As a boy Ahmad Massoud read Persian poetry with his father, stared through a makeshift telescope into night skies speckled with stars and dreamt of being an astronomer.
But that father was also Afghanistan’s most legendary commander, Ahmad Shah Massoud, who in the 1980s and 1990s held off first the Russians then the Taliban until he was assassinated by al-Qaeda suicide bombers posing as journalists two days before 9/11.
Now his son, a graduate of Sandhurst and King’s College London, is attempting to follow in the footsteps of the man known as the Lion of Panjshir.
Last week in Vienna he brought together warlords and politicians from across Afghanistan — converging on the Austrian capital from their exile everywhere from Turkey and Central Asia to Europe and the United States — to try to form a unified opposition to topple the Taliban.
Many feel that the last thing Afghanistan needs after 40 years of conflict is another war, but Massoud, 34, insists his main aim is peace.
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“What we are trying to do is defend ourselves against the tyranny of Taliban and bring unity among all opposition and political groups in Afghanistan to express one demand — elections,” he says, in his opulent suite at the historic Hotel Bristol, while burly guards monitored the doors and balconies.
“If the Taliban agreed to that we would stop fighting.” As he speaks an aide passes him a pakol, a soft brown woollen cap that was his father’s trademark.
“My father was a fantastic charismatic leader,” he says. “I am not trying to look like him or be him because that’s impossible. The hat brings a sense of responsibility — a symbol of resistance.”
It is now almost three years since the Taliban’s shock return to power. They have banned girls from high school and women from working or going to parks or hair salons, and reimposed barbaric punishments such as public floggings and stonings. No country recognises their regime but the international community has not persuaded them to end what the United Nations has termed “gender apartheid”.
Indeed, to widespread outrage, the UN caved into Taliban demands to have no women present at the main annual meeting on Afghanistan in Doha, Qatar, which opens today.
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“The whole world must see the Taliban is not listening to anyone,” Massoud says. “Rather than capitulate to them, it’s time to take a different approach using the only thing they understand: force.”
The Taliban may not seem to be under any threat beyond a few internal divisions. They control even the Panjshir valley, which his father never relinquished. But Massoud, who lives in Tajikistan with his wife and daughter, says that his National Resistance Front (NRF) is now carrying out almost daily targeted operations including in the heart of Kabul despite lacking weapons and ammunition.
“In September 2021 when I was in Panjshir, I thought the Taliban were formidable,” he admits. “But after two years of fighting them, I see they have huge vulnerability on the military side. I have no doubt with proper resources and support we can defeat them.”
A change of tactic has helped. “What we were doing in 2022 was not very successful, we lost more than 500 people, so last year we changed from traditional warfare to partisan and guerrilla warfare — calculated attacks to eliminate those whose hands are filled with [the] blood of our people — and that’s been much more successful.”
“We’ve attacked their convoys and their groups which have abducted and raped girls. We operate in many provinces across Afghanistan, even in the centre of Kabul just 500m from the Arg [the presidential palace]. We have managed to basically take the night from the Taliban and we didn’t have one casualty or one person taken prisoner.”
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Massoud’s NRF is not the only group attacking the Taliban. The Afghan Freedom Front, led by General Yasin Zia, a former Afghan army chief of staff, working with fellow former soldiers, is also launching guerrilla actions, including targeted assassinations.
Massoud was in Vienna, the setting for Orson Welles’s classic postwar spy thriller The Third Man, because a private Austrian foundation funds the annual gathering of Afghan opposition figures that he helps to organise.
The fourth meeting of the Vienna Process since Taliban seized power has been the largest and most diverse yet: 77 Afghans took part in person as well as some dialling in — Tajiks, Hazara, Pashtuns, Uzbeks and Sikhs — including many who fought each other in the past. Among them, aside from besuited politicians such as the former foreign minister Dr Rangin Spanta, were Mohammed Mohaqeq, the Hazara leader in turban and long chapan coat, and Hazrat Ali, the commander many blame for allowing Osama bin Laden to escape at Tora Bora. General Dostum and Ismael Khan both sent representatives. More than a third of the participants were women including Fawzia Koofi, a former MP who survived two Taliban assassination attempts, and Parwana Ibrahimkhail Nijrabi, 23, a student who described being tortured in prison after she stood alone outside the gates of Kabul University in December 2022, holding a placard bearing one word “Iqra” — which means “read” in Arabic.
“When the Taliban took over, they took my everything, my hope, my dreams, my soul,” she says. “The world has just stood by.”
Massoud is reminded of his father’s experience of being abandoned by the West once his forces had helped drive out the Red Army in 1989, weakening the Soviet Union in the process. Afghanistan was left to civil war and the eventual emergence of the Taliban.
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“We understand countries all have their own interests but to use the people of Afghanistan as tools for their geopolitical games then abandon them without any care to the consequences and on top to elevate their enemy, it’s totally absurd.”
“For years and years, we were preached to about freedom, democracy, women’s rights, human rights, but when it came to it, these principles meant nothing, it was all a lie,” he adds. “We feel anger, disappointment, and a very grave sense of loneliness.”
And just as the abandonment of Afghanistan in the 1990s led to the country becoming a safe haven and training ground for al-Qaeda, which his father repeatedly warned about only months before 9/11, Massoud warns the same thing is happening again.
“The world has so much on their hands with Ukraine and Gaza they are not paying attention to the grave danger from Afghanistan,” he says.
A recent UN report found that about 20 insurgent groups are now operating under the Taliban, with al-Qaeda so bound up in the government that its training manuals are used in the Ministry of Defence.
“Recently the son of bin Laden called for all terrorist groups to come to Afghanistan, he said it’s a staging ground for all of us and he’s right,” Massoud says. “Afghanistan is a prison for its citizens and safe haven for terrorism.”
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Even groups opposed by the Taliban, such as Islamic State-Khorasan, operate freely. IS-K has been stepping up overseas operations, killing 143 people at a concert in Moscow in March, and been linked with bombings in Iran, a foiled plot to attack Sweden’s parliament, and gun attacks last weekend on churches and synagogues across Russia’s Dagestan region.
Like his late father, Massoud has been trying to meet western leaders to call for help. Last year he met President Macron of France but has made little headway.
“So far all our progress is based on the generosity of our own people and the fact we know the vulnerability of Taliban. What we lack is resources and support. If the world is expecting us to achieve more then give us more. Could Ukraine succeed even one year without outside support? I doubt it.”
“All we are saying to the international community is help us, let’s by any means force Taliban into an election so the people of Afghanistan can decide. If they decide they want Taliban, who am I to oppose that? We will accept with open hearts.”
He is prepared to fight as long as it takes.
Asked if Afghanistan really needs another war, he replies, “Do I want to fight? What choice did the Taliban leave me? Just last week they entered a house in Parwan, abducted a daughter and her father called me screaming with pain. You tell me, what is my answer to this father?”
