Ahmad MASSOUD
A few weeks ago, Ahmad Massoud was playing tennis in west London – now, he’s taking on the Taliban. Joe Shute reports
Earlier this month, a young man in his early 30s was playing tennis in Lammas Park in Ealing, west London. Dressed in a black Nike T-shirt, grey tracksuit trousers and white trainers, Ahmad Massoud laughed with friends as they batted balls back and forth, blending in with the summer crowds.
Today, Massoud, 32, wearing robes and a wool pakol on his head, is dug in to a redoubt in the heart of Afghanistan’s Panjshir Valley, the final province in the country which remains out of Taliban hands, rallying his troops and preparing for war.
The only son of legendary rebel commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, nicknamed the “Lion of Panjshir”, for repelling both the Soviets and the Taliban before his assassination by al-qaeda in 2001, Massoud junior now represents the last hope that Afghanistan will not fall under the total control of Islamist extremists.
While Western governments and their military are rapidly fleeing the country before the August 31 deadline agreed with the Taliban, Massoud – who now commands several thousand fighters, including the remnants of the Afghan National Army and special forces commandos who have fled to Panjshir – has vowed to remain steadfast. “I’m the son of Ahmad Shah Massoud,” the commander nicknamed the “Lion Cub” has said in recent days, of his last stand. “Surrender is not a word in my vocabulary.”
Moreover, he warned, in an editorial for The Washington Post, that his men are ready for whatever happens next. “If Taliban warlords launch an assault, they will of course face staunch resistance from us.”
One of the people playing tennis with him in London – and among the last to wave him off before he departed to Panjshir – was the former Afghan colonel and defence attaché to the UK, Ahmad Muslem Hayat. The 58-year-old was one of Massoud’s father’s most trusted Mujahideen lieutenants during the war against the Russians and, in 1982, was trained by the SAS in the dark arts of guerrilla warfare.
A steadfast man with a clipped military moustache, Hayat has been like an uncle to Massoud ever since his father was assassinated two days before the September 11 attacks. The griefstricken 12-year-old Massoud accompanied his father’s coffin on an armoured car as part of the funeral cortege, occasionally raising his arm to the thousands of Tajik tribesmen chanting their grief.
Hayat was the first person to give Massoud an ice cream as a child, and in adulthood has remained a close confidant. Speaking to The Telegraph this week over lunch in an Afghan restaurant near to his home in west London, Hayat recalled his final piece of advice to the young man he has watched grow up to seize his father’s mantle and lead the coalition of anti-taliban fighters which is calling itself the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan.
“I told Ahmad, before he left, that to be a leader in Afghanistan, you have to be brave,” Hayat says. “You cannot be afraid of anything and you must sacrifice yourself for your objective.”
His protégé has already been joined in Panjshir by other ousted Afghan leaders, including the former vice president, Amrullah Saleh. And as he assembles his Camelot in the mountains, Ahmad Massoud has spoken of finishing what his father has started.
He delivered his first major political speech close to the tomb where his father is buried, and still visits it to pray every day. Perhaps there is a thought, too, for his grandfather Colonel Dost Mohammad Khan of the former Afghan Royal Army, who was killed fighting the Soviets in Pakistan.
Massoud was his father’s only son out of six children, born in the rural village of Piyu in Takhar, in the north-east of the country; following the assassination, he spent much of his childhood in Tajikistan and Iran.
Even at a young age, he bore an uncanny resemblance to his father and, as his heir apparent, western intelligence agencies kept a keen interest in Massoud as he grew up. After finishing school in Iran, he was offered a place at the US elite West Point military academy, but instead opted to enrol as a foreign cadet at Sandhurst in 2010 – not least because of the presence of Ahmad Muslem Hayat in London.
“He found Sandhurst very tough,” Hayat says, of Massoud’s year at the officer training academy in Berkshire, which is famed for its strict disciplinarian regime. “He was a young boy without any training or experience, suddenly being told to wake up very early and go running through mud.”
Massoud passed out in 2011, and the following year undertook a degree in war studies at King’s College London – researching, among other things, his father’s old military diaries and writing his dissertation on the Taliban.
He kept a deliberately low profile in London, living in a rented onebedroom apartment near the Westway and spending time with a tight group of Aghan exiles, including Hayat (who had settled in London with his family in 2010, in part because of the security threat against him if he remained in Kabul). After graduating from King’s, Massoud took a masters in international politics at London’s City University. “I don’t think we realised at the time that he was the Ahmad Massoud,” one of his former professors admitted this week.
His studies aside, Massoud adored London life. He regularly played golf and tennis, watched football matches (he is a devoted Real Madrid supporter), took trips to the cinema and developed a keen interest in gardening and astronomy.
It was also in London where he met his wife (whose name he keeps out of public). She was born to an Afghan family in England and lives in her father’s ordinary semi-detached house in west London, where Massoud stays when he visits. The pair married in Kabul in 2016, and Massoud’s wife completed her own masters in international politics at University College London last year. They do not have any children.
As the Taliban threat has grown over recent years, Massoud has shuttled between Afghanistan and London, preparing for war. Last September, he hosted the French philosopher and writer Bernard-henri Lévy at his father’s village of Jangalak in the Panjshir Valley. Lévy had previously interviewed his father and met Ahmad Massoud as a young boy. When they met again last year, Lévy says, the physical resemblance was “astonishing”.
Massoud showed Lévy the place where his father was killed by the al-qaeda operatives, who had gained access by pretending to be journalists and hiding a bomb in their video camera. He also proudly offered a tour of the garden his father had planted and which he was now cultivating.
“I told him you are a scholar and an academic – are you sure you want this?” Lévy says when he discussed Massoud leading the fight against the Taliban. “He replied: ‘Yes, I’m sure. It is my moral duty.’” During their time together, Lévy says the pair spoke only in English. “Until a few years ago, his project was to have his life in England,” he says. “A big part of him is really embedded in British culture.”
While his troops have been stockpiling weapons and munitions for decades and are experts in guerrilla warfare in the steep, rugged mountaintops of Panjshir situated north of Kabul, Massoud has stressed the desperate need for international support to preserve what he calls the “last bastion of Afghan freedom” and prevent the country once more becoming a breeding ground for terror attacks on the West.
In recent days, he has issued an urgent call to western leaders to provide the heavy weaponry, supplies and tactical support to enable his troops to hold out against the Taliban.
Massoud is calling for an inclusive government honouring international demands on women’s rights, free speech, holding democratic elections and halting all repression. Despite the shocking suicide bombing of Kabul airport this week, Massoud has ruled out joining forces with the Taliban against the rival jihadist group IS-K (which claimed responsibility for the attack). Such is the chaos engulfing the country that even attacking IS-K would simply assist rival terror group al-qaeda, which is closely affiliated with the Taliban.
Even as they negotiate, Taliban fighters have already reportedly surrounded the 60-mile-long valley and are refusing to allow food, fuel and medical supplies to enter by road. Should peace talks fail and they are forced to surrender, says Hayat, who remains in almost daily contact with Massoud, the Taliban will “massacre” the senior resistance commanders.
Preparing for war in the mountains, a world away from his wife and the life he had hoped to lead in London, in quiet moments Massoud has instead focused on his love of astronomy.
Instead of squinting through his telescope at the red rust of a London night, in Panjshir the stars shine as brightly as anywhere on earth. Quite what future is written for him there, though, is only beginning to unfold.
‘He found Sandhurst very tough. He was a boy without training or experience’
‘I told him that to be a leader, you must sacrifice yourself for your objective’