Ahmad Shah Massoud

Biography

Ahmad Shah Massoud was born in the Panjshir Valley around 1953 into a Tajik family; his father was an army colonel. He went to the French-Afghan Lycée Esteqlal in Kabul and studied engineering at the Kabul Polytechnic Institute, where he joined the Islamist student movement linked to Burhanuddin Rabbani's Jamiat-e Islami. In 1975 he led a failed uprising in Panjshir against President Daoud Khan.

From 1979 he led guerrilla resistance in Panjshir against the communist government and then the Soviet army, holding the valley against repeated Soviet offensives and becoming the best-known commander of the Afghan mujahideen.

After the communist government fell in 1992 he signed the Peshawar Accord and became defence minister of the Islamic State of Afghanistan, fighting rival factions in a civil war that devastated Kabul. When the Taliban took the capital in 1996 he withdrew north and became military leader of the Northern Alliance. In 2001 he travelled to Europe and asked the European Parliament for humanitarian aid against the Taliban.

On 9 September 2001 he was killed by two al-Qaeda suicide bombers posing as journalists, two days before the September 11 attacks. He was later declared a national hero of Afghanistan.