime!
And he succeeded in imparting this calm to his troops. Look at how
Massoud’s troops returned from an operation—there was no dancing,
joy, or applause. They accomplished the duty that they had to
accomplish for the sake of what they loved. This is how Massoud
succeeded, because he was able to impart something of himself to his
troops.
(Humayun Tandar)
Give me that man
That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him
In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart,
As I do thee.
—William Shakespeare (Hamlet, 3.2.69-71)
7
A SENSE OF FREEDOM
Everywhere near Massoud’s bases there were medical clinics. For the
first time in the history of Afghanistan, in these remote places he cared
about the moms. The mothers who were pregnant were always losing
babies, and they could go to those clinics and learn about maternity
issues.
He wanted people to be educated, to know that education is the
primary thing in a person’s life, because he knew its importance. It
empowers you to read, and then you get access to human history. You
can read from Cicero to Churchill, from Homer to Shakespeare. You
can read books that give you unlimited access to knowledge. A sense
of freedom—this is what Massoud was about in all aspects of life.
(Haron Amin)
MY PLAN
I was lacking English, and, because of my experience in Afghanistan, I
knew that there was a need for people to be trained in political
administration. When I was going to France, I spoke with Massoud on
the phone. He asked me what was my plan, and I told him that I was
going to study for two or three years to learn English and
administration so I could be helpful.
He said that in the country there was plenty of fighting, but there
was a need for education of young people. Massoud wanted to
educate them but there were no professors in the north. He said he
needed educated people, and he told me that if I needed money for my
education he was willing to pay. I said no, because I know that my
country is poor, but Massoud would have given money to help
anyone.
(Haroun Mir)
WHO’S ASKING?
Journalists who have met him can tell you that they would interview
him and he would answer questions, but more than answering
questions, he would ask questions of them about things that he was
thinking about. He was constantly trying to see the totality.
(Dr. Abdullah Abdullah)
TEN THOUSAND CHILDREN
Massoud loved children. He believed that they were the future of the
country and the world. He loved them so much that, despite the tough
financial situation, he provided schools for my children and the others
in Tajikistan whose families were in the Resistance. He provided funds
and established schools for ten thousand Afghan children. He always
made sure that the teachers were paid on time, and he specifically
indicated that the children needed TV programs, not only for
education, but also for entertainment.
(Sayed Ahmad Hamed Noori)
IT’S A MASSACRE
Even as the war continued, Massoud paid attention to everything:
people, women, the environment. In the north of Afghanistan we have
big rivers. Before the fighting against the Soviet Union, people used to
fish in them, but afterwards they started to use grenades. Why?
Because there was not enough food and people were hungry, the
fighters were hungry, and they could get more fish using a grenade.
Massoud ordered that this not be done, and he warned that if
anybody used grenades or explosives they would be fined a thousand
Afghanis and sentenced up to a month in jail. He said, “It’s not
fishing, it’s a massacre.”
He also ordered that the trees not be cut. We did not have gas or
electricity, so some fighters cut trees for heat, but Massoud controlled
that very strictly, and he had good intelligence information about it,
too.
(Salih Registani)
OLD ENOUGH
I went to Farkhar, where Massoud’s education center was. The
training was military and political. He was trying to make sure people
knew why we were fighting. In three months of training I learned
more than in four years in the university. I learned about myself as a
human being.
Every week Amer Saheb came to check on the course, and he
would give us a talk to make our hearts confident. Once we were in
the mosque, and I was sitting close to the mumbar, where the imam
directs the prayers. Massoud sat right in front of me, and he started to
talk. The mosque was full of muhasseleen (graduate students). He
noticed that there were some who were very young, and I was one of
them. He said, “We will send back all the people who are very young.
They need to be at home.”
He sent the young ones home, but I did not go because I had a
passion to be with Ahmad Shah and to work with him. I stayed, and
later I would see Massoud, and he would smile at me because I was so
young and had tried so hard to stay. He said, “I don’t want you young
people to have the idea that this is just about fighting. I want you to
be the leaders of the future and be able to help people.”
(Eisa Khan Ayoob Ayoobi)
SARICHA
Massoud had the gift of vision. He was always thinking twenty or
thirty years ahead. For example, I remember in 1980 he was talking
about building a canal to bring water to a place called Saricha. He
wanted to make that place green. There is nothing there, just the
mountains and a tree, that’s all.
I remember there was a breakfast at my house and he was talking
with my father about how to bring water to three villages from a
source fifteen miles to the north. My father said, “Why do you want
to bring water?” And Massoud said that some day it would be a place
where visitors came for vacations. This is happening right now—
people from all over the world go there to visit Massoud’s grave.
(Sher Dil Qaderi)
TO LEAD A NATION
Everybody calls Massoud amir. It is a spiritual word in Islam, which means
“leader,” and Amer Saheb means “respected amir.”
—Abdullah Anas
BUILDING BRIDGES
Massoud was very talented in his sense of long term—thinking about
what to do today, what should be done throughout the year, and that
this year’s actions are part of what needs to be done in the next five
years. So bit by bit we moved towards the goals.
There was a health committee in the Panjshir, and there was a
reconstruction committee! What was reconstruction at that time?
Building a small bridge so the locals could walk one hour, instead of
three hours to the big bridge. There were education, cultural, and
military, and perhaps one or two other committees. As he liberated
more areas, the committees spread their work into them. Then he had
representatives for each committee in Peshawar. He had the
representatives get in touch with non-government organizations and
international organizations which were helping in their particular
fields.
In each village there was a shura [council]. Somebody with
religious significance—an elder, a commander, or somebody educated
—would be in charge of the shura, and for everything that affected the
life of that village, those people had to be consulted. Moving up the
chain of command to the district and the councils, it wasn’t just
military thinking and military organization.
(Dr. Abdullah Abdullah)
“Masud . . . explained how his guerilla movement was based around
twenty qarargahs [military posts] in the Panjsher. Each qarargah had a
group of about thirty mujahideen for self-defence . . . and another
mobile group of thirty—a strike force that could operate anywhere
inside or outside the Panjsher. In turn, each qarargah was divided into
political, military, economic, law and health sections, and each had a
council of ten elected villagers to advise the Commander.”
(Gall, Behind Russian Lines, 155)
ORDINARY PEOPLE
His leadership was not a material thing. He started in an innocent way
at the university and made a moral commitment to defend his country
and to pave the way to a democratic government. He trusted the
people; he believed that when they get together they can come up with
good solutions.
Once in the early stages, he said, “Maybe one day a bomb will
come and kill us, so let’s make this war against the invader a thing
that will endure, and the best way to do that is to get ordinary people
involved. If we ask these people to send their representatives, then if
we get killed, others will be involved to take our places—new, young
people.”
(Engineer Mohammed Eshaq)
TWO POLITICIANS
For many politicians, politics is first and the people come behind it.
Politics dictates that they kill people and destroy things, and they do
it. The objective is power. Power is their god, and they will use any
means to obtain it.
There are very few exceptions, like Massoud, where the people
were in front and politics came behind. Massoud was serving
humanity, for peace, for dignity, not to be the leader or the president
of this country.
(Mohammad Yahya Massoud)
NOT MY JOB
The big countries had some plans for Afghanistan because we beat the
Russians, but Massoud told all of them, the United States, the British,
the Europeans, “Contact our foreign ministry; that’s not my job.
Because we are now an independent country, your foreign minister
has to speak with ours. I have no time to speak with you secretly.”
Because the United States helped during the war against the
Russians, after that they wanted something from Afghanistan, but Mr.
Massoud did not accept it because he was different. In my opinion, if
he had, he would not have died, but they would have had anything
they wanted in Afghanistan.
(Ahmad Jamshid)
TAKING POWER
The higher you go, if you are an honest man, the better you serve your
country, serve humanity. The prophets were the highest. They did not
accept worldly power, because they were higher than that and could
serve people through spiritual means, but Commander Massoud was
not the kind of person to avoid taking power. He was in favor of it—
at the right time, with the right means, and for the right reasons. He
was just not the kind of person that had the thirst for power.
(Masood Khalili)
A GOVERNMENT DIVIDED
Massoud did not like the idea of a federal government divided among
different ethnic groups. He thought there should be one government
that treated all people fairly. In this he was different than Dostum, the
Hazaras, and some others. It was his belief that if a government were
divided among the ethnic groups, foreign influences would cause
tension and discord among those groups.
(Engineer Mohammed Eshaq)
“For three days he recounted to his staff his trip and the result of his
interviews. He was enthusiastic about his conversations with the
officials and the Afghans of the Diaspora. ‘I transmitted my message
and they all understood it,’ he kept saying. He had the euphoric
sensation of having accomplished his duty. More than ever he aimed
for the solidarity of the whole country, and less than ever did he want
to hear about Uzbeks, Pashtuns, Tajiks, and Hazaras.”
(Sediqa Massoud, quoted in Chekeba Hachemi and Marie-
Françoise Colombani, Pour l’Amour de Massoud [Paris: XO Editions,
2005], 226; translated from French by Michele Mattei, with the
assistance of Arlette Croels Decker)
PRODUCT OF AFGHANISTAN
Massoud was very much an amazing product of Afghanistan, and
Afghan culture is a very elegant culture. I think a lot of Westerners
might find that difficult to understand, because they associate
Afghanistan with poverty and fighting and weapons. But the Afghan
culture is a very refined culture.
(Anthony Davis)
SHOWERED BY CHOCOLATES
Massoud liked the poetry of my father very much. Once he asked me
if I remembered a certain poem. It was a very simple poem, between
classic and modern. It was something like this:
A VITAL NEED
My father spent most of our money on the best books: Saadi, Hafiz,
Bedil, Attar, Rumi. He was very interested in books, and all our gifts
were books. Massoud was busy with his studies in the university, but
even when he was busy he always had books. My father told us, “I
have a library, and you have to use it.” All the children did. One was
interested in Saadi, the other in Hafiz, another in Bedil. The whole
family read a lot.
At the beginning of the jihad, Massoud was always in the
mountains. When he came back, we, his sisters, wanted to wash his
clothes. He had a backpack—every mujahid had a backpack in the
Panjshir—and when we took his clothes to wash them, he had always
three or four books in the backpack. He was very busy with the war,
but he found time to read. It was like when you need to eat, reading
was for him an important need—essential, vital.
Once, early in the war, the mujahideen had to go up into the
mountains. We had to go with the whole family. Somebody from
France gave us a place to stay, and Massoud made one room only for
books, like a library. He had, like, six boxes of books at this time. He
had to take them all.
(Maryam Massoud)
“He often recited that poem to me, for I adored guessing his
thoughts and anticipating his desires.
“I particularly liked a poem by Simin Bahbahani that spoke of
waiting:
A KIND HEART
Holy God of absolute power and wisdom,
I have this request of Your infinite grace:
Whoever’s been the recipient of Your kindness,
May his dignity be life-long. Don’t take it away.
—Khalilullah Khalili
NO PROBLEM
We always slept in the same room; times were difficult, and we didn’t
have separate rooms. It was around one or two in the morning when I
finished my turn as a guard and went back to the room. One of our
friends was snoring, and I saw Massoud awake, lying on his back and
holding his hat over his ears with both hands. I thought he must not
want to wake up this friend and tell him, I can’t sleep, go to other
room, so I went to wake him up myself.
Massoud asked, “Is it his turn?” I said, “No, but he is snoring.”
Then I lied; I said that the man had asked me to wake him up in case
he snored because he didn’t want to bother his friends. But Massoud
said, “No, don’t touch him, don’t bother him. It’s no problem.” Our
friend probably snored until morning.
(Salih Registani)
TEARS
One night, in answer to someone’s question, Massoud told us, “There
were only two instances in the war when I cried. I will never forget
them.
“When Chernenko was president of the Soviet Union, there were
fierce air and land assaults by the Red Army and infantry, and cruel
armored onslaughts backed by field tanks. In order to avoid genocide,
we ordered the evacuation of the Panjshir Valley. The refugees,
particularly those in Kabul, were troubled by financial difficulties,
unemployment, and pressure from a regime which called them
‘Panjsheri refugees.’ After four or five months Russian attacks
declined, and representatives of the refugees asked that they be
allowed to return. We said yes.
“Less than a month later, our intelligence informed us of another
vast Russian attack being planned on Panjshir. Thousands of Russian
soldiers, tens of jets and gunship helicopters, artillery, field tanks, and
armored vehicles were to participate. The attack would start in a week
or ten days. I had no remedy but to order the area to be re-evacuated.
Refugees were still returning to their homes, and some had just
arrived, including children, women, the elderly, and the sick.
Tolerating the news to re-evacuate was such a hard thing for them.
Not able to walk and not having any money, many just sat beside the
road, put their heads on their knees, and cried. Seeing this filled my
eyes, too, with tears, and I prayed to God to bestow his mercy and
grace upon them.
“The second time was after the cease-fire. The Russians attacked
the Panjshir Valley with all their might and conquered almost all the
surrounding areas. There were constant killing, unending
bombardments, and burning houses and trees full of fruit. We took
refuge in the mountains, and from the high peaks as far as my eyes
could see, flames and smoke were everywhere in Panjshir. It was such
a horrible and sad scene, and I felt tears rolling down my cheeks.
Except for God Almighty, there was no one to listen to my cry.”
(Daoud Zulali)
FOREVER WITH ME
When Massoud came to Paris he brought a beautiful carpet—a big,
beautiful carpet. He took it to Léïla, the wife of Mehraboudin
Masstan.
She asked him, “Is this carpet for me, for the embassy, or for my
husband?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because if it’s for the embassy it stays in this house, if it’s for my
husband it goes in his office, and if it’s for me it stays forever with
me.”
He said, “Of course, it’s for you.”
(Pilar-Hélène Surgers)
THE DUCK FROM ANDARAB
In 1983, I was with Massoud in the Panjshir, and I told him,
“Tomorrow I want to rest and celebrate because it is my son’s
birthday.” He was going to be two years old.
The next day I was drinking tea with friends when Massoud
entered the house and said, “Come with me.” We went to another
house, and there was a dinner laid out with lots of food. He said,
“This is for your son’s birthday. Please, eat. And there is a duck from
Andarab, the valley where I met you eight years ago, which I asked to
be brought especially for you.”
I was not a journalist or a political analyst, I was just a friend. And
this was during the war.
(Jean-José Puig)
THE BULL
In my village, the Russians dropped bombs designed to look like toys,
and when the children grabbed them they exploded. Several of those
bombs were near a big bull when they exploded, and as we passed by
we could see that the bull was suffering. Massoud stopped, asked us
to clear the way, and put him out of his misery. He risked his life to
reach that animal so that he would not suffer any more.
(Sher Dil Qaderi)
KEEN ON SAFETY
Three or four months after the beginning of the Russian invasion, I
was in Kabul, and I went to see Massoud by car in the Panjshir. The
city was under the control of the communist government, and I had a
letter from the mujahideen in the north to deliver to him. It was
written on toilet paper because of the danger of communist searches
on the way. They put the toilet paper inside my jacket, and if you
looked you couldn’t see it. When we got there we tore off the jacket
and gave Massoud the letter.
Massoud wrote a response, and I wanted to take it to Kabul and
from there to the north. He said, “No, it’s not safe. If they catch you
with this, your life will be in danger. It’s better if it is delivered to
Kabul by somebody else, and you pick it up there,” and it was done
that way. At that time I hadn’t even joined the mujahideen, but
Massoud still cared.
(Mohammad Shuaib)
A FABULOUS MEAL
One day somebody was visiting, and we were sitting with them. I
asked that some special food be made, and I paid with my own U.S.
dollars for it. It was going to be a fabulous meal for us, because we
don’t have good food in the mountains of Afghanistan. The food was
almost ready when Massoud got a call about some urgent matter. He
would have preferred to stay and eat his food, but he said, “No. I
must go; it is about people.” So he left.
(Haron Amin)
YOU DECIDE
I had a brother younger than I who was killed. Then another of my
brothers volunteered to take a gun, but Massoud said, “I won’t give
the gun to him. I will give it to you. Take it to your home and follow
your own feeling whether to give it to him or not, but remember,
young boys are usually careless.” My brother wanted to do it so badly
that we could not stop him. I think he fought for two and a half
months before he was killed.
(Engineer Mohammed Eshaq)
THE GIFT
One summer day when the whole of Panjshir was free of Soviet
domination, a man came and presented Massoud with thirty thousand
afghanis, (approximately three hundred U.S. dollars) wrapped in a
piece of cloth, quietly telling him an Afghan had sent it to him as a
gift. With a grin, Massoud told him, “May there be longevity to his
dwelling,” (an expression of well-wishing to him and his family) and
pointed to give the money to Tajuddin, a man who was close to him.
He told Tajuddin just to keep the money safe.
About a week after that, an old lady with grey hair came asking
for Amir Massoud. He wasn’t there, and she asked at what time he
would return. I did not know, so she said she would come back. She
showed up again that evening and, when she found out Massoud was
not back, said, “Son, tell him that I am a widow with no food to eat. I
have had no news from my son, who went to Iran for employment. I
leave the rest to you.” I told her I would give him the message and
gave her the little food that was available, and she left.
Amir Massoud came that night. He pulled off his army boots and
went to the brook that passed through the middle of his yard to do the
ablution before prayer. As he was drying his face and hands, I
approached him and reported the old lady’s message. He listened
carefully, put his hand on my shoulder, and told me to find Tajuddin
and tell him to pay her ten thousand afghanis from that money. This
was how Massoud was with his money, and this is one of hundreds of
stories showing the kind of relationship he had with his people.
(Daoud Zulali)
11
PERSONAL IMPACT
It wasn’t that I joined Massoud. To me, it was more than that. You join a
group or you join a political party, but he was more.
—Farid Zikria
A SORT OF COMFORT
A few years ago, during an attack by the Taliban, their jeeps were
coming and there was bombing. It was night, and Massoud was
discussing the sale of emeralds with some people. This discussion
continued for two or three hours, and everything seemed almost
normal. We were laughing, and all these people were gathered around,
and it felt like a dream.
In the middle of all that chaos and depression, Massoud gave you
a kind of comfort that was unexpected. He would be laughing but he
was serious, and he somehow combined this seriousness with a sort of
easy life—being easy with the people around him, making jokes and
all that. Nobody mixed up the jokes with the real command, but it
was as if you were in the middle of the storm and found comfort.
(Engineer Mohammed Eshaq)
DIFFICULT TO LEAVE
Dr. Abdullah and another doctor, Abdul Rahman (he became the
second man after Massoud in the Panjshir Valley), were living in
Pakistan. They were working with different charity committees in
Peshawar as doctors. I sent them from Pakistan to the Panjshir Valley.
When they went to the Panjshir, they said, “We will go for five or
six months and come back,” but they ended up staying. Later, I said
to Dr. Abdullah, “You told me that you would stay for only five
months, but you stayed for years.” He said, “It is very difficult to
leave Massoud.” It doesn’t mean that Massoud forced them to stay
there or that they were obliged in any way. No, somehow he had such
good relationships with his followers that they respected him and
would never leave him.
(Mohammad Yahya Massoud)
I NEVER IMAGINED
Once, Dr. Abdul Rahman (later the minister of aviation) told me that
two days after my first meeting with him, Commander Massoud said,
“I think I have found somebody who will be a good friend.” I was
concerned the first time that perhaps Massoud was less than what I
had thought he would be, but he grew on me through the years. I
doubted—am I right or not with these feelings? And always the
answer was, yes, I am right.
The first time I met Massoud was in September of 1985. From
then until September of 2001, I was with him and worked with him.
Before I met him, I had an image of him in my mind. From what I had
heard he was an ideal Resistance leader. The thing is, after I met him
that impression only got stronger and stronger as the days passed. I
found things in him that I never imagined. I was impressed by his
attitude and by his behavior—as a friend, a leader of the country, and
a commander. The whole story is a big memory which keeps me going
in the work, even now.
For a quarter of a century, Massoud dedicated his life to this
country without asking anything for himself. It wasn’t just his political
and military roles, but the impact that he left on me and others, his
human qualities and values. He was a leader against terrorism and a
politician, but on the other hand, he was a very good friend, and
whenever we had time we used to talk about poetry, art, life, sports,
and all other aspects of life. He never lost his morale. Even in the
middle of the war and the suffering, he kept his sense of humor. He
respected human beings, enemies and friends, so that you would
imagine they were the same.
(Dr. Abdullah Abdullah)
WE WERE AFRAID
Most of the success and harmony in the Panjshir is due to Massoud’s
personality. If he had not been there, it is very clear that the Panjshir
would not have achieved such a good reputation during and after the
jihad.
So what was Massoud’s secret? Why did he have this personality?
He had very particular characteristics and different dimensions. He
was not naive or simple; he was very kind but hard at the same time.
That is why the people around him, all his followers, and even I, who
was his brother, we all respected him. But we were also afraid of him.
Yes, we were afraid of Massoud, but it was not fear that we would
be punished. In that case, I would have simply left. When I say that we
were afraid of him, I mean we were trying to do our best to show
Massoud that there was nothing wrong with us. That was it—nothing
wrong. We wanted to be our best for him.
(Mohammad Yahya Massoud)
I FORGOT
The people around Massoud were very polite, those young
commanders, the young mujahideen, polite, clean, and nice, and I saw
that they were under difficult conditions. The war was harsh in that
part of Afghanistan. There were bombardments every night and every
day, but the people were not afraid.
After a few months, I too forgot the fear. I was amazed, because
before I went to Afghanistan I wasn’t sure if I would be killed or not,
and it was very intense. But after a few weeks of being with Massoud,
I completely forgot the fear of being killed.
(Daoud Mir)
AIMING HIGH
In childhood you are trying to figure out what is your character, so
you think, I am this or I am that. My idea was: I want to be like
Massoud. I did not want to be a doctor or an engineer; I just wanted
to be like Massoud, who shared with people with a clear heart, so
brave and strong, and gave people the feeling that things made sense.
(Eisa Khan Ayoob Ayoobi)
INFINITE PAINS
When we got to the Panjshir, the Russians were bombing the valley.
We met Massoud, and it struck me then that, although he was facing
a lot, he was still very calm, cool, and collected, very impressive. He
said, “I have very good intelligence and the Russians are getting ready
to launch a major ground attack.” We spoke what I would call good
schoolboy French. He was obviously very busy, but he took the time
to talk with us and said, “I am very glad you are here. You’ve come a
long way, and we will give you all the help we can.” He sent us to
another side of the valley, to be away from the Russian attacks.
He was absolutely brilliant, I thought, and never seemed to panic,
although they were having quite a rough time because the Russians
sent a lot of troops into the valley, and there was bombing all the
time. He didn’t seem to lose his cool, and he planned everything very
carefully. If he was doing an operation or an attack, he considered
where the mines were, where the forces were, where the machine guns
were, and he had a deserter from the government who gave him more
details. So he made this table and briefed his commanders in detail on
how the attack would operate and which commander would do what.
You had to see him operate it to realize this was a man who took
infinite pains to get it right.
(Sandy Gall)
VALUABLE
When I was in Kabul, people came to me, especially old people, and
said that at such-and-such a time and place, I was with Massoud and
he gave me this letter with his signature. And these people had kept
the letters in nice plastic because they were so valuable to them.
(Mohammad Yahya Massoud)
HIGH IN THE TALIBAN RANKS
When Massoud died, for a week the people in our country did not
know. We kept his death secret, because we were afraid that if we
didn’t, the Taliban would capture all our land. Without Massoud the
enemy seemed invincible.
After a week, the world knew that he had died. Then, when one of
the Taliban said, “We should be happy because Mr. Massoud was
killed,” the second or third person in the ranks of the Taliban regime
slapped his colleague and told him, “Don’t be happy. When Massoud
was alive, Afghanistan was alive.” I don’t want to say his name,
because he was very important in the Taliban.
(Ahmad Jamshid)
COMPLETELY DIFFERENT
In our culture, if a man is killed while on the right path, we think of
him as somebody who was happy. Although it is a loss of life, we take
pride in somebody like that. Sometimes we offered condolences to the
families of the people who were killed in the fight against the
Russians, but not often, because they were embarrassed that we did it.
The division between right and wrong was very clear.
When they killed Commander Massoud, though, it was completely
different. It affected the life of every person in the country.
(Engineer Mohammed Eshaq)
12
JUST AFGHANS
When I reached the Salang and met my friends, they had a lot of
criticism of Massoud’s soldiers in Andarab, and they asked me to
transmit it to Massoud. I told him it was not the commanders but
their soldiers who behaved incorrectly, so “Tell them to be fair with
the Andarabis.” He said, “I understand the mujahideen, because the
Andarabis have not been very supportive, but you are right. We need
to be for the Afghans and not only for the Panjsheris.”
After this, there was a big Soviet offensive in Andarab, and of
course they played on the lukewarm feelings of the Andarabis—for a
month. Then they told the locals, “If you are with us, you must fight
Massoud.” They conscripted young men from fourteen to forty and
sent them to fight.
Massoud captured them but did not hurt them, all those young
people. He gave them money, a certain amount of afghanis to each
one, and told them, “You can go back to Andarab. You are not
prisoners, you are just Afghans.” I know the story from both sides,
from Andarab and the Panjshir.
(Jean-José Puig)
A DANGEROUS THING TO DO
Once, some friends from Badakhshan gave out a list of twenty-five
names of people who worked for the communist regime. A council of
mujahideen decided to put these people to death. I asked them why,
and they said because they are communists, collaborators, and so on. I
called Commander Massoud for an explanation. The decision was
frightening to him. He said, “I disapprove. That would be a very
dangerous thing to do.”
During the time Massoud controlled Kabul, not one of the
prisoners from the Communist Party, nor any who fought against
him, was ever put to death. This was very important in a country
which had been at war for years. He said very clearly: “I am against
killing anyone because they believe in communism, liberalism, or any
other ‘isms.’”
(Abdul Latif Pedram)
IT WAS JOLTING
Once Massoud told me, “We’re going to eat at someone’s house, but
you are the one who has to chat with him because I am not going to
say a word.” I didn’t understand. We went to a house—the nicest in
the neighborhood—and there he had set up the brother of the
communist president, Najibullah, the worst of his enemies. It was the
best place to protect this man and his wife and child at the time.
The wife was extremely liberated, an old communist militant. I
understood why Massoud did not want to go eat with them. He was
shy in this type of situation, and the way this woman carried herself
was very liberal—not just from the point of view of how she dressed,
but it was jolting. In an Afghan village, a woman who would not let
the men get a word in edgewise? Her husband could have formed an
association of oppressed husbands. But we stayed rather late, and
Massoud paid careful attention that this family should not feel bad. I
think this was difficult for him, but he did it all the same.
The man’s brother, the communist president of the republic, had
asked Massoud for his protection, and Massoud’s emissaries went to
Pakistan to make sure that the Pakistani Secret Service did not bother
this family, and that as soon as they arrived, passports would be ready
so they could leave for a Western country. When Massoud had
assured himself of these two conditions, he told the family to leave the
region, and to this day they are in the U.S. because of what he did.
(Humayun Tandar)
DÉJÀ VU
Massoud, remembering his youth, said, “When I was young, Dr.
Najibullah and I lived in Karte Parwan in Kabul, and I was fond of
soccer. Dr. Najibullah always said that the soccer court belonged to
him and his team, but my team usually used it. That was the reason
for a dispute that started between him and me. Dr. Najibullah
gathered his team and attacked us, but my team defeated them with
stones, sticks, and slings.
“Then there came a time when he became the president of
Afghanistan, and I fought him and his Russian supporters in the
mountains of this country. Again, Dr. Najibullah wanted to eliminate
me from his path. He not only asked the Russian generals to attack
me in the Panjshir, he sent scores of Afghan army troops to capture
me, but again, he did not succeed.”
(Ahmad Shah Farzan)
“I told the Taliban delegations that came here for talks with us in the
Panjsher, that you claim to represent the Pashtun tribes—fine, we
agree. You say that the majority of Afghanistan is under our control—
we agree. You say that the people accept us—we agree. Fine, if there is
such level of confidence—then let’s go toward elections. You [the
Taliban] claim to hold the majority backed by popular acceptance;
then what are you worried about? In place of so much warfare and
bloodshed, move toward elections and legitimately attain power. Our
position is still the same. We did not and do not consider a military
option as the solution. . . .”
(Interview with Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud by journalists
and representatives of the “Women on the Road to Afghanistan”
Conference, Azadi Afghan Radio, August 7, 2000, www.afghan-
web.com/documents/int-masood.html)
LITTLE GESTURES
For me the way a world leader treats his prisoners reveals everything
about him or her. Massoud treated his prisoners with such
compassion that Soviet soldiers preferred to surrender to him over
anybody else, or to desert and go to his side. Back in the ’80s, I was
involved in negotiations where Russian soldiers held by Massoud were
helped to escape to Pakistan with French journalists so they could
look like French journalists and ultimately find political asylum in the
West. Even though Massoud and his people were terribly poor and
had very little to eat themselves, their Russian prisoners were fed no
worse.
You just had these little gestures. One Russian prisoner was about
to be taken to Pakistan, and Massoud himself gave Nikolai a camera
so he would look like a journalist, and a warm sweater to go over the
mountains. When I found this out I was extremely impressed, because
I knew about the way prisoners were horribly treated by other
mujahideen groups. Commanders who torture and kill, if they come
into power, they create a tyranny—it never fails. You can judge the
way a future politician will be by the way he behaves in combat
conditions in the Resistance.
(Professor Michael Barry)
“‘I had serious political conflicts with him over the years. We were not
friends,’ said Abdul Bahir Turkestani, an aide to northern Uzbek
warlord Adbul Rashid Dostum. ‘But with his death, I had to admit he
was a good man.’”
(Juliette Terzieff, “Pilgrimage Honors Slain Afghan Hero:
Massood’s Shrine Thronged a Year After His Death,” September 8,
2002, www.SFGate.com)
A VEHEMENT DISPUTE
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, as a student activist and a member of Jamiat-e
Islami at the time, was convinced that terrorism would make the
group successful. I noticed that he did not exclude bombs, acid
attacks, and assassination of political enemies as means to achieve its
goals. Even then [in the mid-1970s], Massoud voiced his dislike of
extremism, and he and Hekmatyar had vehement disputes because of
Massoud’s absolute opposition to acts of terrorism. He saw in them
the destruction of the very people he wanted to serve.
(Engineer Mohammed Eshaq)
NOT A COMMANDER
I challenged Hekmatyar when he said, “We, the mujahideen, don’t
have disputes among ourselves.” It was complete rubbish; of course
they did. I said, “If you really want to show that you are collaborating
as you say, why don’t we go with your people and take the matter to
the people of Abdul Haq [a Pashtun leader], then go to Massoud’s
people and do the same.” Of course, he never wanted to do that.
I knew him very well. Hekmatyar was the first “commander” that
I met in Afghanistan in 1979. He was a politician, not a commander,
a very sly, conniving politician who would do anything to claim
victory, and was completely unabashed about it. Anything that served
his purpose he would do. And he got rid of intellectuals, but I always
made a point to have discussions with him. He had a good
organization, but he was not a man of inspiration.
On the other hand, I would describe Massoud foremost as a
commander, and as a politician only in the sense that he knew he had
to have the people on his side. But he was not a politician in the sense
that he was just setting himself up for power.
(Edward Girardet)
ON ANOTHER LEVEL
Massoud’s enemies envied him, but eventually they realized that
between them and him there was a huge gap which could not be filled,
a gap in personality and in character. At the beginning, Dostum
thought Massoud would make him a good rival, but later on, even he
realized that, no, you cannot be a rival of Massoud because he is on
another level. Hekmatyar was in Iran, and of course he thought he
was better than all Afghans, so he was an exception. But all the other
leaders—Dostum, Karim Khalili, and all of them—learned this about
Massoud.
(Ahmad Wali Massoud)
“[I]n a very real sense, Massoud helped liberate the Russians too, by
forcing their dictatorship to come to a military end, at long last, in the
mountains and valleys of Panjshêr.”
(Excerpted from a speech by Professor Michael Barry, “Thoughts
on Commander Massoud,” at the Afghan Embassy in London, on
September 9, 2003, published in Omaid Weekly 12, nos. 595–96,
September 2003)
AN UNUSUAL VISIT
In 2003, the Russian defense minister, Sergei Ivanov, came on an
official trip to Kabul, and he asked to visit the shrine of Massoud.
Fahim and other people were there when he went, and it was a very
emotional moment. Ivanov said he had a lot of respect for Massoud.
(Mehraboudin Masstan)
© Hiromi Nagakura
© Hiromi Nagakura
© Reza Deghati
© Hiromi Nagakura
© Hiromi Nagakura
© Hiromi Nagakura
© Hiromi Nagakura
© Hiromi Nagakura
© Hiromi Nagakura
© Hiromi Nagakura
© Hiromi Nagakura
© Hiromi Nagakura
© Hiromi Nagakura
© Hiromi Nagakura
© Hiromi Nagakura
© Hiromi Nagakura
© Reza Deghati
© Masood Khalili
Massoud with one of his closest companions, Masood Khalili, son of the most
prominent contemporary Afghan poet, Khalilullah Khalili.
© Hiromi Nagakura
© Hiromi Nagakura
© Reza Deghati
© Omaid Weekly
© Reza Deghati
Massoud speaking in the European Parliament in 2000. Sitting on his left is the
president of the European Parliament, Nicole Fontaine. Sitting on his right is Dr.
Abdullah Abdullah, one of his closest companions.
© Hiromi Nagakura
© Hiromi Nagakura
© Hiromi Nagakura
13
WHAT IS PERMANENT
One day Massoud was explaining about Islam, and he said something
like this: “There are three ways to recognize your God. One we
inherited from our ancestors. If you ask 90 percent of people why they
are Muslims, they would say, because my ancestors were Muslims.
Second is raah-e-shariat, the rules Islam teaches to its followers. In
that way you get Hadith [accounts of what the Prophet Mohammad
did, said, and approved in others], and through that knowledge you
reach God. Third, you have to be a lover, and through love you reach
God and see your Beloved. This is the way of tasawuf.” And Massoud
was a lover of his God, not of Islam in the hands of politicians.
In his job, God was before him, because he established a link—if it
makes God happy, I will do it. This work for him was a path to reach
the next level. He thought we should not believe in things that are not
long-lasting, which means life in this world. It is not permanent; it is
temporary. He asked why we should sacrifice the things that are
permanent for something that is only temporary?
(Mohammad Yahya Massoud)
REMEMBRANCE
I read the book of spiritual guidance which he read, The Alchemy of
Happiness from Al-Ghazali. Move out hatred from the mujahid, no
hatred. If you hate, you are not a mujahid. Very beautiful. You have
to quell your emotions, your anger, your lust, your feelings of
vengeance.
Every evening, after hosting all his officers, visitors, or diplomats,
he would retire for half an hour with only his closest friends and he
would indulge in what Islamic mysticism calls “remembrance,” the
remembrance of God. He would just lean his forehead against his
fingertips for fifteen minutes or half an hour of mystical meditation, in
which he would empty his heart of all anxiety, all anger, all
frustrations. When he lifted his forehead again it was as if he had slept
for hours.
(Professor Michael Barry)
REZA (DEGHATI): “You have been fighting for twenty years. And
during this time, each time that I have come here, some more of your
friends and your companions have unfortunately been martyred. How
do you view death? How have you kept these losses in your heart?
How have you endured?”
CRITICAL LINKS
In the first half of the sixteenth century, Roman Catholicism had
reached such a state of moral abjectness that I wonder how it was able
to survive. Then you find Antonio de Montesinos, a Dominican priest,
who stood up on a pulpit on Christmas Day in 1507, looked at the
Spanish colonists on the Island of Santo Domingo, and said, “I will
not give you communion, and I will not give you absolution because
of what you are doing to your fellow humans on the pretext that they
are not Christians. It’s unworthy of human beings, unworthy of
Christ. You enslave people, you massacre people. You are here only
for your own greed. You pretend to be Christians, but I banish you
from this church.”
Although I am not a Roman Catholic by tradition, I am Catholic
by culture because I grew up in France and speak French and Spanish
and Italian, and I know that tiny group of Dominican priests of
Antonio de Montesinos maintained the link between the Catholicism
we have today and the original church of Christ. If it were not for a
few people like them, the whole religion might as well have committed
suicide.
Massoud and the people immediately around him were such a
group. They maintained the connection between the Islam of the
Golden Age and a future, regenerated Islam. They appeared in our
time and were put to death. I don’t fear to say this, because my
commitment to Massoud was based on long reflection. It was a
profound and spiritual commitment, not just a humanitarian accident.
Massoud and his little group were models; they were exemplary.
(Professor Michael Barry)
14
BROTHERS
Five or six times, Massoud invited me to prayers, so I prayed with
them. Most of the times Massoud led and later we would go to
dinner. Massoud asked me to do what we call les graces in French—to
thank God for the meal. Many times he said, “Jean-José, we believe in
the same God. Please, tell us the prayer before lunch or dinner in your
own language.” Michael Barry, who is Jewish, was also asked to lead
prayers.
Later on, with the propaganda and proselytizing of extreme
groups, it changed, but in Afghanistan during the war against the
Soviets, no matter if we were Jewish, Christian, Muslim, we were all
brothers. It’s hard for people to believe now, but it was like that.
(Jean-José Puig)
FOR ALL OF US
One day I said, “Ahmad Shah, I am really surprised you didn’t ask me
about my background, my family. You tell me practically all your
secrets without any security.” He laughed a little bit, because he really
enjoyed humor, and said that it was not only his country, it was my
country too. He said, “I am not doing this for myself; it’s for all of us.
If I am not here someday, you will continue, other people will
continue. We have to work together.” And he told me about Shura-e-
Nezar.
At that time Massoud was very upset about the ethnic clashes in
Afghanistan. I asked him a lot of questions because I had come from
France and was not aware of the problems of ethnicity in Afghanistan.
He said the reason he worked with Shura-e-Nezar was to make a
council with all commanders, Pashtun, Uzbek, Hazara, and Tajik—all
the ethnic groups. “We are in contact with practically everybody,” he
told me. His goal was to have an organization that included every
Afghan, not only Tajiks or Panjsheris.
(Daoud Mir)
“Massoud’s patience was infinite and I never heard him raise his
voice. Except once. A commander was just coming out of his office,
and Ahmad, who was often present at the meetings, asked him, ‘Dad,
is he an Uzbek? He has a funny accent.’ My husband, who never made
an impatient gesture toward his children, took him by the ear and told
him angrily, ‘He is an Afghan, as you and I are; I never want you to
speak like that again!’ My son still remembers that moment.”
(Sediqa Massoud, quoted in Hachemi and Colombani, Pour
L’amour de Massoud, 191)
A MESSAGE TO WOMEN
In April of 1992, the communist regime was overthrown. Soon after
capturing Kabul, Massoud appointed a woman doctor as chief of the
medical academy to send a message that we supported women and
that we wanted women to have a role in the reconstruction efforts of
Afghanistan.
(Commander Bismillah Khan)
ON EQUAL FOOTING
He believed in quite a few things other people did not. He did not
think about specific people or just about Afghanistan; his vision was
for all of humanity. He had a high vision for human beings as
creations of God. He did not classify people on the basis of ethnicity,
nationality, or religion or anything like that. Although he was a
devoted Muslim, he put everybody on equal footing.
I asked him, “You are devout; what do you think happens with the
non-Muslims? What is the final place where they go after this world?”
Many Muslims believe that Muslims will be saved and non-Muslims
will not. I just wanted to know what he was thinking.
He said, “No, that’s not the case. Whoever is a good human being,
that’s what is important, no matter which is their religion.” He said
there are a lot of devils among the Muslims, and a lot of good people
who are non-Muslims. “You cannot say that God will bless the
Muslims and not the rest. What is more important is what kind of a
human being he is.” He had a very strong view on the subject.
(Ahmad Wali Massoud)
“It is our conviction and we believe that both men and women are
created by the Almighty. Both are human beings; both have equal
rights. Women can pursue an education, women can pursue a career,
and women can play a role in society—just like men. This was our
belief, and it continues to be our belief. In the future of Afghanistan, if
it is the will of God that the Taliban will be struck down, and a
moderate government comes into power, undoubtedly women will be
respected and highly valued.”
(Massoud, interviewed in Into the Forbidden Zone)
SMALL THINGS
Maybe this does not seem very important, but you learned small
things as well as big ones from Massoud—to stay clean in all
circumstances, to see if everybody had everything they needed during
lunch or dinner. From the end of a room he would be aware of what
was happening everywhere in the room. Such things were a constant
teaching to others without his showing or telling them, “Do this and
that.”
(Dr. Abdullah Abdullah)
THE ADMIRER
This happened in the 1990s when Massoud was in Kabul. A friend of
mine, Zia, who is a Hazara, admired Massoud so much that he drew a
picture of him. Then, he took a taxi and went to Massoud’s office. He
arrived at noon and asked to see Massoud, but the secretary told him
that Massoud was busy, so Zia went back home.
The next day, again he took a taxi, and at noon he was at
Massoud’s office. He waited until 8 p.m., and finally the secretary said
to Massoud, “He won’t leave; go and see him.” So Massoud received
Zia and immediately confronted him. “Why are you wasting your
time painting me? I couldn’t finish my studies; you go and finish
yours, and don’t waste any more of your time!”
(Fawad Rahmani)
INDIRECTLY
This makes me a little uncomfortable: I did not have any knowledge
of Islam, unlike other revolutionaries who had the chance to read the
right books. Humbly, I told Ahmad Shah, “I come from a Kabul
family of very open-minded people. A lot of women in my family, my
cousins and others, don’t even wear headscarves. But I want to do
something for Afghanistan if I can.”
He didn’t say anything, but during the next weeks and months he
taught me, indirectly and without extremism or fundamentalism, not
only about Islam but also about the relationship between God and
people. He asked if I read the Bible or the Koran. I said that I never
thought about it. Then he taught me some things about both of them.
I thought, this man is different from the other commanders and
leaders I have met in Afghanistan and Pakistan; he is open-minded.
(Daoud Mir)
THE VILLAGERS
I was in the Panjshir Valley with Massoud before the Russians
invaded Afghanistan. He was injured, and the road had collapsed. We
wanted to come out of the village, but some of the villagers said, “No,
you cannot leave.” And one of the young men, Yasim, came forward
and took hold of Massoud’s shirt and said, “You are responsible for
this road and you are not moving.”
After a few minutes, some of Massoud’s soldiers, about two
hundred men, came to the village and immediately when they saw the
situation turned guns on the villagers and said, “What the hell do you
think you are doing?” Then they looked to Massoud, but he said,
“Don’t.”
We said to him, “They are not allowing your family to get out of
the village. They are holding you, humiliating you.” But Massoud
said, “They are the people. Today they have a problem because the
road broke, so they think that way today. But tomorrow they will be
the people again and they will be our strength.”
So Massoud did not allow our men to do anything. Later on, when
he was strong again, somebody asked what should be done against
that village. Massoud laughed and said, “Don’t think small, don’t
think that way. They are all human beings; they are all Afghans.”
(Ahmad Wali Massoud)
FOR HOURS AND HOURS
People used to come and I would think, they are talking too much
about things that have nothing to do with the situation, so why not
tell them, I don’t want to hear that; tell me about this, which was
important. But Massoud let people argue with him all the time—
elderly people, young people. For hours and hours he talked to them,
and at the end of every meeting I realized that they left feeling
satisfied. I learned that you need to care for every single issue that
matters to them, regardless of its political importance or significance
in the military struggle. That’s the way to gain the confidence and
trust of people.
The first time I went to the Panjshir Valley, I would lose my
temper when things did not seem logical. I would argue and argue and
lose my temper. He told me after a while, “Look, be a little more
patient. These people have suffered a lot. These are not normal
circumstances, and there are too many problems. When they come to
us they think we are capable of solving all their problems, and if we
don’t, they lose their temper. We should be patient. They don’t have
anywhere else to go.” Without him reminding me, later on I saw how
much patience he showed towards people, even the ones who argued
with him and sometimes spoke nonsense—how he would still listen.
This I learned from him.
(Dr. Abdullah Abdullah)
IN THE CAVES
Massoud helped us in academics throughout northern Afghanistan, in
the caves and elsewhere, and he brought tapes and video cassettes and
many other things that were sent to him. He wanted his people not to
remain peasants, not to remain people who knew only about war, but
to know that life is greater than war.
(Haron Amin)
BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
Massoud was not the type to speak for hours trying to motivate
people. He spoke calmly and used simple words ordinary people could
understand. Mainly he affected people, not just with clear reasoning
and conversation, but by his example. I think that is why his was a
lasting leadership.
Sometimes in Afghanistan leaders fall out of grace because of their
weaknesses. A lot of the politicians lead double lives: When the doors
are closed they have different beliefs. Massoud did not. He was what
he was.
(Engineer Mohammed Eshaq)
COPY THIS!
Whatever Massoud did, people copied him all the time. You have seen
Massoud’s pictures. His hat was always cocked to one side. He did
not place it like that on purpose; his talk was animated, he moved his
head a lot, and the hat just moved to one side. That became a fashion.
All people who are loyal to him wear the hat like that.
One day he was swimming in the river, and when he got out he
didn’t tuck his shirt into his pants. He just walked around like that,
and the next day 90 percent of the mujahideen were wearing their
clothes the same way.
So one day he gathered all his commanders, and he said to them,
“Whatever I do, you copy me. If I walk funny, you walk funny. If I
talk differently, you talk that way, too. So I have one request for you
people: if you want to copy me, copy this. I am not stealing from the
people; my heart is here to take care of the people. Don’t steal. Work
for your people and your neighborhood.”
(Sher Dil Qaderi)
THE VIEW
Two or three years before he was killed, there was moment in
Massoud’s house, in his garden. Everybody was sad; a lot had
happened. Mazar-i-Sharif and Kunduz had fallen to the Taliban. In
Salang, a commander had surrendered to the Taliban. The situation
was bad, so Massoud asked some of his colleagues to have a
discussion—Mr. Qanooni, Bismillah Khan, etc.
Commander Massoud wanted to make the moment a little bit
lighter, but it wasn’t possible. When everybody left, I went with him
inside his house. He said, “Some of our colleagues have lost morale;
it’s very difficult. I tried, but everybody was sort of preoccupied.” So
we sat and had a cup of tea, and I went home.
The situation got better. We went back into Salang, the Taliban
was attacked in Mazar-i-Sharif and lost lots of their people, and the
people from Mazar were liberated. Then Massoud and I went to the
same room, a room that was sort of a library, and he said, “Look.
There is such a nice view here.” I said, “Yes, no doubt about it.” Then
he said, “Three days ago, the same view was there, but nobody
noticed how nice it was. It depends on the moment, on somebody’s
situation. Everything is relative, you see. It was the same view.”
(Dr. Abdullah Abdullah)
HOMEWORK
Once Masood Khalili went to the Panjshir Valley. When he came
back, I asked him how Massoud was, and he told me, “Let’s talk
later. First, I should complete my homework.” And you know what
the homework was? Massoud had told him, “The next time that you
come to the Panjshir Valley you should have read this Al-Ghazali
book, and I will ask you about it.”
(Mohammad Yahya Massoud)
PRIORITIES
In 1998, the Taliban took over most of the country. The only places
that were free were Badakhshan and part of Taloqan in the Panjshir
Valley, and the Taliban was advancing towards Badakhshan. I was
with Massoud when we left the Panjshir to take a helicopter trip to
the north.
I asked him about his son, Ahmad. He said, “Well, I promised
Ahmad that next time I went to the north I would take him with me,
and Ahmad was ready and came to the helicopter to join me. I told
him that, yes, I had promised and I didn’t want to break my promise.
But I tried to explain to him that the Taliban was advancing to the
north, and if I took him with me, the people in the Panjshir Valley
would think that I was taking him to a safer place—that the situation
was so bad that I was taking him outside the country. So I told him,
‘It is better for you to stay here so the people can feel safe.’”
(Farid Zikria)
“‘I’ll tell you what I think: life goes by whether you’re happy or not,’
he [Massoud] said. ‘Any man who looks back on his past and feels he
has been of some use need have no regrets.’”
(Junger, “Massoud’s Last Conquest,” 139)
REALITY IN KABUL
I reported from Kabul for The Economist and the Associated Press
from 1991 through 1994 during the new government in Kabul, with
Massoud as defense minister, which basically upheld the liberal
provisions of the National Constitution of 1964—including the right
of women to health care, education, and professional work.
It was tough to get an interview at times, simply because Massoud
was always either negotiating, planning, or fighting. Even as proxy
militias on hire to each of Afghanistan’s unfriendly neighbors joined
hands to destroy the city, Massoud’s self-effacing approach to public
relations continued, for very much the same reasons—but often to the
discomfort of his followers. Massoud never stopped negotiating
behind the scenes with his enemies, especially those with a jihadi
background. His priorities were always clear: “We will not
compromise on national sovereignty. If we work with Dostum, it’s
because we don’t want to have to fight in the north while we are
defending Kabul—and because his relationship with Ankara [Turkey]
and Tashkent [Uzbekistan] is far less of a threat to Afghan sovereignty
than Hekmatyar’s relationship with Pakistan.”
For the next four and a half years, every step that Massoud took—
or could have taken, but hesitated to—was dictated by one overriding
concern: The well-being of the ordinary citizens of Kabul. He can
hardly be blamed for the presence of irresponsible armed groups in the
capital, having done everything within his power to prevent it. Until
November 1994, I witnessed firsthand the resulting dilemmas he
faced, the amazing restraint with which he met them, and the almost
willfully feckless manner in which absentee Western “observers”
based in Pakistan distorted the situation in accord with ISI
propaganda.
For example, the Dostum militia created a big crime problem in
Kabul, and Massoud’s enemies (along with jealous rivals among the
mujahideen) accused him of “bringing the Gilam Jam [in reference to
Dostum’s militia accused of thieving] to Kabul.” (In fact, it was
common knowledge that communist regime generals had flown them
into Kabul to shore up the city’s defenses a week and a half before the
mujahideen took over.) Massoud’s followers, busy as they were,
regularly shot it out with Dostum carjackers and burglars who were
preying on the citizens. Eventually, Dostum joined the opposition—
and Massoud drove his militia step by step out of Kabul. First he was
blamed for their crimes; when he fought them, he was blamed for
“fighting in the city.”
The Iran-backed Shiite Hazara militia wasn’t supposed to be in
town either: They were able to seize southern and western Kabul
precisely because of the collapse of the army perimeter engineered by
Pakistan’s proxy militias and their communist allies. Massoud did
everything within his power to restrain the Hazara “ethnic cleansing”
campaign in southwest Kabul, which began barely a month after the
communist regime collapsed.
When his efforts fell short, Western aid workers and diplomats—
parroting their contacts in ISI and its Afghan proxies—derided him for
“failing to control the situation.” When he finally crushed them, to
stop their abuses, the Western parrots began chattering the tune of
Radio Iran, blaming him for “massacres” and “human rights abuses”
against Hazaras that are overwhelmingly fictional.
Massoud’s hands were tied, to some extent, because except for
short periods he was unable to keep his enemies out of artillery range
—just as better-equipped communist troops before them and NATO
troops afterward have proven unable to stop terrorist attacks in
Kabul. The enemy used munitions from Pakistani army depots to shell
marketplaces and intersections at peak traffic hours. They deliberately
killed tens of thousands of civilians. Despite the ongoing
disinformation, there is no doubt and no question, in the minds of
objective observers who were actually present, that it was Massoud
and his followers who struggled to uphold human rights, and his
enemies who abused them.
That led to trade-offs—the stuff of every political and military
decision, west or east. When Iran-backed Hazara militiamen began
shelling Kabul’s northwestern neighborhoods, Massoud worried aloud
to his aides that driving them from their positions would risk allowing
some of his allies’ camp followers to commit atrocities against Hazara
captives. On the other hand, he noted, the alternative was to allow
Hazara militiamen to continue shelling much more heavily populated
areas, and killing many more noncombatants, on the other side of
town. Understandably, he chose the former. In the resulting Afshar
operation, abuses were minimal, as I saw for myself—nothing to
compare with the savagery I had witnessed the Hazara militia inflict
on noncombatants. Of course, that has never stopped political
opportunists (often masquerading as human rights activists) from
inventing a “massacre” that never, in fact, occurred.
During the battle, I watched Panjsheris rescue a wounded Hazara
woman caught in a cross fire and carry her to safety. Next day, I
stumbled across one of Wahdat’s impromptu jails in the basement of
an abandoned house, complete with three non-Hazara corpses, tied up
with baling wire and shot as the gunmen fled. My bureau chief wasn’t
interested. (Though she didn’t quit her job, she later dropped any
pretense of journalism and became an anti-Massoud activist.) In
Islamabad, they only cared about atrocities against Hazaras.
The pundits who natter on about mujahideen “abuses” forget a
very important point: Any popular movement, if it is truly popular, is
going to harbor a criminal element, just because every large
population harbors a criminal element. It is unrealistic to expect zero
crimes. Yet Afghans, even Massoud’s enemies, know that abuses by
his troops were rare, exceptional, and punished as often as they were
caught. (Whether they are willing to admit it to Western hacks and
diplomats is another matter.) His enemies, on the other hand—few of
whom were mujahideen to begin with—undertook mass murder,
looting, and ethnic cleansing as a matter of policy.
It also bears noting that, from late 1992 through early 1995,
Massoud’s enemies enjoyed direct military backing from all of
Afghanistan’s militarily significant neighbors—Pakistan, Iran, and
Uzbekistan. Yet he withstood them, and eventually all but Pakistan
realized the foolishness of their policies. Had Massoud not fought to
hold on to Kabul, the human rights situation in Afghanistan and
throughout the region would have been vastly worse than it was.
(John Jennings)
A THOUSAND ROCKETS
When the mujahideen took over, Massoud became the minister of
defense and actual leader of the government. Then Hekmatyar started
rocketing Kabul, and the city went through a very bad time. The
question is whether or not the situation was caused by Massoud.
I was in Kabul during that period, and I don’t think so. Other
parties, for example Hekmatyar with the help of the Pakistani ISI,
tried to disturb the peace. That was the fact. The situation in Baghdad
today is a lot worse; people don’t feel safe. That is what the Pakistanis
wanted for Kabul all those years. If they made it an unsafe place,
people would blame Massoud because he was supposed to be in
charge.
Hekmatyar had his own army, and he was within a few miles of
the city. He had the backing of Pakistan, and he had a lot of rockets.
He fired more than a thousand rockets at Kabul in a day.
(Farid Zikria)
EMPTY-HANDED
When Mr. Yunnus Qanooni came to Pakistan, I asked him about
Kabul, and he told me that one day during that time Massoud sent
him and Mohammed Qasim Fahim to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and told
them, “Bring my heart, my intention, to Gulbuddin, and tell him that I
want him as prime minister of Afghanistan, and please not to fire
rockets all over Kabul. I will stay under his command, and I will
accept him as prime minister.”
Qanooni and Fahim went to Shariazar to meet Hekmatyar. When
they arrived, Qanooni told Hekmatyar, “We are not coming officially.
Nobody knows we are here. We are just bringing the intention of
Massoud to you, to talk about you and Kabul and the future of
Afghanistan.” And Qanooni explained Massoud’s message and that
Massoud would remain under his command for the sake of Kabul and
Afghanistan.
Qanooni said, “Do you know what Gulbuddin’s reaction was? He
said he would accept, but there was one condition: There was a
mountain inside Kabul that was occupied by our forces, and if
Massoud agreed to withdraw from this mountain, Hekmatyar would
come.” Qanooni laughed and told him, “Massoud is ready to give you
the whole country and you are talking about one mountain?” And of
course they came back empty-handed.
Massoud tried to negotiate several times, and Hekmatyar refused
because he was not independent. He was a puppet of the Pakistanis. It
was not a civil war but a plot designed by the Pakistan Intelligence
Service (ISI). When Hekmatyar was defeated, they sent the Taliban.
Even before Commander Massoud entered Kabul, he had a phone
conversation with Hekmatyar, a historic conversation. If you listen to
the tapes of it, you will understand how many times Massoud asked
him to not attack Kabul. He told Hekmatyar, “I am really flexible
toward including all the Afghan leaders who are in Pakistan in the
government in Kabul. I don’t want the city or the power for myself.”
He repeated this several times, but the guy just did not accept it. We
have the cassettes in our office in Kabul.
(Mohammad Yahya Massoud)
PROMISE OF PEACE
The issue was how to achieve peace and security in Kabul. Hekmatyar
said that as long as Massoud’s troops were in Kabul, there would be
fighting. That was always his position. During that period there were
many visits from the United Nations, and different Afghan delegations
came. During all the mediations, what Massoud said is that if you can
agree on any mechanism that will guarantee peace in Kabul and
Afghanistan, I will not insist on the presence of armed forces in Kabul.
If there is no guarantee of peace and the fighting continues, then of
course we have to stay. That was his position.
One of Hekmatyar’s conditions for his forces to stop their fighting
[against the Rabbani government] was that Massoud leave the
Ministry of Defense. In a meeting in Jalalabad at the end of 1993,
President Rabbani and Professor Sayyaf were present and this issue
was raised. They discussed it, then contacted Commander Massoud.
He said without hesitation that in exchange for peace he would resign,
but they would have to guarantee that peace was achieved, and the
one doing the fighting was Hekmatyar.
Massoud did not believe in taking power for its own sake, but only
as an opportunity to be of service. One of his greatest wishes was
peace in Afghanistan. They sent Commander Massoud a message
from Jalalabad, and he resigned and went to the Panjshir, to Jabul-
Saraj, where he dealt with the mujahideen as a commander, not as
defense minister. Of course, when the political leaders made this
decision, they did not make sure that peace was achieved. Hekmatyar
continued fighting, so it did not stop the war.
(Dr. Abdullah Abdullah)
NOTHING TO SAY
During the horror of 1994–95 in Kabul, I was with Christophe de
Ponfilly, some French doctors, and Massoud in one of his safe houses.
Everything was dark. There was no electricity, and the rockets were
falling like rain. The city was under siege by the Taliban, and I had
gone through their lines to bring food and medicine into the city.
Massoud was sitting there with a great map by the light of a
lantern, trying to explain to all of us why he was ultimately going to
win. He was pointing at the map: We are here, the enemy is there, we
can move around this way and catch them that way and defeat them
that way, but you can be assured, my friends, that we are going to
win.
We said to him, “You know Amer Saheb, whether you win or not
has nothing to do with the reason we are here. We are here to help
you even if you lose.” And he didn’t know what to say; he just
couldn’t answer.
(Professor Michael Barry)
GIVE IT TO THEM
I am going to tell you the story of the defeat of Kabul; how we had to
leave Kabul for the Panjshir.
When the fighting with the Taliban reached the Kabul gates, the
first person who went to meet them was Massoud himself, because he
did not want the fighting to continue; he did not want Kabul
destroyed. There were Pakistanis, Arabs, and Chechnians fighting
against us. That’s when Massoud told the commanders to withdraw
our troops to the north.
I was in a place called Sangebaushta, which was one of the
defending posts, and Massoud came and told us not to fight the
Taliban anymore. There was a mosque, and the Taliban wanted to
take it. Massoud said, “Give it to them; don’t fight.” He wanted to
serve God, not to fight people, and he did not want more innocent
people being killed, so he made the decision to leave Kabul to the
Taliban.
He explained then why we were withdrawing, and he yelled, “I
told you to leave!” We were heartbroken, but we gathered our stuff
and we went because we took his orders. He was our leader.
(Commander Gul Haidar)
NO HELP
During the 1990s, I was a commander in Ghazni with Harakat-e-
Islami, a Hazara party, and we were allied with Massoud in the fight
against the Taliban. I had constant contact with him by phone, and
when we were in Kabul I was with him in person almost every day.
Once when the Taliban surrounded Kabul, Massoud had a
meeting with the Iranian ambassador and asked him to try to convince
the other Hazara parties to fight the Taliban because they were trying
to enter and destroy Kabul, because the Taliban had killed one of their
leaders, Massari, and because if there was a resistance from the whole
country the Taliban would not be able to enter Kabul. The Iranians
helped the party fighting against Massoud.
Everybody at that time knew what the Taliban was, but nobody
helped Massoud. He could have fought from Kabul very well. He had
good strategy and good equipment, but he did not want to destroy
Kabul, so he left the city. He said, “If the fight is here it will affect the
lives of all the people in Kabul. I will leave and continue the
Resistance from the mountains.”
(Aref Shajahan)
HIDDEN INTENTIONS
The Pakistani-imposed Taliban regime in Kabul became the
laughingstock of the world for its apparent intellectual idiocy. Yet this
was another ploy. While I was in Kabul (from 1992 to 2001), the
issue at stake seemed to be Pakistan’s destruction of the Afghan State.
To lobotomize Afghanistan, to provoke the collapse of its entire
health, educational, and administrative system, to turn its educated
women into animals for reproduction, and to make its entire people
appear like mindless barbarians, served the purposes of reducing the
whole country into a permanent Pakistani protectorate. Islamabad’s
implication was that only Pakistan was a responsible, civilized state fit
to administrate its small savage neighbor, filter all international aid to
it, and turn Afghanistan into a corridor for oil pipelines and a haven
for opium fields, guarded by Pakistan’s proxy tribal forces.
(Professor Michael Barry)
A SIMPLE LIFE
A raindrop, dripping from a cloud,
Was ashamed when it saw the sea.
‘Who am I where there is a sea?’ it said.
When it saw itself with the eye of humility,
A shell nurtured it in its embrace.
—Saadi of Shiraz
SIMPLE WORDS
We never praised Massoud in his presence, and he never expected it.
He just wanted us to use words of simple greeting. People said we
should address him with a title, but he did not want that either. They
called him Commander, and we called him Massoud. Some people
were angry about that, but he was not there to promote himself. He
didn’t need that.
(Engineer Mohammed Eshaq)
SHY
The other aspect of Massoud was this timid persona. One would have
a hard time believing it. He was under pressure from certain groups
and religious people to get married, and he always responded that he
was already married—to the war. Of course, there were many young
women in Kapisa, not to mention in the villages, who wanted to be
“the wife of Massoud.”
One time in Takhar we went up on a roof to look at the moon and
the stars. I didn’t understand what he was doing in that house at the
bottom of that valley. He didn’t say anything, but in fact he had come
to get married. Even when we left to spend the night elsewhere, either
out of wisdom or shyness he never let anyone know that he was going
to get married.
Another thing, whenever someone made a mistake, he wouldn’t
laugh even though he wanted to; he hid his face. Timidity hidden in
the face of a warrior is characteristic of the Oriental mindset.
(Humayun Tandar)
LIKE A KID
When he wasn’t fighting, Massoud was the funniest man in the world.
He loved the water; if he could, he would have been swimming all the
time. His favorite way of relaxing was playing with children in the
water, pushing them around and throwing them. He played like a kid
with the children, always with the children. He wasn’t a leader then;
he played and joked, ran after them and played hide and seek. When
he was around children, he was at his best.
He was an engineer and knew math, and he would make contests
for them—you do this, you read this, you count this, and let’s see who
scores the most. He wanted them to learn. He made up math games
especially for them, and he always checked the schools to see that they
were running well—the books, the chairs, everything.
(Sher Dil Qaderi)
AS AN ORDINARY PERSON
When Massoud returned from his trip to meet with the European
Parliament, I and a lot of other Afghans went to the airport to receive
him. Approximately five thousand people—ordinary men and women,
Afghan journalists, and foreign journalists—were there. When he got
off the plane, I went to him with Abdul Wodod, who is Massoud’s
nephew, while the rest waited in the terminal. After seeing all those
people, Massoud said to us, “You should have come to pick me up as
if I were an ordinary person. There was no need to trouble so many
citizens of my country.”
(Sayed Ahmad Hamed Noori)
IN THE BACK
When Muslim people pray together, they call it jammaat. At jammaat
Massoud would always be in the back. He did not want to bother
anyone, and nobody would know he was there. He just wanted to
pray, not to appear important. In my mind he was the most important
person in the whole world, but he never acted like it.
(Sher Dil Qaderi)
I CANNOT BEAR IT
Massoud was getting dressed. Trying to help, somebody moved his
shoes closer to him, but he said, “Don’t touch my shoes. I cannot bear
the burden of somebody doing these things for me,” and he went and
picked them up himself.
(Haron Amin)
THE DIARIES
For many years Massoud had a habit of writing every night in a diary
about what he had done during the day, so he had a lot of diaries.
Some are with me now, and when I open them for a few minutes and
read, I can see how determined this man was in what he wanted to
achieve. For example, he says, “I want to get myself disciplined, but it
seems I cannot. Tonight I promise myself that I will be disciplined
from this time forward.” So he talks to himself, he makes
commitments to himself, and then he gets started.
In other pages he writes about his family. When he got married he
was not exactly sure what would happen, but after a while he realized
how much he loved his wife. He really appreciated her, and he
appreciated her mother for the support she gave them.
His character had so many dimensions. On one hand he was a
strong fighter, on the other hand he was someone who talked about
poetry, his social life, and his affections. Of course, he was also a
politician. All of those different dimensions are in his diaries.
(Ahmad Wali Massoud)
Most regretfully, this morning I went to bed half an hour earlier than
usual, at 5 a.m., and woke up an hour later than I usually do. This
irregularity delayed the reports from the fields, which were
incomplete, and I was not able to attend the training and sport
activities of the mujahideen on time.
November 5, 1989
Piow Training Center
NO SAINT
It’s part of our culture that when we respect an elder or somebody we
consider spiritual, then we kiss their hands when we meet them. I met
Massoud many times, and every time I tried to kiss his hand he would
say, “Don’t kiss my hand. I am not a Syed [a descendent of the
Prophet Mohammad] and I am not a saint.”
In Kabul I joked with him. I said, “Amer Saheb, you won’t allow
me to kiss your hand, so I will do it when you are not looking.” But
every time, he pulled his hand out of my grip. He was so strong and
had such a force that I couldn’t hold it, although I am taller and
stronger.
(Sayed Hamed Mohammad Elmi)
NOTHING MATERIAL
When Massoud was among his mujahideen he always looked like
them. Nothing in him differed from them. He dressed like them and
shared food with them. Massoud did not behave like other leaders; he
was humble and simple. After his death, the only thing he left was his
family and his great reputation—nothing material. He did not
accumulate any personal wealth, inside or outside of the country.
(Yunnus Qanooni)
EMPTY POCKETS
Massoud was a man with no interest in wealth. His pockets used to be
empty of money. Although he accepted the small amounts of money
his friends and fans sent him as gifts, he never kept it. He handed it
over to one of his men and told them to keep it because, “we will have
a future.”
(Daoud Zulali)
AFGHAN TAG
At the beginning of the war, when he was going from one village to
another, the kids from about four to ten years old would all be
playing along the road. Whenever Massoud passed, they would hide
behind the walls. They would say, “Saalam aleikum,” to Massoud,
popping suddenly from behind the walls and trying to surprise him.
And Massoud would play with them, always trying to be faster, to tell
them Saalam aleikum first. He was very gentle with all kids.
(Mohammad Shuaib)
TRANSPARENT
In 1991, when Massoud was in Pakistan, he gave a press conference. I
wondered how he would respond to these journalists, who were from
very important publications (Time, BBC, etc.). He was bombarded
with questions, but Massoud chose his answers cleverly, answering
very completely and with no gaps to incite further questions.
After an hour, the reporters were quiet. So Massoud asked them,
“Do you have any more questions?” Finally, a lady from the French
press said, “Tell us a little bit about your family.” And he said, “Why
do you ask about that?” And she said, “Because we don’t have any
more questions!”
The difference is that other political leaders try to avoid questions,
but Massoud didn’t. We are accustomed, as journalists, to hurry our
questions because politicians so often try to escape, but Massoud
answered them all. He laughed a lot, and at the end he said, “I hope
to see you later, in a free Afghanistan.”
(Sayed Hamed Mohammad Elmi)
THE PANJSHIR
Massoud used to say, “If you want medicine, eat the
grass of the Panjshir and all your illnesses will be cured.”
—Dr. Mohammad Sidiq
A FORMIDABLE BASTION
Do not tell me that the Panjshir is not conquerable. It is one valley
among hundreds of valleys that are very similar, and it has access to
six or seven provinces. It can be invaded.
To defend the Panjshir, Massoud turned unity into strength by
teaching people, by taking care of them. Beyond and above all was the
Commander’s feeling for the ordinary man, feeling for the person who
was at the front line—making sure that he was fed, making sure that
he was clothed, making sure that he would persevere. That guarantees
successful war.
People trusted that Massoud would look after them, and he did, so
he was able not only to keep the Panjshir Valley as a formidable
bastion but he was able to expand it. When he accepted a truce with
the Soviets, he used the time to establish bases similar to the Panjshir
through northern Afghanistan.
(Haron Amin)
“[T]he water [ran] fast and clear between tall blue daisies. . . . Fields
of ripening wheat and maize, neatly terraced between high stone
walls, fell away to the river on our right. Big, solid, mud and timber
houses, some with a stone foundation, were dotted about the smiling
valley, some like miniature castles, their flat roofs already laden with
rounded stacks of hay and winter fodder. When we came to a group
of heavily-laden apricot trees, the mujahideen climbed up and shook
the boughs, bringing down a golden rain of apricots. They were sweet
and juicy, and the old man and woman to whom they presumably
belonged smiled and told us to help ourselves.”
(Gall, Behind Russian Lines, 62)
IN THE MARKET
The Panjshir and Takhar were completely separate from the Russian
sector. They had their own government, and taxes were collected.
Sometimes shopkeepers tried to sell their goods for more money, and
it was Massoud’s passion to make sure that the prices were fair. In
those ten years of war against the Russians, I don’t remember
anybody stealing from others. Basically, there was no crime.
(Sher Dil Qaderi)
HE IS AMER SAHEB
During Massoud’s time, nobody would be involved in corruption
because they were afraid of his name. If they were about to do
something wrong, the feeling would come to their mind, oh, he is
Amer Saheb. Because they knew he was really serious and was really
trying to help the people, they could not do it. Instead, people would
try to do good to make Massoud happy. If he saw something wrong,
he hated that, and he was like a member of everybody’s family.
(Eisa Khan Ayoob Ayoobi)
A FAMILY THING
The sense of harmony in the Panjshir was developed over years and in
the course of events. Massoud passed the test in many different ways,
and he did not betray the people; he was honest in all cases. The
people came and asked for solutions for their problems, and if he was
able to help, he would tell them. He was very open about the
problems. Later, not only in the Panjshir but in Farkhar also, the same
thing developed. It became like a family thing. He was a young person
but he was like the head of the family for everyone—for the elderly,
the religious leaders, the commanders. In Farkhar, in Borzak even, in
the same spirit you would have found that people trusted him,
respected him, and believed in him.
Right from the beginning there was a sort of genuine natural
leadership, which his personality developed over the years. People had
extreme respect for him. They were not afraid to talk with him, and
they were not afraid of criticizing him. So he let people grow the sense
of their togetherness and freedom with him, and in that way he came
to know their problems. The children in the Panjshir would go up to
him and say, “Amer Saheb, how are you?” Then he would ask them
something and let them play with him, let them compete and spend
time with him.
The other leaders and military commanders did not do those
things. At that time, being a commander meant that somebody was
harsh and had too many horses and bodyguards. The commanders
and subordinates would be riding horses, and the bodyguards would
be running behind the horses, etc. Without Commander Massoud
telling people what to do, those commanders saw his attitude towards
the people. For example, when he went to the villages in the north of
Afghanistan, he would pay for his food. That was totally new for
people. It had been the habit of the other commanders to simply come
and everybody had to prepare their food. So the people learned that
things could be different.
It was a family in which everybody had chosen one person as the
head. So there would be nothing you could not talk about to that
person. You would share happiness, and you would share sadness.
(Dr. Abdullah Abdullah)
ALL MY SONS
We went to a house in Kohshaba that belonged to Mozaffar. His son
had been wounded by the Russians and had just died on the floor.
Mozaffar’s wife and daughter kept the body in another room. At the
same time, they took care of Massoud, bringing him food, and the
wife said to him, “God protect you. I give all of my sons to you and to
God.”
(Colonel Ahmad Muslem Hayat)
HER WAY
Coming back from training in Pakistan, around sunset we reached a
place called Khawja Siyaran, north of Shamali. It was Ramadan.
There was a little village with a big house, and Saber, Aman, and I
knocked at the door. An old lady answered and invited us in. She told
us, “Everybody in my family has died. I have nobody, and I cannot
wage war because I am old, but I baked these twenty-one loaves of
bread as my way to help.”
Any resistance movement will succeed if it has the heart and
sentiment of the people.
(Haron Amin)
JUNE 5, 1983:
“. . . I had sent you a work plan with a list of the money and weapons
to implement it. . . . Now that six months has passed, I have not
received any of the items I asked for. . . . I had written that if you were
not able to supply our needs you should tell us to limit the scope of
our work. You wrote back that Jamiat had accepted the plan and
would supply the requests. . . .
“Don’t you realize under what difficult circumstances we are
working? Don’t you realize that the plan we had drawn up . . . would
have inflicted many losses on the Soviets? The plan fell apart due to
lack of attention paid to it. Because of my desire for this work and my
trust in your promises, I worked hard . . . to launch coordinated
attacks from several centers [at the proper time]. Now I find that I do
not have the resources to implement the plan, and I don’t know how
to continue the work. . . .”
SEPTEMBER 1, 1984:
“. . . Tell us what to do. Can ‘we have nothing to give you’ fill empty
stomachs and cover bare feet? I write from the qarargah of
Chemalwarda. The two hundred mujahideen here have no lunch. . . .
We cannot even find dried mulberries and talkhan (mulberry powder)
because all the houses are burned. . . .”
MEETING AT NIGHT
Once Massoud had called a meeting with all the mullahs in the valley.
Two of them did not come. It was evening, and the Commander sent
Bismillah Khan to bring them so they could start. He had also said
something to Bismillah Khan about the French women doctors who
were working in the valley—that they needed something—and
Bismillah Khan must have understood that he had to bring the women
too.
At ten in the evening in a small village in Afghanistan it is late, and
there at the meeting of the mullahs were these two lady doctors. We
laughed with Massoud and made jokes about that. If you put it in the
context of the time and the situation—the middle of the war with the
Soviets, just to allow them to be there, just that, was a kind of
courageous step.
(Dr. Abdullah Abdullah)
“Massoud asked Dr. Abdullah for a pen, and Dr. Abdullah drew one
out of his tailored cashmere jacket. ‘I recognize that pen, it’s mine,’
Massoud said. He was joking. ‘Well, in a sense everything we have is
yours,’ Dr. Abdullah replied. ‘Don’t change the topic. Right now I’m
talking about this pen.’ Massoud wagged his finger at Dr. Abdullah,
then turned to the serious business of preparing the offensive.”
(Junger, Fire, 210)
YOUR HALF
We were climbing a mountain to get to the next village. Massoud was
sort of competing—he would go a little bit faster, then slower, then
when I got close to him he would go fast again so I couldn’t catch
him.
I continued on. Then I found half an apple on top of a rock, placed
so that when you passed it you could not miss seeing it. In the middle
of the trek, I was thirsty and exhausted, and he left it for me. This was
an example of his caring for friends: making jokes in the middle of a
serious situation, but in a way that everybody felt comfortable and
sort of lighter.
(Dr. Abdullah Abdullah)
SECRET SON
When Massoud got married, he was in hiding and only five or six
people knew about it. Later, we were in a place called Pew in the
province of Takhar. We all stayed at Tajuddin’s place because
Massoud was always there. We didn’t know that Tajuddin had
become his father-in-law.
Every afternoon, when Massoud finished working, he would go to
the house and bring back a child, and people asked whose it was.
They said it must be Tajuddin’s son, because he had a baby son about
that age. Massoud carried the boy everywhere. Ahmad [Massoud’s
son] was just two months old at the time.
(Sher Dil Qaderi)
TELLING ON ME
Engineer Eshaq had a computer and printer he used to print Afghan
News, a newsletter, and he didn’t allow anybody to touch them. That
was his habit. I was in the Panjshir and Commander Massoud said to
me jokingly, “I heard that you play with Engineer Eshaq’s computer
all the time, and I’m going to tell him.” He was always trying to pull
something on you.
(Mohammad Shuaib)
“Then there was the incredible but just possible tale of Massoud and
one of his commanders, who had recently been to inspect the southern
front lines by jeep. Somehow they had taken a wrong turn, lost the
route, and driven unarmed into the heart of a Taliban stronghold.
“Massoud, instantly recognized and facing almost certain death,
demanded confidently to see their leader. So baffled were his hosts at
the sudden appearance of their arch-enemy, they obliged, and a
cordial exchange was reported between the rival leaders. Their
meeting was just long enough not to offend custom, but short enough
to prevent the Taliban from realizing that Massoud’s appearance in
their midst was nothing more than a one-in-a-million mistake.”
(Jason Elliot, An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan,
London: Picador, 1999, 76)
A RUMOR REFUTED
At one time in the early ’80s, there was information, let’s call it that,
that Massoud was “a fundamentalist,” but the truth was that he loved
to listen—perhaps a little on the sly, but that’s okay—to the songs of
Ahmad Zaher, who was thought of as the Elvis Presley of Kabul.
(Humayun Tandar)
SERIOUS BUSINESS
One night, we welcomed a new team of doctors in the Panjshir and
they were drinking tea. Massoud and some friends came in, sat down,
and began a discussion with very serious faces. The doctors were quite
impressed, but they remained silent, just drinking their tea. I listened
to the conversation for maybe an hour, then the men left.
The doctors asked if they were talking about the Soviet offensive,
about organizing the defense of the valley. They were quite anxious to
know. Actually, Massoud and his men were talking about their wives
in sexual terms, how to seduce and make love to them, what to do
and what not to do. It was respectful, and they pretended to be very
solemn, but it was a game in which they were trying to leave an
impression on the doctors while, in fact, they were ready to laugh.
(Jean-José Puig)
BATTERIES
At a press conference, Engineer Eshaq wanted to put a tape recorder
in front of Massoud, and Massoud asked, “Is the tape recorder
working?” Eshaq said yes. “Do you have batteries in your recorder?”
Eshaq said yes. “Are your batteries strong, are they working?”
I said, “Amer Saheb, Engineer Eshaq’s batteries never work!”
Massoud laughed heartily, because in our culture, if you tell a man
that his batteries don’t work it means he is sexually weak. So he
laughed a lot, and when he laughed, a reporter took his picture and it
appeared in Time magazine.
(Sayed Hamed Mohammad Elmi)
FRIENDLY PERSUASION
Some mujahideen did not have shoes and had asked Amer Saheb to
get them some. One day he came to Baad Qool, and my brother asked
him about the shoes. He joked with my brother: “No, I am not going
to give you any shoes.”
Later, they had to cross the river, and my brother, Mir Ata Khan,
was carrying Amer Saheb on his shoulders because he was all dressed
up. When they got to the middle of the river, my brother stopped and
said to him, “Do you want to give us shoes, or would you like to get
wet?” Massoud laughed and said, “Don’t get me wet; I’ll get you the
shoes!”
(Eisa Khan Ayoob Ayoobi)
JOKING IN JANGALAK
In 1999, I was with Massoud in Jangalak. It was night and we were
sitting without a lamp. My political beliefs were different from most
educated people in the town, even my family, so Massoud jokingly
said to somebody, referring to me, “And now I am not even sure if he
is one of my supporters. He says he is, but I am not so sure . . . ” and
he laughed.
I responded by telling him that Mullah Omar [the Taliban leader]
had once told his colleagues, “I hope I die before Massoud.” The
colleagues were surprised and asked, “Why do you say that?” Mullah
Omar answered, “If Massoud dies before me, he will destroy the
Polsalat Bridge, and I will never get to the other side!”
You see, in Islam, we believe that the day after you die you have to
cross the bridge of Polsalat; everybody has to walk across to leave the
earthly realm. Of course, my Mullah Omar story was really about all
the bridges that Massoud destroyed to stop the Taliban, and he had a
good laugh at it.
(Colonel Ahmad Muslem Hayat)
ALWAYS TEASING ME
Massoud had a strong sense of humor. He was always teasing me. I
remember that I had come from Kabul to see him, intending to go
straight back, but he said, “No, we are going to Takhar, and you’re
coming with us, so let’s go!” We spent the evening together in Takhar,
and the next day we went to climb a high mountain.
We could not go by car, and it was too dangerous to go by
helicopter because the enemy was very close, so we started the long
climb on foot, carrying heavy field glasses and other gear. After about
twenty minutes, Massoud said to me, “Come here, Pedram!” I
approached him, panting, and said, “I can’t carry these glasses any
further, so I’ll just put them down here.” He laughed and said, “Yes,
these field glasses were brought to Kabul by the mujahideen during
the war against the Soviets. They were not meant to be carried by
intellectuals.”
(Abdul Latif Pedram)
THE WINNER
In the Panjshir one day at the beginning of the Resistance, Massoud
was playing chess with a companion. Massoud won, and he was
pleased and said, “Did you see that? I won.” His opponent responded,
“Well, Amer Saheb, everyone wins against me.”
(Farid Amin)
DIPLOMATIC MOTIVATION
Massoud repeatedly asked the intellectuals, “What are you going to
do if the Taliban come? They can beat you, you know.” He was just
teasing them, but after a while they were all ready to leave the country
to work as diplomats.
(Colonel Ahmad Muslem Hayat)
NO SMOKE
There was a lot of fighting in Kabul in 1993 and ’94, and we were at a
key position. Hekmatyar and Dostum, who were allied at the time,
and the Shia groups were shooting missiles, and there was smoke
everywhere—except one nice little area which was completely clear.
Massoud saw it, and he laughed and said, “How come they aren’t
shelling there?”
(Colonel Ahmad Muslem Hayat)
EXACT TRANSLATION
At the press conference I arranged for Massoud, there was a female
reporter at our table taking photos. She was from the BBC and asked
the first question: “What role do you give to women?” In Persian,
Massoud answered that women could become lawyers, teachers,
ministers, doctors, politicians—he mentioned around twenty
professions. Afterwards, I translated for her, “The Commander says
that except for journalists, they can become whatever they want.”
Everybody chuckled at that, and the Commander asked me why. I
translated into Persian what I had told her, and he began to laugh like
a child.
(Masood Khalili)
THE INVITATION
I wanted to invite him to Japan. I am not rich, so I said to Massoud,
“Just you and your wife, I invite. I can pay for that.” And Massoud
said, “No, I have many mujahideen, so if I go to Japan it will be
maybe sixty, and we will stay one month.” I said, “Sixty!!” and I
forgot about that conversation.
Maybe one or two years later, I offered again for him to come to
Japan. He said, “Last time you were surprised with sixty people. Now
I say twenty people, but we must stay for two months.” So I thought
of a very big house for them, but he could never come.
(Hiromi Nagakura)
“[In Paris] Massoud wore his customary safari jacket and pakul cap
and was addressed as ‘commandant’ by the awestruck hotel staff. . . .
“Word quickly rippled through the Afghan delegation not to turn
the television on, because there were ‘dangerous’—i.e. pornographic—
channels they might stumble onto. In some interpretations of Islam,
even thinking about a woman other than your wife qualifies as a sin,
and one bearded commander was observed gripping his armchair and
praying, eyes closed, as a young French woman walked by.
“While his commanders struggled and prayed, Massoud worked.”
(Junger, “Massoud’s Last Conquest,” 107–9)
THE TOOTHACHE
On my first journey to the Panjshir I had a terrible toothache.
Massoud told me he would bring somebody to help, so they brought a
French doctor from Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without
Borders). I told him I had a lot of pain in my tooth, and he said he
would take it out, no problem. I said, “How many teeth have you
extracted?” and he said none. “Well, this is difficult,” I told him, “I
am your first victim; are you going to kill me?”
Then he called someone with a long beard like a pharaoh of Egypt.
He was slim with deep eyes and small Mongolian nose. I asked him,
“What is your profession?” and he said he was a barber. Well, my
grandmother told me once that she was treated by a barber and that
the barber was the one who took care of teeth, a semi-doctor. I asked
him how many times he had taken out teeth, and he said, “More than
ten times, a thousand times!” I said, “God bless you, come on.”
So I was sitting there like a kind of victim looking at him, and I
said, “Do you have anything to inject?” He said no, he didn’t believe
in that. He got a piece of equipment like pinchers, very old, black, and
greasy. When I saw this I said, “Oh,” but he said, “Don’t worry,” and
took out the handkerchief he used for his nose and cleaned them off. I
said, “Oh,” again and started praying: “Oh God, help me! Oh, God
and the holy warriors.”
He put those things in my mouth and said, “In the Name of God .
. . ” but I said, “Hold on, hold on . . . ” Then I asked the brother of
Hasham to come and sit on my shoulders, but he was so big that he
was like a tank and I was like a bicycle. I said, “You can’t sit on a
bicycle; let your son do it.” So the son sat on my shoulders.
Commander Massoud was sitting there, talking with some people and
looking over at me with a little smile.
Then the barber put those pinchers or whatever they were, on my
jaw and instructed me to say, “In the name of God.” I said, “I have
already recited the whole Koran!” So he pulled out my tooth, and I
felt the weight of the whole world on my shoulders and in my head,
but after two minutes there was no pain.
They brought water. It was very cold, and I washed my mouth.
Then I saw the young French doctor. He was setting up the camera to
shoot my photo, and his eyes were bigger than a deer’s. He managed
to say, “How are you?” and I replied, “Don’t ask how I am. How are
you?”
(Masood Khalili)
20
AFGHAN SPIRIT
This is a nation which is the poorest in the world,
but the people are rich in their hearts.
—Masood Khalili
“We were sitting on the grass . . . when Masud came over to join us.
He started talking to the boys, teasing one of them about the white
cloth with garishly embroidered flowers he was holding.
“‘Do you want to give that to me as a present?’
“After some hesitation, the little boy said, ‘Yes,’ and held it out to
Masud.
“‘No, no, it was only a joke. Your mother might have something
to say about that.’
“But the little boy, who could not have been more than seven,
insisted and Masud had to accept it.
“‘It’s beautiful, thank you very much. Here, come and sit beside
me, I want to talk to you.’ The boy did as he was told without the
slightest sign of shyness or embarrassment and, after asking him a lot
of questions about himself, Masud persuaded him to recite several
verses from the Koran and then something in Farsi. He did it
beautifully, as far as I could tell, without a pause or hesitation, and
when he had finished Masud applauded. I asked Khalili, ‘Who was
that poem by, Khushal Khan Khattak?’ Khattak was a seventeenth-
century Pushtun poet.
“‘No, much older. It was by Hafez, a Persian poet of the fourteen
century’.”
(Gall, Afghanistan, 164)
THE PAPAYAN
I remember an old man who walked for twenty miles to get to
Massoud. He asked Massoud to give him a gun to fight with. Now,
there are guns called papayans which shoot forty or fifty meters, but
the Kalashnikov shoots four hundred meters. In Afghanistan, the
people like to fight from a close range because it shows they are not
afraid of the enemy, so Massoud’s men played a little game with him:
“Do you want to fight from a distance or up close?” Of course, the
man said proudly, “I’d like to fight at close range.”
So this old man came twenty miles on foot, exchanged a few
words, turned around one hundred and eighty degrees and went back,
but he was happy because it let him show he was not afraid. He is still
alive but lost his eyes in a land mine explosion. Not everyone would
think to turn a small event into something clever and positive in the
middle of a war.
(Engineer Mohammed Eshaq)
I KNOW MY PEOPLE
If a leader is honest with the Afghans, behaves honestly, the Afghans
are very good people. The rumors that Afghans fight against each
other, that they are against the rules? I know my culture, I know my
people. They are really good people, if someone is honest with them.
Massoud did not give things to the people, he was just honest with
them, and he proved to the people that he was serving them.
(Mohammad Yahya Massoud)
THE MUSLIM
Once a boy named Fahrid came to the house and told me that my
father owed him some money for a book. I had him come upstairs,
and my father paid him and gave him extra money for making him
wait. Then we went upstairs to my uncle who is a doctor, and they
asked him, “Son, are you a Muslim?” and he said yes. “How are you
a Muslim? Prove yourself.” And he said, “I have a prayer,” and he
said, “Laa ilaha illallah, Mohammader-rasolallah” (There is no God
but God, and Mohammed is His Prophet).
“Son, I have a thousand dollars in my pocket, and I will give it to
you if you say that you are not a Muslim. Just say it, and I will give
you this money.” He was quiet. He was a beggar in the street, and
who wouldn’t want a thousand dollars? Then he said, “Sir, if you give
me a million dollars, if you give me the entire city, I will not say that.
What would be left for me? A Muslim has God above him; he has
faith in God.”
From a ten-year-old kid! Even my uncle had teary eyes.
(Madina Zikria)
A FARMER OR A PEASANT
I used to watch Massoud closely, wondering if the man was genuine. I
would be talking with him, and he would say, “Excuse me, I have to
go and pray.” And he would pray with whoever was around, whether
a farmer or a peasant boy didn’t matter, they were all equal.
It may go back to the fact that Afghanistan has never been
colonized. When I am in Pakistan, it’s totally different. Power is the
rapport, respect is the rapport. The fact that you are Western
automatically associates you with colonization. When you are in
Afghanistan, you are there as an equal.
(Edward Girardet)
TIMELESS
Afghanistan became sort of a spiritual thing for me, although I say
this very guardedly. It became necessary for me to go to Afghanistan
at least once a year if not more, and one of my greatest
disappointments was when we could no longer walk in. We had to
drive or fly, and it was never the same again.
When you walked you had the time to do a lot of thinking because
there was no other distraction. The food was basic—you just ate in
order to get energy—and you would see the most spectacular views. I
think that in this terrain you could find yourself. Your existence
would be down to very basic things. Afghanistan is a timeless place,
and in it you could somehow see the world more clearly.
(Edward Girardet)
SURNAMES
In Afghanistan it is traditional that there are no surnames. We say
“so-and-so, son of so-and-so.” Perhaps this is how it was in France
during the Middle Ages, yet when you come to Kabul, in an educated
milieu or where there are universities and people who have traveled,
you find surnames.
Afghan surnames do not change; they are from either one’s tribe or
one’s region. For example, someone from Kabul becomes “Kabuli.”
Sometimes a name is a personal choice, as when people choose a word
from literature that they find pretty.
During the war, during the government of President Daoud [1973–
75], the militant nationalists all did clandestine work. To avoid
identification and arrest they adopted surnames. Massoud’s name
comes from this period. One meaning of Massoud is “lucky.”
(Mehraboudin Masstan)
FOREGONE CONCLUSION
It was very difficult in the ’80s, impossible to think that this little tiny
place, Afghanistan, and this small group of people, the Resistance
within Afghanistan, would have any chance of defeating the Soviet
Union. Yet people under Massoud’s leadership used to talk about
“when the northerners leave,” and “when the Russians leave,” as if it
were a foregone conclusion that they would leave.
(Richard Mackenzie)
“Jean-Philippe [Tabard, a French doctor] . . . declared that many
Afghans suffered from nervous headaches, brought on by the
bombing. The children in particular were prone to symptoms of
trauma and he described treating one child, wounded in the arm by
bomb splinters, who had not been able to utter a sound. But, he said,
the surprising thing was that, despite these psychological effects, the
morale of the people, even the refugees, remained extremely high.
‘They are poor people, but they are for the mujahideen,’ he insisted.”
(Gall, Behind Russian Lines, 121)
“The very first Afghans I met said they would rather fight to the last
man than allow the Russians to control their country. This kind of
claim had a ring of ancient bravado about it, and one took it with a
pinch of twentieth-century salt. But after I had met the people inside
the country who were really doing the fighting I would need an
entirely new vocabulary to describe them: it was not bravado at all,
and no price was too high for its fulfilment. A wizened old villager
once put it to me simply: to lose one’s home, he said, was nothing; to
lose one’s health was something; but to lose one’s freedom—ah, that
was quite a different matter: the Russians would never get away with
that.”
(Elliot, An Unexpected Light, 163)
WHY WE WON
A long time ago, I saw a battlefield, and that night about thirty people
were killed and the village was burned. I wrote in my diary that the
next day I saw people from other villages coming to help the
wounded, and they said, “Go, boys, and fight for freedom.”
I thought: Oh, freedom is not free; you have to fight for it; it has a
cost, and it is valuable. I have tasted both, losing freedom and
regaining it, and I experienced the civil freedom that people in
Afghanistan lost with the Taliban. Then you don’t have freedom; you
have barbaric things. But it was the war of the people indeed, and that
is why we won.
(Masood Khalili)
TRANSFORMED
Somebody asked Massoud if he had changed after so many years of
struggle. I remember he answered:
“Have twenty years of war changed me? It is my people that they
have transformed, but it has been positive change. Those years have
raised people above themselves. They have allowed them, through
suffering and resistance, to transcend themselves. I loved my people
before. Now I admire them, and my dearest dream is to contribute to
the reconstruction of a free Afghanistan for them and with them.”
(Masood Khalili)
THE PHILOSOPHER
I remember a British lady who came to see Massoud; I saw her in the
lobby of his hotel in Paris. After she talked to him, I found her again
and she said to me, “It is so amazing to find a military man who has
been at war for twenty-five years and is so calm and peaceful. I never
thought that Massoud would have such a personality that if you met
him he would have an influence on you. You would never think he is
a military person; you would think he is more like a philosopher.”
When I went to see Massoud that day, I told him what that British
lady said and I asked him, “How can you be so peaceful?” He said,
“Well, I have my goals. That is the most important thing in life. Once
you know what your goals are, then the rest is easy. If you struggle to
get to them, whether you get there or you don’t, it is still okay. My
goal is the liberation of my nation, and I will do my utmost to reach
it. If I don’t, that’s my destiny, so why should I be afraid of it? Since I
have a clear goal, I don’t have to change my way of thinking or my
path every day. That’s why I am so peaceful. I don’t have any worries
at all.”
(Farid Zikria)
IN VICTORY OR DEFEAT
The Russians invaded, killed people, children, women, dropped
bombs, and a lot of mujahideen commanders were killed. Massoud
had to be upset about what was happening, but when you were
talking to him you could see the victory on his forehead; he was
always smiling, always open. Spiritually, you would think he was
winning. Without him saying anything, you would feel when you saw
him smile while all those things were happening that we were
winning. On the other hand, when he was successful he did not get
excited or chant that yes we did it. He was calm and always looked
strong—in a battle in which he lost everything or on a day when he
was successful.
(Mohammad Shuaib)
A LIGHT
MARYAM MASSOUD: Our father was engaged to our mother, but they
were not married yet. My father dreamt that he was with his fiancée,
and there was a light. The light came directly from the sky and onto
her forehead. When Massoud became a young man, when he started
the Resistance and was a leader, our father told us, “Now I see. This
light, the light that came from the sky in my dream and fell on your
mother’s forehead, that was Massoud.”
THE CONNECTION
When a person becomes “whole,” that person knows all the inner
senses, the inner self. And that person goes beyond the personal self
and is able to look at humanity and to capitalize on the positive
elements of individuals and care about them; that is the second level.
First is within, the second is without. The third is to bring those things
together, which becomes a transcendental thing.
Massoud was very developed. He could look in the eyes of a
person and know exactly what was inside that person’s heart. I mean,
he could look at you and know that you were going to open your
mouth and say, “If you don’t give me something in return, I won’t do
it.” He grasped it immediately, and could then tell you, “This is why
you are here. Here is what you want; take care and go.”
People began to pay him respect because they said, “This man—
before you open your mouth he knows exactly what you want and
gives you advice about it!” Individuals with remarkable ability like
that are able to connect with people by osmosis.
(Haron Amin)
THE COBBLER
There was an old man who in his youth and vigor was a fighter in
Central Asia during the period which the Soviets called the Basmachis.
Under pressure from the Soviet military he became a refugee in
Afghanistan, where he undertook the trade of moochi: cobbler. We
can well imagine what kind of cobbler he was: He had a little wooden
shop with probably three or four hammers, a few nails, and a little
bowl filled with water where he tempered the leather pieces that he
had found to sew into shoes. He could have been something else, this
gentleman; this is something you find among certain mystical
personalities, Sufis.
When the war erupted, he once again went into warrior mode
against those who had uprooted him and made him flee his country.
His age did not permit him to lead the fighting in this war, so instead
he chose to transmit a spiritual force to others. This is what he came
to Massoud to do, and I think that touched Massoud.
(Humayun Tandar)
MERCIFUL WARRIORS
Massoud deepened his faith over time, so that he became a Muslim
mystic who meditated on Islamic mysticism in the evenings while he
fought his wars by day. This leads me to compare him to the only
other character like that in modern Islamic history: the Algerian leader
Abdul Qadir, who in the 1830s, ’40s, and early ’50s fought against
the French and forced them to respect his high spiritual and
humanitarian dignity. Abdul Qadir too would retire in the evenings to
meditate and to comment upon the classics of Sufism, even though by
day he fought.
What makes these two so comparable is that the spiritual course
both brought to their actions was total renunciation of hatred. That is,
they perceived their participation in war as something absolutely but
unfortunately necessary to defend the independence of their nations,
of their communities, but they drilled themselves to renounce hatred,
revenge, and bitterness as motives for fighting. This showed in their
extraordinary clemency for prisoners. It meant that they always
showed mercy whenever they could, and this was something both
their Russian and French enemies detected and came to respect so
much.
(Professor Michael Barry)
IN MY SOUL
Massoud often seemed to go almost into a trance. He would close his
eyes and start praying, and it was like he would go to sleep for two
minutes, into a trance or meditation. He would close his eyes and his
lips would move very gently, as if he were whispering to a baby. This
was not somebody just saying prayers, it was a deep communication
with God. I know that in my soul.
(Richard Mackenzie)
“He appeared to have come from some fierce burnished other world.
There seemed an aura about him, as if somehow he remained
untouched by the frailties of politics and men. Placing his multicolored
three-by-five-foot prayer rug facing Mecca, he began to pray.”
(Plunk, The Wandering Peacemaker)
By “heart” I do not mean the piece of flesh situated in the left of our
bodies but that which uses all the other faculties as its instruments and
servants. In truth it does not belong to the visible world, but to the
invisible, and has come into this world as a traveller visits a foreign
country for the sake of merchandise, and will presently return to its
native land.
—Al-Ghazali, The Alchemy of Happiness
22
“‘I can die at any moment . . . ’ [my husband told me,] . . . ‘and I want
to be sure that you will be the master of your emotions and be as
strong as a man. . . . I would not like you to lose your beautiful
courage. You must continue to live. You owe it to our children.’”
(Sediqa Massoud, quoted in Hachemi and Colombani, Pour
L’amour de Massoud, 239)
A FRAGMENT OF TOMORROW
A few days before September 9, 2001, Amer Saheb called me and
asked me urgently to come to him because we had business to do. I
had some apprehension, so I asked him what was the urgent business.
He said: “There is no important matter. I just want you to be here.”
On September 8, just before sunset, we went to a place where he
has a bedroom with air-conditioning. Air-conditioning is a big luxury,
but this one was old and made a lot of noise. A hero, the minister of
defense and vice president of a country, had a room with an old noisy
air conditioner! Anyway, there was a small cupboard, his bed, and a
bookshelf. On a small table beside his bed was a volume of the Holy
Koran and a poetry volume of the Dewan of Hafiz. On the other side,
there was a wooden chair on which supposedly he sometimes sat and
stretched his back, because he suffered from back pain.
Amer Saheb changed his clothes and wore white. Among his
blessed hairs there were silver ones. He had no hat, and I said to
myself, “How nice and bright he is looking.” He told me, “Before we
start talking, recite something that you can remember.” I recited this
poem:
Get up, so that the lovers, during the night, have secret talks.
They fly around the door and the roof of the beloved One.
Everywhere there is a door, they close it during the night.
Except the door of the Friend; they let it open, in the night.
Amer Saheb, who had a lot of literary taste, enjoyed it, asked me
to read it again and wanted me to express the meaning of it. Then he
gave his own interpretation of the poem, and that was a good
beginning for our conversation about history, Sufism, and mysticism.
It became a very special night.
Before I read the poem, he had asked someone to close the door
and bring green tea for our talk. I had perceived that when he was in a
very special mood he liked to make arrangements such as that. Later,
he picked up the Dewan of Hafiz and said: “They sent me this book
recently.” I don’t remember who had published the book, but I hope
they kept it. This was a book which included the explanation of every
word and the interpretation of the poems. We expressed our surprise
at what a wonderful book it was, and that the footnotes were more
than the text itself.
He said, “Let’s read lyric poems for an hour.” I noticed that the
poems were long, and that made me happy because I was always
transported to a special state when I had conversations with him. I
recited a couple of ghazals of Hafiz.
Our discussion turned to Sufis and their way of life. He was very
familiar with Imam Al-Ghazali and his book, The Alchemy of
Happiness, one of only two books of Al-Ghazali in his native
Dari/Persian language. He recalled a chapter of the book and asked
me if I had read it. I said I had been reading that book since my
childhood. He replied: “Read it again. That is a very important
book.” I made an excuse in the hope that he wouldn’t start that
subject, because that is a very long discussion.
He said: “Let’s consult the book of Hafiz to tell our fortune,” and
then he opened the book. It’s a tradition that we open the book,
whether it is someone who’s got a friend, a lover, or a mother who
has a child far from her—they just open it and see what happens, like
a fortune-teller. It’s a tradition; it’s not scientific. And in Afghanistan,
I open the book, and you read it for me, and whatever is written, we
will see what will happen to us. So, he opened the book, and he gave
it to me, and this is the poetry I read:
When I read that, he just sat and said, “I opened it; did you see?”
He said, “Read it again. Read it and tell me what you see.” I read it
again, and I thought that Hafiz saying a night like this will not come
again meant we would not see each other on a night like this with the
window open, no one except him and me awake, in this poor remote
village on the bank of the Amu Darya [the Oxus River]. Not again the
beginning of autumn, and just one light lit, him and me, as we see
through the window. The stars are hanging, and the sky is like a
hanging ocean. Amu Darya is flowing like an arrow into the heart of
the history of mankind, and tomorrow or another day, this all will not
come again.
He smiled and said, “Well, beautiful interpretation. I hope we will
see each other again on such a night.” And then he asked me, “Do
you have anything else from Hafiz?” I opened the book again, and
another poem came. I read it to him:
Now I realize how negligent I was. He said, “It’s still early,” but I
insisted it was too late and I should leave him so that he could sleep a
little bit. I did not pay attention to his words. He was kind to honor
me by escorting me downstairs and said that it would be good to eat
lunch on the bank of Amu Darya, and God willing we would continue
our talks there. And he repeated three times, “Inshallah” (God
willing).
In the morning when I got up, I saw a red teapot and a box of
coffee in my room. While he might have been preoccupied with
questions regarding the political and military poles, the deeds of
Pakistan, Central Asia, the Taliban, and others, when he got up for
the daybreak prayer, he sent me coffee, because he knew I, his guest,
liked coffee.
Around eleven-thirty that morning, he came, and those were the
best moments when I saw him so nice that morning. He wore a gray
shirt, a gray long jacket, very clean military pants, a pair of shiny
shoes, and no hat. He was so impressive that upon his entrance I
jumped up from my bed, without thinking of my back problem.
Now I remember the double couplet of camel driver Sarban of
Mawlana Jami which I also recited that night, and now I know why it
was joyful to him:
Of the camel-driver I asked where my kindless moon is;
He answered, the one on the camel-litter is in another caravan.
I said, may I see him from a distance?
He said, don’t ask me, because the rein of that caravan
is not in my hands.
Who knew that I would recall with regret, because the rein of that
caravan is really in the hands of another camel driver. After that
tormenting event, often I see that whole night in my dreams, and I
read this double couplet again. At that time I didn’t know.
On that morning, Massoud said that we had an appointment, we
had to go and we had to hurry up. He made some quick calls,
accepted some short visits, and gave some instructions. The contents
of those conversations were merely political issues; it took all of ten
minutes, and when he was done he asked me, “What is on your
desk?” I said, “Tazkeratul-Awliya [Memorials of the Saints] of Attar.”
He said, “It’s good that we will work on this book today.”
Then he said, “There are journalists waiting for me. They are
Arabs too. They have been waiting for thirteen or fourteen days; it’s
not appropriate to let them wait any longer. We can finish the
interview in five minutes and then we will go to Amu Darya.” I
showed my aversion, not because they were Arabs, but because why
should they cause a delay in our excursion? He noticed this from my
facial expression and repeated, “We will finish the interview in five
minutes!”
Beside my room, there was a living room. A couch had been placed
there for the interview. He entered that room, and I followed him.
(This account is a combination of two interviews: the author’s
personal interview with Masood Khalili, and an earlier interview of
Mr. Khalili, which was published in Omaid Weekly, an Afghan
magazine (vol. 10, no. 499, November 12, 2001; no. 500, November
19, 2001; no. 501, November 26, 2001; and no. 502, December 3,
2001). Thanks to Mr. Mohammad Q. Koshan, editor-in-chief, for his
gracious permission to use Omaid’s material in this way.)
SO MANY TIMES
I heard that Massoud said before he passed away, “Karimalaila ilala
mahama razulilah” (God is great. I believe in God; God is One.
Everything is in God’s hands, and Mohammad is the Prophet.) Then
he said, “How are the others?”
It must be true, because his life was always in God’s hands. I am
sure 100 percent, because he said it so many times. We were always in
dangerous situations. Sometimes his bodyguards told him, “Don’t go
so far into the Taliban territory.” But he would always say, “My life is
in the hands of my God. When he decides that I die, I will die.” It’s
true. He had a link with God. I heard some days before that he didn’t
care when he died, that he accepted God’s decision.
(Ahmad Jamshid)
BEACON OF LIGHT
Seek not my monument on the face of the earth
but look for it in the heart of the Friends.
—Jami (From “What is life and death?”
by Sayed Omar Ali-Shah, February 24, 1994, London)
UNCLE FARID
In 2001, I was in Paris with my brother, his wife, and his two
daughters. I took them to see Massoud because they really wanted to
meet him. He took this time to talk to them when the Taliban was 90
percent in control of Afghanistan, and he was the main leader fighting
against them.
(Farid Zikria)
MOTHER SURAYA
When I left Afghanistan in 1980, I used to hear stories about Ahmad
Shah Massoud, who was fighting with the mujahideen against the
Soviet occupation and wanted freedom for Afghanistan. It was my
dream to meet him, and when I went to Paris I had the opportunity to
finally do it. We sat down with my husband and my two daughters,
Madina and Arian. There isn’t a day that I don’t think about it.
He talked about how to make your family strong, and about the
roles of the mother and father. He asked us questions: Do you work?
What do you do? Do your daughters go to school? Who takes care of
them? As a woman, he made me feel I had such a big role in the life of
the family—how important it is to raise a good family, how you can
help your children. He appreciated that we carry most of the burden,
and he praised women a lot.
He emphasized the need to read strong poetry books like Rumi to
your children, and said that in the mornings we should play tapes of
the Koran for them, that it didn’t matter if they understood because
they could hear. He said, “You know the Koran is complicated, but
don’t worry if the kids are born in the United States; they will
understand later on.”
Sitting in a room with somebody like Massoud would have
normally made me nervous. He was the only hero I met with whom I
felt really comfortable. I felt I could ask him any question and he
wouldn’t hesitate to answer. He was very inviting, and you could see
in his eyes how happy he was to see a family who wanted to meet
him. He said, “Read to your kids, have faith in God and Islam, and
have strong values. That’s what Afghanistan needs.”
He wanted to get an idea of the life of an Afghan family in the
United States, so he asked my children if they spoke Farsi or English at
home, what was their primary language. Madina was thirteen, and
Arian was ten, and it was unbelievable how well he connected with
them. He believed because they were living in the United States,
English was important, but he emphasized that they should never
forget their true language, which was Farsi, Dari, or Pashtu. He
emphasized that even though we had to leave Afghanistan as refugees,
we should not forget our culture, heritage, and language.
He wanted to know if other refugees would return to Afghanistan
if the situation was better. He wanted to know, how is the school
system, how is the daily living in the United States. We live very
comfortably, but he made me feel like we are suffering as much as
people in Afghanistan, because, “We are there; at least we know
what’s going on. It’s more difficult to be away than it is to be
present.”
He talked about the elders. Children take care of the elders in
Afghanistan, and they all live in one big house. What do they do
abroad? He thought it was sad that in the United States you have to
work and you don’t have the time or the financial capabilities to take
care of your elders. He was surprised, and he kept saying, “Your
parents who have raised you, put you through your education, and at
the end of life you let them go?” For him it was very important to take
care of your elders, to preserve the traditions. What is a house without
elders, because they tell you stories, they communicate values. They
are respected in the household, and that’s how the children learn.
He hoped people would return to Afghanistan in the future. We
couldn’t give him a definite answer, but we told him that people
financially can sometimes not go back. They settle here or they have
illnesses, so we talked about all of those issues. It was getting late, but
we had tea and cookies and kept talking. To me, it seemed like only
ten minutes. I had always talked about him to my children, so it was
the best thing for them to experience, and they still talk about him. I
can’t tell you how difficult his death was for us. It was a loss for the
whole world, because people like Massoud are so rare.
(Suraya Zikria)
DAUGHTER MADINA
When we went to Paris I was thirteen years old. I had heard about
Massoud from my father and my Uncle Farid, who loved him, but I
didn’t know very much. When we were in Paris my mom said,
“Ahmad Shah Massoud is here, and we are going to see him.” We
went to a beautiful hotel and I was kind of shaky; I couldn’t believe it.
We had to wait in another room because he was praying. Afterwards,
we all shook hands, and he sat down on the other side of the room in
a single chair.
We talked for two or three hours, and he was such a—I don’t
know how to say it. Just by his face and his features you could tell
what kind of a man he was, what he had gone through. He had strong
features, with lines on his forehead, and he was so clean, so pure. He
had just prayed and—usually when you go to Afghanistan there is no
water so people don’t take showers, but he was so clean. He was not
wearing shoes. Even in Afghanistan with no water he still prayed five
times a day.
So we sat down and talked, and he asked me if I spoke Farsi or
English at home. I do speak English but I mostly speak Farsi, so I
didn’t tell him that I spoke English because I wanted to make a good
impression. But when I talked in Farsi he noticed that I had a little bit
of an accent. He said to Dr. Abdullah, “Listen to her accent. Her
tongue is rolling because she speaks English.” I started to laugh, and
he said, “Good job!” He encouraged me to speak Farsi at home:
“Stick to your culture, to your language, your values. Read books,
learn about Islam, read the Koran, stick to your religion. Don’t let
American society pull you away from it.”
He asked my father, when Afghanistan becomes free, would you
come back or are you very attached to the luxuries of the United
States. And my father said, “Of course I will come.” Massoud said
everybody should come; it is the new generation that should come and
rebuild. He looked at his watch and said, “I am waiting for my plane
to come so that I can go back to my country. I am sure my friends will
ask me if I saw the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and I will tell them no,
because every minute I was looking at my watch waiting to see when I
could go back.”
He said to read the Koran, be a good Muslim, help your country.
And there is a book he told my mother that she should read to us. He
told us always to remember where we are from, and that Afghanistan
will be free and we can go back and help our people. He talked about
older people. When he heard that in the United States they are placed
in nursing homes, assisted living homes, and nobody cares, it was new
to him because in Afghanistan it is not like that.
Massoud had a big influence on me. Like I told you, I didn’t know
very much about Afghanistan, but after meeting him and knowing
what kind of person he was, how much passion he had, I felt, gosh, it
would be great to someday go there to see what it is like. I couldn’t
believe that someone would sacrifice his entire life for the freedom of
his country. He spent all his life in a war in Afghanistan, and he had
such a great passion that all he wanted to do was go back.
(Madina Zikria)
A MOTHER’S DECISION
I have sent my daughter to Afghanistan. She is sixteen years old, and I
decided to let her go so she can see it. People said she is going to get
sick, etc. I thought, I leave it in God’s hands. If something is going to
happen to her it’s going to happen. I just said, “May God be with her.
Let her find her way in life; let her see her roots.” She called me many
times and said, “Mom, thank you for the best opportunity of my life.”
Massoud made me feel that if you are a woman you can do this, that
both men and women can do it.
Right now, the world needs people who are more affectionate,
more human. Of course, you become a doctor and you make millions
of dollars. That’s it, and what is life? At sixty-five, you are retired and
you are gone, if you even live that long! But I want my children to
enjoy their lives, to be able to experience both worlds, to see and
make a choice. She is old enough right now, and I told her that while
she is there I don’t want her to sit around the house. “Go out, go to
the hospitals, meet people, meet the ill, talk to the children in the
streets.” And when she comes back she will study hard, she will try to
be somebody, and whatever she decides to do hopefully will benefit
people in the world.
My daughter called and told me, “This is so fulfilling.” I asked her
what she meant and she said, “I gave a pencil to a little boy, and he
gave me a hug. He had tears in his eyes, and he thanked me so much.
He didn’t have shoes on his feet, and I felt that I have done the best
thing. It was so fulfilling for me, just giving my pencil.” She will
always remember in the back of her mind, wherever she is in her life,
she will remember that. May God be with her.
Human beings, they are all created by God. Why are they suffering
and we are not, over here? But she has to realize that we are suffering
in a different way. God gave us all this, and we should give back
somehow. Some people say, why does God allow such cruelty. It’s a
test for us, so we can give back to those in need, whether in money,
love, comfort, hope. One of the strongest things that Massoud gave to
the Afghans, there and here, was hope. And hope keeps a human
being alive.
(Suraya Zikria)
MADINA’S JOURNEY
My trip to Afghanistan was wonderful. I was born and raised in the
United States, and it was all new for me, like a different world. I was
able to do donations for the little kids, I made school clothes, I did a
lot of things that I wanted to do for the poor. Since I came back, my
whole focus is what can I study, what can I do so that some day I can
go back over there and help. I had never seen poverty—so many poor
people, so many ruins. When I went there I realized what it meant.
I met so many people. Even the little kids selling books in the
streets, they all became such good friends of mine. Every day I was
with them, I would bring them inside. I would take them to the bakery
and buy them bread and cook for them and buy them ice cream. We
got their measurements for black shirts and white scarves and took
fabric to a seamstress. We bought sixty pairs of sneakers, and
notebooks, pencils, pens, rulers, pencil sharpeners for about forty
children—a bunch of stuff just to help out.
Before, a lot of them were begging in the streets. We said, “Don’t
beg. You are getting older, and it is going to become a habit. Go to
school, and after school sell books, sell newspapers instead of begging
in the streets.” Some of them told me if they didn’t go home with a
certain amount of money for the family at the end of each day, they
got in trouble and got punished.
Such a poor country. Amazing. And they all love Ahmad Shah
Massoud, and they sell his pictures and books. I told them that I met
him, and they were shocked. One of the little boys said that when he
passed away the entire town of Kabul wore black coats and was
devastated.
(Madina Zikria)
TOO SOON
We try to do what we can nowadays, but there is a void. Massoud left
us too soon. He could have done so much for Afghanistan, for the
region, and for the world—he had the ability. I see clearly that
everyone on our side tries to do something, but it is not even a tenth
of what he could have done.
When we see what is happening today in Afghanistan, even though
there is aid from the international community, from international
troops and all, there is still a leader missing. It is like a plane which is
super-equipped with everything but has no pilot. This is not meant as
a slur against President Karzai or anyone else, but Massoud was a
leader so competent that even a junked plane—one destroyed and
lacking everything—he would have been able to take off with it. This
is the reason things are going slowly, not only for Afghanistan, but for
the region and for the whole world.
(Mehraboudin Masstan)
THE IMPACT
In the whole history of Afghanistan, not so many people have written
or recited poems, or have talked, or have shed tears. People who never
saw him at all, but immediately, when they talk about Massoud, it
affects them and they just cry. You can go to Afghanistan and ask
children as young as seven, and you can see the effects of Massoud’s
death on them. Men, women, friends, enemies—you can see the
impact.
(Ahmad Wali Massoud)
A LOVELY FRIEND
I was not saddened by Massoud’s assassination; that was what he
knew and accepted when he took the first step. However, we lost a
very dear and kind father, a real commander and chief, a dear brother,
and a lovely friend. May God Almighty grant Massoud the highest
place in Paradise.
I conclude my words with a poem by Khalillullah Khalili, a great
poet of my country, written to praise heroes like Massoud. This poem
is about those who make history and remain in many hearts, and so
never die.
Man does not die by death;
Death only steals his name.
As death renders eternal,
How can he simply die?
(Daoud Zulali)
A NEVER-ENDING STORY
Massoud for me was a complete human being, a symbol of morality,
of bravery, of love. When I remember, my feeling is not as his brother,
but more as a human being. His attitude towards his people, his
country—in this regard he is very valuable to me. And I am not the
only one who feels this way. Dr. Abdullah who was with Massoud all
the time, we talk about Massoud all day. We don’t talk about, oh, he
was so brave that he captured that town. We talk about his friendship,
his humility, his love, his attitude towards his people. It’s a never-
ending story.
(Mohammad Yahya Massoud)
FROM MY HEART
Everything I see about my country reminds me of him. I came to this
country [England] to study English, economics, and everything for
him, and I will finish it for him, honestly, from my heart. My learning
English is very useful at the moment because I can tell you about him.
Then I would like to work for the Massoud Foundation.
(Ahmad Jamshid)
I SAW MYSELF
The way I saw Massoud was—I can ask myself, are you kind to older
men? I saw him as a reflection for me. In Japan, if I publish a book
people say, “Oh, you are very good,” so I was a little bit self-satisfied.
But when I went to Afghanistan and saw Massoud, I said to myself,
“You are nothing. In Japan people say you are great, and then you are
satisfied; you are happy. But when you come here and see the Afghan
people, you realize you are nothing.” It gave me more of a perspective.
The way I see Massoud, I see myself. It’s like a mirror.
(Hiromi Nagakura)
WIN OR LOSE
We saw him in victories and we saw him in defeats, but we never
changed our minds about him. Usually, when somebody wins he is
praised, and when he loses, people discard him, but for us, Massoud
was always a respected figure. We did not expect him to thank us for
what we did. Really, we needed him more than he needed us.
(Engineer Mohammed Eshaq)
STILL WITH US
We, as his followers, are proud of having worked with such a leader.
None of us questioned for a single instant our readiness to sacrifice
ourselves for his noble cause. He never feared anything, even death.
Knowing that he was such a great leader, we all have to follow his
path and his cause. Even though he’s not among us any more, his
ideal, his will, and his goal stay with us.
(Yunnus Qanooni)
“The terrible, violent 20th century finally came to an end: with its
record of three totalitarian assaults on human dignity, three almost
unprecedented perversions of the human mind. The Nazi: the
perversion of right-wing politics. The Leninist or Soviet: the
perversion of left-wing politics. And the Tâlibân and al-Qâ’ida: the
perversion of religion injected into politics. . . .
“Yet . . . the legacy of all three perversions, when all accounts are
tallied, has been simply: mass murder, and a permanent besmirching
of mankind’s perception of itself. Massoud was born just after the first
of these perversions had at last disappeared from this earth, but he
fought magnificently against the other two. Massoud contributed
mightily to defeat the second perversion, the Soviets; he helped rid
humanity of its lingering enigmatic nightmare, and lived to see its end.
Massoud also contributed just as mightily to defeat the third
perversion, al-Qâ’ida. Here he did not live to see its end. But
Massoud’s sacrifice hastened al-Qâ’ida’s end in Kabul itself. And
Massoud’s message of religious decency, of profound faith in a creed
of mercy, as opposed to a creed of hate, has helped check this third
great perversion all around the world today.
“For victoriously waging these two struggles, we, who are alive
today, remain forever in Massoud’s debt. . . .”
(Barry, “Thoughts on Commander Massoud”)
“Three Taliban were dragged out of a bunker, dirty and terrified, and
pushed along through the crowd toward the side of the road. One was
an old man, a Turk, wounded in the chest, who claimed he was a
cook. A young Alliance soldier cocked his gun and started to haul him
off the road but was stopped by Reza, the photographer I was
working with. Reza told the soldier in Dari that he had known
Massoud during the ’80s, when they were fighting the Russians and
that Massoud had absolutely forbidden the mistreatment of prisoners.
“‘I have all your photographs,’ Reza warned. ‘Respect the memory
of Massoud, or I will report you all.’”
(Junger, “Massoud’s Last Conquest”)
History adds that before or after dying he found himself in the presence of
God and told Him: ‘I who have been so many men in vain want to be one and
myself.’ The voice of the Lord answered from a whirlwind: ‘Neither am I
anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare,
and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no
one.’
—Jorge Luis Borges (“Everything and Nothing,”
Labyrinths, New York: New Directions, 1999, 248)
(We would like to thank Mrs. María Kodama, widow of Jorge Luis
Borges and President of the International Foundation Jorge Luis
Borges, for allowing the publication of these beautiful words from
Borges)
APPENDIX A
MASSOUD’S LETTER TO THE PEOPLE OF
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (1998)
I send this message to you today on behalf of the freedom and peace-
loving people of Afghanistan, the Mujahedeen freedom fighters who
resisted and defeated Soviet communism, the men and women who
are still resisting oppression and foreign hegemony and, in the name of
more than one and a half million Afghan martyrs who sacrificed their
lives to uphold some of the same values and ideals shared by most
Americans and Afghans alike. This is a crucial and unique moment in
the history of Afghanistan and the world, a time when Afghanistan
has crossed yet another threshold and is entering a new stage of
struggle and resistance for its survival as a free nation and
independent state.
I have spent the past 20 years, most of my youth and adult life,
alongside my compatriots, at the service of the Afghan nation, fighting
an uphill battle to preserve our freedom, independence, right to self-
determination and dignity. Afghans fought for God and country,
sometimes alone, at other times with the support of the international
community. Against all odds, we, meaning the free world and
Afghans, halted and checkmated Soviet expansionism a decade ago.
But the embattled people of my country did not savor the fruits of
victory. Instead they were thrust in a whirlwind of foreign intrigue,
deception, great-gamesmanship and internal strife. Our country and
our noble people were brutalized, the victims of misplaced greed,
hegemonic designs and ignorance. We Afghans erred too. Our
shortcomings were a result of political innocence, inexperience,
vulnerability, victimization, bickering and inflated egos. But by no
means does this justify what some of our so-called Cold War allies did
to undermine this just victory and unleash their diabolical plans to
destroy and subjugate Afghanistan.
Today, the world clearly sees and feels the results of such
misguided and evil deeds. South-Central Asia is in turmoil, some
countries on the brink of war. Illegal drug production, terrorist
activities and planning are on the rise. Ethnic and religiously-
motivated mass murders and forced displacements are taking place,
and the most basic human and women’s rights are shamelessly
violated. The country has gradually been occupied by fanatics,
extremists, terrorists, mercenaries, drug Mafias and professional
murderers. One faction, the Taliban, which by no means rightly
represents Islam, Afghanistan or our centuries-old cultural heritage,
has with direct foreign assistance exacerbated this explosive situation.
They are unyielding and unwilling to talk or reach a compromise with
any other Afghan side.
Unfortunately, this dark accomplishment could not have
materialized without the direct support and involvement of influential
governmental and non-governmental circles in Pakistan. Aside from
receiving military logistics, fuel and arms from Pakistan, our
intelligence reports indicate that more than 28,000 Pakistani citizens,
including paramilitary personnel and military advisers are part of the
Taliban occupation forces in various parts of Afghanistan. We
currently hold more than 500 Pakistani citizens including military
personnel in our POW camps. Three major concerns—namely
terrorism, drugs and human rights—originate from Taliban-held areas
but are instigated from Pakistan, thus forming the interconnecting
angles of an evil triangle. For many Afghans, regardless of ethnicity or
religion, Afghanistan, for the second time in one decade, is once again
an occupied country.
Let me correct a few fallacies that are propagated by Taliban
backers and their lobbies around the world. This situation over the
short and long run, even in case of total control by the Taliban, will
not be to anyone’s interest. It will not result in stability, peace and
prosperity in the region. The people of Afghanistan will not accept
such a repressive regime. Regional countries will never feel secure and
safe. Resistance will not end in Afghanistan, but will take on a new
national dimension, encompassing all Afghan ethnic and social strata.
The goal is clear. Afghans want to regain their right to self-
determination through a democratic or traditional mechanism
acceptable to our people. No one group, faction or individual has the
right to dictate or impose its will by force or proxy on others. But
first, the obstacles have to be overcome, the war has to end, just peace
established and a transitional administration set up to move us toward
a representative government.
We are willing to move toward this noble goal. We consider this as
part of our duty to defend humanity against the scourge of
intolerance, violence and fanaticism. But the international community
and the democracies of the world should not waste any valuable time,
and instead play their critical role to assist in any way possible the
valiant people of Afghanistan overcome the obstacles that exist on the
path to freedom, peace, stability and prosperity.
Effective pressure should be exerted on those countries who stand
against the aspirations of the people of Afghanistan. I urge you to
engage in constructive and substantive discussions with our
representatives and all Afghans who can and want to be part of a
broad consensus for peace and freedom for Afghanistan.
With all due respect and my best wishes for the government and
people of the United States, Ahmad Shah Massoud.
(www.afghan-web.com/documents/let-masood.html [Afghanistan Online])
APPENDIX B
DECLARATION OF THE ESSENTIAL
RIGHTS OF AFGHAN WOMEN
Dushanbe, Tajikistan, June 28, 2000
SECTION I
Considering that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well
as the international statements addressing the rights of women listed
in Section II of this document, are systematically trampled in
Afghanistan today.
Considering that all the rules imposed by the Taliban concerning
women are in total opposition to the international conventions cited
in Section II of this document.
Considering that torture and inhumane and degrading treatment
imposed by the Taliban on women, as active members of society, have
put Afghan society in danger.
Considering that the daily violence directed against the women of
Afghanistan causes, for each one of them, a state of profound distress.
Considering that, under conditions devoid of their rights, women
find themselves and their children in a situation of permanent danger.
Considering that discrimination on the basis of gender, race,
religion, ethnicity and language is the source of insults, beatings,
stoning and other forms of violence.
Considering that poverty and the lack of freedom of movement
pushes women into prostitution, involuntary exile, forced marriages,
and the selling and trafficking of their daughters.
Considering the severe and tragic conditions of more than twenty
years of war in Afghanistan.
SECTION II
The Declaration which follows is derived from the following
documents:
- United Nations Charter.
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
- International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
- International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
- Convention on the Rights of the Child.
- Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against
Women.
- Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women.
- The Human Rights of Women.
- The Beijing Declaration.
- The Afghan Constitution of 1964.
- The Afghan Constitution of 1977.
SECTION III
The fundamental right of Afghan women, as for all human beings, is
life with dignity, which includes the following rights:
1. The right to equality between men and women and the right to the
elimination of all forms of discrimination and segregation, based on gender,
race or religion.
2. The right to personal safety and to freedom from torture or inhumane or
degrading treatment.
3. The right to physical and mental health for women and their children.
4. The right to equal protection under the law.
5. The right to institutional education in all the intellectual and physical
disciplines.
6. The right to just and favorable conditions of work.
7. The right to move about freely and independently.
8. The right to freedom of thought, speech, assembly and political
participation.
9. The right to wear or not to wear the chadari (burqa) or the scarf.
10. The right to participate in cultural activities including theatre, music and
sports.
SECTION IV
This Declaration developed by Afghan women is a statement,
affirmation and emphasis of those essential rights that we Afghan
women own for ourselves and for all other Afghan women. It is a
document that the State of Afghanistan must respect and implement.
This document, at this moment in time, is a draft that, in the
course of time, will be amended and completed by Afghan women.
Info and send support statement to:
1. The United Front and the Taliban shall cease-fire and all heavy weapons shall
be withdrawn from the front lines. The city of Kabul shall be de-militarized, and
the exchange of all prisoners of war shall commence.
2. A transitional government shall be established in Kabul for a period of six
months to one year, and shall be composed of either of the following:
Impartial persons who are not members of the United Front or the Taliban; or
Impartial persons, and persons who are members of the United Front and the
Taliban; or
Only those persons who are members of the United Front and the Taliban.
3. During the transitional period between the cease-fire and the formation of a
new government of Afghanistan, the transitional government shall exercise the
following powers:
Maintain the cease-fire, and oversee the process of peace and reconciliation
throughout Afghanistan.
Collect all the heavy weapons, and form the nucleus of a national army.
Administer the provinces, major cities, and districts in consultation and
cooperation with the influential and respected persons in those local areas.
4. The transitional government shall form an assembly (“shura”) representing all
the people of Afghanistan. The sole purpose of this assembly is to draft the
Constitution of Afghanistan (“Basic Law of Afghanistan”). The Constitution of
Afghanistan shall define the type of government that the people of Afghanistan
desire.
5. The transitional government shall form a Grand Assembly (“Loya Jirga”) to
approve the Constitution of Afghanistan. Upon approval, a new government shall
be formed in accordance with the constitution, and all national power shall be
transferred from the transitional government to the new Government of
Afghanistan.
Amin, Farid is a realtor in Colorado who also writes, does research, and teaches
students from seventh grade to college level. For many years, he acted in Southern
California as unofficial representative of the Afghan Resistance against the Soviet
Union. He worked under Massoud in 1995—before joining the Foreign Office—and
was appointed Afghanistan’s chargé d’affaires to Austria, Hungary, Bosnia,
Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. In May of 1996, he became the permanent
representative to the United Nations in Vienna.
Amin, H. E. Haron was born in 1969 in Kabul. He fled Kabul after the Soviet
invasion of 1979 and eventually settled in California. He returned to Afghanistan in
1988 to fight for his country’s freedom under Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud.
Later, he was assigned to represent Afghan interests before the U.S. government, and
in 1995 joined the Foreign Service. Amin facilitated the 1997 campaign of
Ghafoorzai as the prime minister, serving as his chief of staff until the latter’s tragic
plane crash.
Amin received his master’s in political science from St. John’s University in New
York. He was instrumental in restoring bilateral relations between Afghanistan and
the U.S. in 2002. A former United Nations diplomat, Amin became known in world
media as the principal spokesperson for the anti-Taliban Coalition after 9/11 and is
currently Afghanistan’s ambassador to Japan.
Anas, Adbullah was born in Algeria and is presently working with a company called
P.A.TV as translator and consultant on a documentary called JIHAD: Men and
Ideas Behind Al-Qaeda. He served with Ahmad Shah Massoud as a mediator and as
representative of the Service Bureau. Anas was instrumental in presenting Massoud
to the Islamic world, especially after 1988 with his father-in-law, Abdullah Azzam.
Elmi, Sayed Hamed Mohammad was born in 1962 in Kabul. He received his B.S.
degree from Kabul University, worked in journalism for the mujahideen’s Afghan
Information Center, and later entered Boston University’s journalism program for
further training in the field. His reporting during the Afghan-Soviet War led to his
being awarded the title the Best Journalist During the War by Afghanistan’s Journal
Union. During the early 1990s, he reported for Afghanistan for Voice of America.
In 2003, Elmi was appointed to the office of spokesperson to the president of
Afghanistan and was later promoted to deputy spokesperson and head of
Communications. He became the principal spokesperson for President Karzai’s
campaign team for the country’s first free elections in 2004, and in 2005 was
appointed cultural attaché to Afghanistan’s Embassy in Washington, D.C., where he
presently resides.
Elmi has authored five books and numerous articles on Afghanistan’s political
and military situations and cultural affairs.
Escobar, Pepe was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1954. He began his journalism
career in 1979 as a film critic. Escobar has been a foreign correspondent in London,
Milan, Paris, Los Angeles, and Asia (based in Singapore, then Bangkok) and has
worked for all major Brazilian newspapers and a few magazines. Since 2000, he has
been with Asia Times as a traveling correspondent, covering especially the Middle
East, Central Asia, and South Asia, and sometimes Southeast Asia, China, and
Europe.
Escobar has published two books in Brazil, and one in the U.S. (Globalistan,
2007) and was contributing editor in two other books, published in England and
Italy.
Eshaq, Engineer Mohammad was born in 1952 in the Panjshir Valley. He attended
the Afghan Institute of Technology (AIT) and the College of Engineering at Kabul
University where he joined the Islamic movement and met Ahmad Shah Massoud.
Eshaq joined Massoud in a failed uprising against President Daoud in 1975 and was
forced to flee the country for six years.
From 1983 to 1992, Engineer Eshaq represented Massoud in Peshawar where he
traveled to advocate the mujahideen’s cause. He testified before the U.S. Congress,
published many articles about the Afghan Resistance, and served as a political
adviser to Massoud. In 1992, he returned to Afghanistan as deputy minister of Civil
Aviation and published a fortnightly paper called Afghan News.
When the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996, Eshaq returned to the Panjshir and
helped publish Payam-e-Mujahid (Message of the Mujahid). From 2000 until the
end of 2001, he represented Massoud in Washington. In 2002, he became head of
Radio-Television of Afghanistan. He currently works for Payam-e-Mujahid Weekly
in Kabul.
Gall, Sandy is a writer and journalist based in England, who for many years was
foreign correspondent for ITN, co-presenting “News at Ten” for nearly twenty
years. He traveled several times to Afghanistan and particularly to the Panjshir
Valley during the 1980s to visit Massoud. He has written two books related to his
journeys through Afghanistan: Behind Russian Lines: An Afghan Journal and
Afghanistan: Agony of a Nation.
Hachemi, Chekeba was born in Afghanistan and lived in exile in France during the
Soviet and Taliban wars. She founded the organization Afghanistan Libre in 1996.
In 1999, she traveled to the northeastern region of Afghanistan and worked with
Massoud until his death in 2001. In 2001, she was appointed one of the first Afghan
female diplomats in Brussels. She is now the minister counselor of the Afghan
Embassy in Paris and continues the projects in education and economic development
for women through her organization all around the country.
Haidar, Commander Gul joined the jihad in 1979 and fought beside Massoud until
his death in 2001, despite losing a leg to a land mine. He now serves in the Afghani
National Army.
Hooke, Chris has been making documentary films since 1981. He first travelled to
the Panjshir Valley of Afghanistan with Tony Davis in 1984 for research, then
completed a fifty-minute documentary film in 1985 about the Afghan Resistance
and made several films about Afghanistan for BBC Panorama, Channel 4 (U.K.) and
Discovery over the next decade. Hooke was in Kabul interviewing Ahmad Shah
Massoud a month before the Taliban attacked and occupied the city. He is currently
photographing subjects in science, ethnography, and wildlife with the occasional
foray into politics.
Jamshid, Ahmad was a secretary of Massoud during the Resistance against the
Taliban. He is now studying economics in London.
Jennings, John wrote extensively on Afghanistan from 1987 to 1994 for the
Associated Press, The Economist, and other publications. He returned to journalism
in November 2001 to cover Afghanistan for the Washington Times and also worked
as a Dari interpreter for BBC television. He published his article “1992–96: The
Rabbani Government’s Twilight Struggle” in The Anatomy of Conflict: Afghanistan
and 9/11 by Anand Giridharadas, published by Lotus Collection, New Delhi, 2002.
He currently works as a medical assistant in the United States.
Kandahari, Abdul Hamid is an Afghan singer who toured in the United States.
Khalili, H. E. Masood was born in Kabul in 1947. He is the son of the renowned
Afghan poet Khalilullah Khalili. He is currently Afghanistan’s ambassador to
Turkey. In 1980, he joined the Resistance as a political adviser to Massoud in the
Jamiat-i-Islami Party, traveling between Afghanistan and Pakistan until 1989. He
was a special envoy to Pakistan from 1993 until 1995, when he was declared
persona non-grata. In 1996, he was named ambassador to India. Khalili was
seriously injured in the attack that claimed Massoud’s life, undergoing multiple
reconstructive surgeries.
Khan, Commander Bismillah was one of Ahmad Shah Massoud’s top commanders
during the Soviet and Taliban wars in the Shamali Plains north of Kabul. He is
currently a lieutenant general and serves as the joint chief of staff in the Afghan
National Army.
Massoud, Ahmad Wali is Ahmad Shah’s youngest brother. After he finished his
schooling in Pakistan, he went to London in 1983 for further studies and got his
master’s in political science. He was Afghanistan’s ambassador to England from
1994 to 2006. He travelled back and forth from England to Afghanistan during the
Resistance. Currently, he is the president of the Massoud Foundation in Kabul.
Massoud, Maryam is one of Ahmad Shah’s sisters. She participated with other
women in the Resistance against the Soviet occupation. She is married and now lives
in the United States.
Massoud, Mohammad Yahya, Ahmad Shah’s older brother, was born in 1951. He
graduated from Naderia High School and studied veterinary sciences in Kabul
University. After the Communist Party seized power in 1978, he was arrested and
jailed by the communist regime. When the U.S.S.R. invaded Afghanistan in 1979,
Yahya joined the Afghan Resistance in the Panjshir Valley, working as a political
officer. In 1998, he was assigned the job of diplomat in Warsaw, Poland. He now
serves as a counselor in the Afghanistan Embassy in Brussels.
Masstan, Mehraboudin was born in the Panjshir Valley in 1964. In 1981, he began
as an interpreter to western NGOs and journalists. From 1983 to 1990, he studied
and worked in France while working hard to defend and support the Afghan cause.
From 1998 to 2002, Masstan served as the Afghan chargé d’affaires in Paris, with
non-resident postings to the European Union, Switzerland, Spain, and Portugal and
as the permanent delegate to UNESCO. He initiated and helped organize Massoud’s
summer 2001 trip to the French, Belgian, and European Parliaments. In 2002–04, he
served as interim director to the Afghan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and from 2005
until November 2006 was counselor to the Embassy of Afghanistan in Ottawa.
Masstan is co-author of Massoud au Coeur (Editions du Rocher, September
2003), a portrait and biography of Ahmad Shah Massoud.
Mir, Haroun served for more than five years as an aide to the late Ahmad Shah
Massoud. He has published analytical articles with international media such as
International Herald Tribune, The Hindu, Asia Times Online, and the Central Asia
Caucasus Institute, which is affiliated with Johns Hopkins University. Formerly, he
worked as a political analyst for SIG & Partners Afghanistan and the Middle East
policy analyst for the International Affairs Forum. Presently, he is cofounder and
deputy director for the Kabul-based Afghanistan’s Center for Research & Policy
Studies.
Momand, Diana left Afghanistan in 1980 and went to France, where she spent five
years and studied law and French literature for one year. Then she moved to
Germany, where she continued her studies and got married. She moved to the
United States in 1994.
Nagakura, Hiromi was born in 1952 in Kushiro, Hokkaido, Japan. In 1977, he
graduated from Doshisha University, Department of Law, and in 1982 joined Jiji
Press, photography section. As a freelance photojournalist, Nagakura reports on
conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, Central and South America, Southeast Asia, and
elsewhere. He has had dozens of special photo exhibitions and won numerous
awards for his images.
Nagakura’s relationship with Afghanistan began in 1975, when he spent over a
year living with its nomads. He first met Ahmad Shah Massoud in 1983 and
thereafter visited him many times in the Panjshir Valley, staying months at a stretch.
He has published three volumes of photographs and two books about Massoud. His
photo album, Massoud, the Beloved Land of Afghanistan, was awarded the Domon
Ken prize, the most prestigious award in Japan, and his photo exhibition on
Massoud in Tokyo drew more than 20,000 viewers. In 2002, Nagakura organized
an NGO, which assists a primary school in the Panjshir Valley in order to share the
dream of Massoud, who always spoke of the importance of education.
Noori, Sayed Ahmad Hamed was born in 1963 in Kabul. After earning his B.S. and
master’s degrees, he taught political science and rights at the Kabul University and
journalism at the National University of Tajikistan. In addition, for seven years he
was employed by Hewad Daily Newspaper, moving from reporter to department
manager to manager for international affairs. Later, he established and was editor-
in-chief of Cheragh, a monthly cultural and social journal. He has been an
announcer for social, political, and literal news, and programs for Afghanistan radio
and TV for over twenty years.
Omarzada, Ayoub was born in 1961 and spent sixteen years with Ahmad Shah
Massoud, from 1983 to 2000. He was a member of the mobile communications
central core, which traveled with Massoud from 1984 to 1988. Massoud
communicated with commanders from more than a dozen provinces on a daily
basis. From 1989 to 1993, he was the main communications director. From 1994 to
1998, he was appointed as the main finance and procurement officer at Massoud’s
main office. From 1998 to 1999, he continued his services as a member of
Massoud’s main or core office. Between 2000 and 2001 and while still a member of
Massoud’s main office, he was appointed as the main liaison in New Delhi to
oversee the medical treatment of Resistance fighters fighting Taliban/Al-Qaeda
forces. Between 2002 and 2005, he was the commercial counselor of the Afghan
Embassy in New Delhi. Since 2005, he has served as an official of the Afghan
Foreign Ministry.
Qaderi, Sher Dil was born in the Panjshir Valley. At age thirteen, he joined Ahmad
Shah Massoud’s first training group and fought alongside Massoud until the mid-
1980s when asked by Massoud to work for him in Peshawar, Pakistan. Qaderi
worked as transport director and head of the Chitral Medical Clinic for Freedom
Medicine, an American NGO.
After the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan, Qaderi and his wife moved to America,
where he studied English and became a restaurateur. He and his wife returned to
Afghanistan in 2001 to help reconstruct the country. He is currently managing
partner of the Cabul Coffeehouse and president of Five Lions, a logistics firm in
Kabul.
Qanooni, Yunnus joined Massoud in 1982. Since then, he has held several positions
in the civil administration of the mujahideen in Afghanistan and Pakistan. From
1992 to 1996, he served as defense minister and in other capacities. During the
Resistance against the Taliban (1996–2001), he worked as the head of civil
administration of Massoud’s organization and his political envoy to the United
Nations. After the fall of the Taliban, he was named interior minister and later
minister of Education. He was one of the presidential candidates against Karzai.
Then, he was elected a member of the lower house of the Parliament in Kabul and
the Speaker of the House.
Registani, Salih was born in 1963 in the Panjshir Valley. In 1980, he joined
Massoud as a mujahideen in the Resistance against the Soviet occupation. He was
chief of the operation office from 1985 until 1997. From 1997 to 2000, he was
Massoud’s representative in Tajikistan and from 2000 to 2004, in Russia. He is
currently a member of the Afghan Parliament.
Rahmani, Fawad is an Afghan man who supported the Resistance and who now
lives in the United States.
Shajahan, Aref was a member of the Hazara party Harakat-e-Islami during the
1980s and was in Ghazni, where he was a commander and the only medical doctor
in a small clinic in that area who treated Pashtuns, Hazaras, and Tajiks. During the
1990s, he was a member of the coalition government, as an assistant to Defense
Minister Ahmad Shah Massoud. During the Taliban’s rule, he returned to Ghazni
where he was again a commander and a medical doctor. He currently lives in the
United States.
Shuaib, Mohammad has been living in the United States with his family since 1989
and works independently as an air conditioning/refrigeration technician.
During the years of the Resistance to the Soviets, he worked in the political office
of Jamiat-i-Islami Afghanistan, based in Peshawar, Pakistan. Shuaib was the press
liaison (giving the news from Afghanistan to the media and sending foreign media
crews inside Afghanistan to cover the war). His most valuable contribution was in
giving Massoud’s news and messages to the world media, but he was also able to
help introduce Massoud to the world as an effective commander and to send foreign
journalists and aid workers to cover the war and thereby help Afghanistan.
Sidiq, Dr. Mohammad has been for the last two years president of the High Council
for Press and Culture in the Afghan Ministry of Information and Culture, as well as
coordinator of an independent high commision for media and communication in
Afghanistan sponsored by UNESCO.
He last met Ahmad Shah Massoud while working as head of Radio Nawa-e-
Afghan and commentator on Afghan affairs, representing the mujahideen’s point of
view and covering developments in Afghan strongholds. Dr. Sidiq joined Massoud’s
struggle to establish a free Afghanistan and help guide people toward democracy
and unity, and has written many essays reflecting Massoud’s ideas in a private daily
called Arman e Mili. He remains hopeful that his nation will achieve freedom,
dignity, and prosperity.
Tandar, Humayun was born in Kabul in 1956 and attended basic schooling there
before obtaining a master’s in archaeology at La Sorbonne (Paris) in 1982. Later, he
earned specialized degrees in international relations at the International Institute for
Public Administration (Paris) and in political science at the University of Geneva.
From 1980 to 1990, Tandar served as chief representative of the Afghan
Resistance in France and as the personal representative of Ahmad Shah Massoud.
He served the mujahideen government as minister, counselor, and chargé d’affaires
for the Embassy of Afghanistan in Paris (1992–93) and subsequently was minister,
counselor, and chargé d’affaires for the permanent mission of Afghanistan to the
U.N. in Geneva (1995–2002).
In 2001, Mr. Tandar was a member of the delegation accompanying Massoud
during his trip to Europe at the invitation of the president of the European
Parliament. And in 2002, he was part of the United Front delegation to Rome to
seek a political solution to the war in Afghanistan, and to the Bonn negotiations on
Afghanistan, under the aegis of the U.N. Tandar was a signatory of the Bonn
Agreement. Subsequently, he served as head of the Afghanistan Mission for the
European Communities and ambassador of Afghanistan in Belgium. He currently
serves as Afghan ambassador to the European Union.
Zafari, Abdul Wadood has privately helped the Afghan Resistance by sending
contributions and writing hundreds of reports regarding the Resistance movement.
In 1996, Zafari joined a Northern California committee to raise money and find
sponsors for hundreds of families who, forced from their homes in the north of
Kabul by the Taliban, took refuge in the Panjshir Valley under Massoud’s
protection. In two years, the group collected $200,000 and received Massoud’s
personal thanks. At Massoud’s 2001 request, he translated a 350-page book, The
Taliban, Islam, Oil and New Great Game in Central Asia. He now lives in the
United States and writes and translates articles about Afghanistan for Omaid
Weekly, a Persian-language newpaper.
Zikria, H. E. Farid was an Afghan living in exile in the United States during the war
against the Soviet Union and the Taliban. He visited and spent time with Massoud
during the 1990s. During the first years of Karzai’s government, he worked as
protocol chief in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He is currently the Afghan
Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates.
Zikria, Madina is Farid Zikria’s niece and has lived in exile in the United States.
Zikria, Suraya is Farid Zikria’s sister-in-law and has lived in exile in the United
States.
Zulali, Daoud served as a soldier and later as the commander of the First Central
Unit in the Resistance against the Soviets under the leadership of Commander
Massoud. He currently lives and works in Colorado with his family.
GLOSSARY
Afghanistan: A 249,984-square-mile, landlocked country in southwestern Asia
bordered by Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, China, and Pakistan.
Ahmad Shah Massoud: A member of the clandestine anti-Soviet militants opposed
to President Daoud, who gained power as the result of a military coup with a covert
role played by prominent communists (1973–1975). To avoid identification and
arrest, members of the anti-Soviet group adopted surnames. Massoud took his name
during this period. Some of the meanings of it are “successful, lucky, prosperous,
and happy.” When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, he led the Resistance in
the northeastern area of the Panjshir until the Soviets left in 1988 and the pro-Soviet
government collapsed in 1991. He served President Burhanuddin Rabbani as defense
minister of Afghanistan from 1992 to 1993. After Rabbani’s government collapsed,
the Taliban rose to power. Massoud fought against the Taliban as the military
leader of the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan. Massoud was
assassinated by alleged Al-Qaeda agents on September 9, 2001. He was named
“National Hero” by Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president, the following year. The
day of his death is now known as Massoud Day and is observed as a national
holiday in Afghanistan.
Al-Ghazali, Mohammmad: See, Ghazali.
Al-Qaeda (al-Qaeda): Means “the base.” Originally Osama bin Laden’s base of
operations in southern Afghanistan. Now the name is used to refer to members of
bin Laden’s groups, considered to be terrorist by the United States and other
countries throughout the world, and to the organization as a whole. Also, Al-Qaida,
Al-Qa’ida, Al-Qa’idah.
Amer Saheb: Amer (a derivative of Amir in Islamic doctrine) means “leader” in
Islam, and Amer Saheb means respected leader. A person devoted to God and at the
service of his people. His followers often referred to Massoud by this honorific title.
Amu Darya: The third largest Afghan river, approximately 1,500 miles (2,400 km)
in length; 800 miles are navigable. The main part of the river is called the Panj
River. It separates Afghanistan from part of Turkmenistan and forms the border
with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The ancient Greeks called the river the “Oxus”; the
name is often still in use in English. Also, Amu Daria.
Andarab: A valley and river located in the southern part of the Baghlan Province in
northeastern Afghanistan, adjacent to Panjshir Province.
Ansari, Kwaja Abdullah (of Herat) (1006–1088): A Sufi Master known both as
“Shekh-ul-Mashaekh” and “Shaikhul-Islam.” He was a poet and renowned
interpreter of the Qur’an. His poems are in the form of a soul’s monologue with
God. Ansari’s significant works include Kashf al-Asrar (the lengthiest Sufi
interpretation of the Qur’an) and Tabaquat al-Sufiyya (a collection of biographies of
Arab Sufis). He lived in seclusion for the last twelve years of his life.
(El-)Arabi, Ibn: Mohiudin ibn el-Arabi was known as Sheikh el-Akbar, meaning the
“Greatest Sheikh” amongst the Arabs. He was known as “Doctor Maximus” in the
West. Born in Murcia, Spain, in 1164, he lived during the Middle Ages. He was
renowned as a Sufi and philosopher, and for his poetry. Also, Al-Arabi.
Arakam, Karim: An Ismaeli who was a good friend of Massoud.
Aref, Engineer Mohammad: The head of Massoud’s intelligence unit. He was out of
his office in Khoja Bahauddin when Massoud’s assassination took place.
Assalam Alaikum: “Peace be upon you,” or “Peace be with you.” It is a standard
greeting among Muslims.
Attar, Farid Ud-Din (1150–1229/30): A Sufi Master and poet born near Nishapur,
in present-day Iran. He wrote 114 books. Two of his best-known works are the
Parliament of the Birds and Memorials of the Saints. His works use fables, maxims,
and illustrative biographies and other literary forms to teach. His works are also
thought to “help maintain the social fabric and ethical standards of Islam,”
according to commentator Idries Shah. He was killed by barbarians accompanying
Gengis Khan during their invasion of Persia.
Badakhshan: One of the provinces in northeast Afghanistan where lapis lazuli is
mined. Faizabad is its capital and a major town.
Bagram: An ancient Greek city north of Kabul in Parwan Province. In the 1950s, it
became a military township. Also spelled Begram.
Bhagavan: A Hindu term usually meaning the Supreme Being or Absolute Truth
with the added dimension of a “personality” possessed by the Supreme Being.
Bamyan Buddhas: Stone buddhas 180 meters high, carved in the second century into
cliffs in the Bamyan Valley of Afghanistan. They were deliberately destroyed by
Taliban shelling in 2001. Also, Bamiyan.
Basmachis: A Russian expression for the Basmachi Revolt in Central Asia. During
World War II, areas in Central Asia within Soviet Russia began a drawn-out civil
war against Russia and Soviet rule.
Bazarak: The village in eastern Afghanistan where Ahmad Shah Massoud was born
in 1953. It is the capital of Panjshir Province. Also, Badharak.
Bedil, Abdul Qadir: A Persian poet and Sufi born in 1642 in an area of Kabul
Province called Khwaja Rawash. Bedil lived and died in Delhi in 1720. His ghazals
(a poetic form made up of rhyming couplets and a refrain) are still recited in
Afghanistan. His poetry is said to have several levels of meaning, and it figures into
Afghan classical music.
Beh’babani, Simin: An Iranian poet nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in
1997. She was Iran’s national poet.
Bin Laden, Osama: A Saudi-born leader labeled a terrorist by the United States and
other countries throughout the world. He came to Afghanistan in 1979 and
established training camps in the country to fight the Soviets. He organized and is
the presumed leader of the international terrorist group called Al-Qaeda.
Central Asia: Generally comprises Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan,
Kirguizistán, and Kazakhstan. Afghanistan and Mongolia may also be included in
addition to Inner Mangolia, Xinjiang, Qinghai, and Tibet.
Chador or Chadar: A traditional long veil worn by Muslim women, supposedly to
cover the head up to the chest. It could be any color, but mainly is black or drab-
colored. A form of Chadar is also worn by some Hindu women.
Che Guevara: Ernesto “Che” Guevara, a prominent figure in the Cuban Revolution
(1956–59) that brought Fidel Castro to power. Guevara was known for his
command of guerrilla theory and tactics. Born in Argentina in 1928, he later led a
guerrilla war and was killed in Bolivia in 1967.
Churchill, Sir Winston (1874–1965): British statesman and author, he was England’s
prime minister during much of World War II (1940–45) and again from 1951 to
1955. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.
Daoud, Mohammad (Sardar Mohammad Daoud Khan): First president of the
Republic of Afghanistan after taking power as leader of a coup d’etat that ousted his
cousin Zahir Shah, the king. He was believed to have set the stage for communist
rule of Afghanistan because communists played a fundamental role in his coup
d’etat less than four years earlier. He served as president from 1973 to 1978. He was
killed in the coup that overthrew his government. Also Daud, Dawood, Daood, or
Dawud.
Dari: Old form of the Persian language, similar to Farsi, spoken in Afghanistan.
Dasht-i-Riwat: A town near the northeast end of the Panjshir Valley near which
most emerald mining is done. Also, Dasht-i-Rewat
Dashti, Fahim: An Afghan journalist and photographer, his Ariana Films focused on
the exploits of Massoud and his troops. He was seriously injured in the explosion
that assassinated Massoud. Later Dashti became editor of the Kabul Weekly.
Dostum, General Abdul Rashid: Ex-communist Uzbek militia commander and
leader of the Afghan Uzbek militia with a reputation in Afghanistan for brutality.
He changed alliances during the rule of the Rabbani government, with different
militias including Hekmatyar’s. During the early day of the war against the Taliban,
Dostum made Mazar-e-Sharif—a city of around two million people—his center of
operations. He joined the United Front by mid-1996, but he was forced out of
power in Mazar-e-Sharif in 1997 and was mostly out of the country, in Turkey and
Uzbekistan, until the beginning of 2001.
Durand Line: The dividing line by which Britain in 1893 defined the border
separating Afghanistan from what was then British India. It split the Pashtun tribal
area between the two countries; its existence and exact location disputed by many
Afghans.
Fahim, Mohammad Qasim: A well-known Afghani military commander and
politician. He served as one of Massoud’s military deputies and worked as the head
of intelligence. After Massoud’s assassination, Fahim became the defense minister of
the United Front. He served as Hamid Karzai’s defense minister in the Afghan
Transitional Administration and went on to serve as Karzai’s vice president.
Farsi: The Persian language spoken in Iran, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan.
(Al-) Ghazali, Mohammmad (1058–1111): A Muslim philosopher, theologian,
jurist, and Sufi Master. Born in Khorasan, Persia, present-day Iran, and known in
the West as Algazel. His most famous published work is The Alchemy of Happiness
(Kimiya’e Saadat). Having pointed out the problems of conditioning on the human
mind eight hundred years before Pavlov, he called the human habit of confusing
opinion with knowledge, which was rampant even in his own day, an epidemic
disease.
Guevara, Che: See, Che Guevara.
Hadith: The recorded sayings of the Prophet Mohammad; one of two chief legal
sources of Islam. The other is the Qur’an.
Hafiz (Shams ud-Din Muhammad-i-Hafiz): A fourteenth-century poet and Sufi
Master, little is known of his life. He lived in Persia (present-day Iran) in the city of
Shiraz for most of his life. He is thought to have written 5,000 poems, of which
perhaps 600 have survived. In the 1800s, Hafiz’s work became known in the West
through the translations of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Also, Hafez.
Haq, Abdul: A Pashtun from a prominent family and commander in the Resistance
against both Soviets and the Taliban. Hekmatyar and Dostum invited Arab
extremists to join the Afghan fight against the Soviets, but Haq was opposed to this.
When American coalition airstrikes started in 2001, he slipped back into
Afghanistan with the help of the CIA to organize Pashtun resistance against the
Taliban but was captured by the Taliban and hanged.
Hasan of Basra: Born 642 at Medina. An Islamic scholar and theologian, Hasan
became a teacher and founded a school in Basra (in present-day Iraq). Known for his
asceticism.
Hazara: A people of Mongolian-Persian mixture said to be the descendants of
thirteenth-century Mongol invaders of Afghanistan; they live mainly in central
Afghanistan and practice a sect of Shiia Islam.
Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin (Born 1947): A Pashtun and vehement anti-Western
Islamist, he broke with Rabbani to form and lead the Hezb-i-Islami Party. Although
he was commander of one of the seven mujahideen groups headquartered in
Peshawar during resistance to the Soviets, he often attacked other mujahideen. He
refused to join the Rabbani government in Kabul, besieging the city from outside
and killing thousands of civilians with indiscriminate shelling instead. He was
supported by Pakistan in this effort, but lost its backing to the Taliban in the early
1990s when he failed to gain control of Kabul. When the capital fell to the Taliban
in 1996, Hekmatyar fled to Iran. In 2001, during the American coalition attacks, he
urged Afghans to side with the Taliban against the West. Hekmatyar has actively
opposed the government of President Hamid Karzai.
Hezb-i-Islami: Literally, the “Islamic Party.” A mostly Pashtun Afghan party
founded and led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
Hindu Kush: A mountain range of Northeastern Afghanistan, Northern Pakistan,
and Tajikistan. The highest elevation is Tirich Mir at 25,229 ft.
Imam: When written in lower case, it refers to the leader of congregational prayers.
Imam is also used by many Sunni Muslims to mean the leader of the Islamic
community. Among Shia Muslims the word has many complex meanings.
Inshallah: “God willing,” or “May it please God.” Also written: “In sha’allah,
Ensha’Allah.”
Iqbal, Mohammad: India-born (1877–1938) Muslim. He was one of the first to
propose a separate Muslim state for Indian Muslims. He was a politician,
philosopher, and poet. His Persian and Urdu poetry is held in high regard. He also
wrote works on political and religious philosophy in Islam. He is also known as
Allama Iqbal. His work helped lead to the founding of Pakistan.
Islam: The monotheistic religion founded by Mohammad, the Prophet of Islam,
while the Qur’an, The Book of God, was revealed to him during the last twenty-
three years of his life. Islam has nearly 2 billion adherents worldwide and is
practiced in countries in North Africa and the Near and Middle East and in Central
Asia. Islam requires the worship of God (Allah) alone. Islam is an Arabic word with
many meanings, including peace, loyalty, and submission to the will of God (Allah).
There are two main schools of Islam: the Shia or Shiites and the Sunnis, although
some Muslims follow Islam in several other forms.
Islamabad: The capital city of Pakistan.
ISI: The Interservice Intelligence, Pakistan’s agency for intelligence and covert action.
It supported Hezb-i-Islami, and later the Taliban.
Ismailiis: Sometimes called Maulais, a sect of Islam. The original Ismailii people are
believed to have come from Persia.
Jabul-Saraj: A village north of Kabul where Ahmad Shah Massoud maintained a
command post until 1996. Previously the center of a textile industry. Also, Jabal us
Siraj, Jabal-os-Saraj, Jabal Al-Siraj.
Jamiat-i-Islami: “The Islamic Group.” A political party founded and led by
Burhanuddin Rabbani with the support of Ahmad Shah Massoud’s forces after its
first uprising in Panjshir Valley (1975). The majority of its membership is Tajik and
other ethnic minorities. Sometimes referred to as Jamiat or Jami.
Jami, Maulana: Born (1414–1492) in Herat, a province in present-day Afghanistan.
A poet and Sufi Master, considered one of the last in the line of classical Persian
poets. Two of his better-known works are the Baharistan, and a collection of
biographies of Sufi saints called the Zephyrs of Intimacy.
Zaher, Ahmad: An Afghan singer known during the 1980s as “the Elvis Presley of
Kabul.” He died in an automobile accident in Afghanistan. When his body was
recovered it was found that he had been shot in the head. The lyrics of many of his
later songs had been critical of the government.
Zahir Shah, Muhammad: Son of Muhammad Nadir Shah and king of Afghanistan
(1933–2007). He reigned for four decades (1933–1973) until he was ousted in a
coup. He lived in exile in Rome until returning to Kabul in 2002. He was given the
title “Father of the Nation” in 2002, which he held until his death.
Some definitions in this glossary first appeared in Gary W. Bowersox, The Gem
Hunter (Honolulu: GeoVision, Inc. 2004).
REFERENCES
Balcerowicz, Piotr. “Taliban Lacks Support from the Afghan People.” Omaid
Weekly, no. 496 (October 22, 2001).
Barry, Michael. “Thoughts on Commander Massoud,” given at the Afghan Embassy
in London on September 9, 2003. Reprinted in Omaid Weekly 12, nos. 595–96.
Bowersox, Gary. The Gem Hunter. Honolulu: Geovision, Inc., 2004.
Colombani, Marie-Françoise, with Chekeba Hachemi. “A Meeting with Mme.
Massoud.” Elle no. 2906 (September 10, 2001), translated by M.E. Clarkson,
November 2001.
Elliot, Jason. An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan. London: Picador, 1999.
Escobar, Pepe. “Masoud: From Warrior to Statesman.” Asia Times Online Ltd.
www.atimes.com, September 12, 2001.
Gall, Sandy. Afghanistan: Agony of a Nation. London: Bodley Head, 1988.
———. Behind Russian Lines: An Afghan Journal. London: Sidgwick & Jackson,
1983.
Girardet, Edward, quoted in D. L. Parsell. “Afghanistan Reporter Looks Back on
Two Decades of Change.” National Geographic News (November 19, 2001),
www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/11/1119_afghanreporter_2.html.
Gross, Nasrine. “Massoud: An Afghan Life.” October 28, 2001,
http://www.kabultec.org/MASSOUD.html.
Hachemi, Chekeba, and Marie-Françoise Colombani. Pour L’amour de Massoud.
Paris: XO Editions, 2005.
Interview with Ahmad Shah Massoud with journalists and “Women on the Road to
Afghanistan” Conference, 2000. Azadi Afghan Radio, http://www.afghan-
web.com/documents/int-masood.html.
Junger, Sebastian. Fire. New York: Harper Collins, 2002.
———. “Massoud’s Last Conquest.” Vanity Fair no. 498 (2002).
———. “Requiem for a Warrior.” National Geographic Adventure 3, no. 6
(September/October 2001).
Massoud, Ahmad Shah. “Excerpt from the Diary of Ahmad Shah Massoud.”
Translated by personnel of the Afghan Embassy, London.
Mehran, Farzana. Ahmad Shah Massoud: A Biography. http://www.afgha.com,
2006.
National Geographic Society. Into the Forbidden Zone. Washington, D.C.: National
Geographic Society, 2001.
Plunk, Roger. “Breakfast with Massoud.” The Source, December 1, 2001,
http://www.peace-initiatives.com/breakfast.htm.
Plunk, Roger. The Wandering Peacemaker. Charlottesville, Va.: Hampton Roads
Publisher, 2000.
Rohrabacher, Dana. “Challenge Facing America.” Delivered before the U.S.
Congress on September 17, 2001,
http://s3.amazonaws.com/911timeline/2001/rohrabacher091701.html.
Terzieff, Juliette. “Pilgrimage Honors Slain Afghan Hero: Massood’s Shrine
Thronged a Year After His Death,” www.SFGate.com, September 8, 2002.
Wiltz, Teresa. “The Lion’s Tracks: Northern Alliance Commander’s Assassins Killed
the Man, but His Memory Lives On.” The Washington Post, April 5, 2002.
*Pepe Escobar, “Masoud: From Warrior to Statesman,” Asia Times Online Ltd.
(www.atimes.com), posted September 12, 2001.
*Although Ahmad Shah Massoud insisted on identifying all citizens of his country
simply as Afghans, ethnic differences did exist, and foreign interests exaggerated and
manipulated them to prevent Afghan unity.
For the reader’s information, the largest group, the Pashtuns, generally live in
the southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan and speak the Pashtu language. The
second largest is the Tajiks, a non-tribal group. Most Tajiks live in the north and the
west, and their language is Dari (Persian). Other ethnic groups include the Hazaras
(in central Afghanistan), the Uzbeks (in the northwest), and the Baluchis, Turkmen,
Aimaqs, Niristanis, and Arabs. Most Afghans speak either Pashtu or Dari, but as
many as forty different languages and dialects are also spoken in the country.
Massoud was born of Tajik heritage.
*“A copy of a letter Massoud wrote to the people of the U.S. is reprinted as
Appendix A in the back of this book.
*A complete copy of the Declaration can be found in Appendix B.