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Amrullah Saleh, 48, is the former vice president of Afghanistan, who escaped Kabul as the Taliban advanced to join Ahmad Massoud and the National Resistance Front in the Panjshir Valley. The remote, 70 mile long valley, bordered by high mountains, is a geographical stronghold and the last province in Afghanistan to hold out against the Taliban. After peace negotiations failed, battle has now been joined with each side claiming territorial gains and heavy casualties in the past 48 hours. In a courageous and moving dispatch from the frontline, Saleh - whose leader, President Ashraf Ghani, fled Kabul for the UAE...

Aug 31 (Reuters) - Taliban forces clashed with militia fighters in the Panjshir valley north of the Afghan capital Kabul on Monday night, losing eight killed, a representative of the main anti-Taliban opposition group said. Since the fall of Kabul on Aug. 15, the Panjshir has been the only province to hold out against the Taliban, although there has also been fighting in neighbouring Baghlan province,,,

The shooting near the military side of the airport came as the Taliban sent fighters to the north of the capital to eliminate pockets of armed resistance to their lightning takeover earlier this month. The Taliban said they retook three districts that fell the day before and had surrounded Panjshir... ....Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the group's forces have surrounded nearby Panjshir, the only one of Afghanistan's 34 provinces yet to fall to the militants.

Ahmad Massoud, the son of the 'lion of Panjshir' has been backed by Afghanistan’s top spy and ousted Vice President Amrullah Saleh, who has a network of spies inside Kabul An Afghan educated in Britain is leading the fightback in his home country, which has already seen between 60 to 100 Taliban killed. Ahmad Massoud, son of a legendary mujahideen commander, is heading up the heavily-armed uprising.... ...A source told us: “Over the past three days, remnants of the Afghan National Defence and Security Force made their way to Panjshir. "They are bolstering, joining and supporting Massoud’s alliance.... ...Massoud’s father...

While the Taliban now controls virtually all of Afghanistan, including the country’s capital, Kabul, one region, the Panjshir Valley, remains outside of the group’s tightening grip. Now, a resistance movement is forming there, led by, among others, Amrullah Saleh, who had been First Vice President of Afghanistan until the collapse of the internationally-recognized government this past weekend, and now claims to be the legitimate leader of the country.Yesterday, in a post on Twitter, Saleh declared himself “the legitimate care taker [sic] President,” citing the constitution of the now all-but-defunct Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, which says the First Vice President assumes...

Leaders of Afghanistan, who have India’s backing and who fought the Taliban between 1996 and 2001 as members of the Northern Alliance, have shown some signs of initial resistance amid the Taliban’s surge. While former Herat strongman Ismail Khan, now in his 70s, is planning to regroup to fight the Taliban, dozens of fighters have pledged loyalty to former vice-president Marshal Abdul Rashid Dostum in the northern provinces against the Taliban, ET has gathered.

The Obama administration gave the parents of Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl extraordinary insider access to the military’s hunt for their son by having them take part in a series of secure video conferences with senior commanders as well as White House and State Department officials. A former government official involved in American hostage issues said he had never heard of giving a family such access and questioned whether sensitive information could have been conveyed to Robert and Jani Bergdahl and somehow leaked out. A family spokesman said he knows of no such breach. Soon after Sgt. Bergdahl went missing in...

Thousands of pages of previously secret military documents about detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison now put a name, a history and a face on hundreds of men in captivity there. The documents include details on 158 men on whom no information has ever been released. The hundreds of classified documents - marked "secret" and "noforn" meaning the information is not to be shared with representatives of other countries - are assessments, interviews and internal memos from the Pentagon's Joint Task Force at Guantanamo. The task force was supposed to determine who the detainees were, how they might be connected...

The Perfect Storm author spent a month with anti-Taliban warrior Ahmad Shah Massoud in 2000. Now he offers his reaction to the recent murder of the Northern Alliance leader—and the subsequent attacks on the U.S. In November 2000 [National Geographic] Adventure sent contributing editor Sebastian Junger and photojournalist Reza (see photo gallery) to profile Afghan resistance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud. The resulting article (read an excerpt) appeared in our March/April 2001 issue and has just been reprinted in Fire, a collection of Junger’s journalistic work. ________________________________________________________ On September 9, 2001, suicide bombers killed Massoud. Two days later the U.S. was...

The suicide bomb attack on Ahmed Shah Masood, the leader of the Afghan opposition, has dealt a deadly blow to world attempts to hold the Taleban in check. The “Lion of Panjshir”, feared dead by Washington and Islamabad, may yet be clinging to life; but the attackers, by reaching his stronghold, have shredded his mantle of invincibility. He has been the last of the commanders still holding out against the Islamic extremists. From his stronghold in the Panjshir Valley, where he once fought off more than a dozen Soviet offensives, he has kept alive the resistance to a regime ...

“What I want to say is that he was never an extremist, neither in his private nor political life. He believed that a modern moderate Islam could work in Afghanistan. He said that the extreme left or right failed in Afghanistan, since both had neglected the needs of the people. Therefore, we could not govern Afghanistan like any traditional Muslim country.” -Ahmad Wali Massoud regarding Ahmed Massoud Shah of the Northern Alliance. In 1996, funded financially and backed morally by their allies in Pakistan, the Taliban (”Students of Islamic Knowledge Movement”) emerged as the prominent force in Afghanistan after the...

Massoud's Letter To The People Of America Date: 1998 A Message to the People of the United States of America 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...

WASHINGTON — When the U.S. State Department announced this week that it finally is going to designate the Haqqani network as a foreign terrorist organization, it was a nonevent for most of our countrymen. That's because few Americans know how deadly the organization is. For that we can thank those at Foggy Bottom who are wedded to the naive hope of a near-term "diplomatic breakthrough" in Afghanistan. Couple that misguided belief with the Obama administration's self-deception that the radical Islamic jihad against the West ended with the demise of Osama bin Laden and it's understandable why the Haqqani network...

France has deported a Tunisian man to his homeland despite protests that he could face torture there. Adel Tebourski, 42, was put on an Air France flight back to Tunisia on Monday, officials said. Tebourski had served a jail sentence in France after being convicted of helping the killers of Afghan resistance leader Ahmed Shah Masood in 2001. The French authorities described Tebourski as a serious threat to national security. French campaigners have said he could be tortured in Tunisia, and the UN torture committee last month called on Paris to suspend his deportation, the French news agency AFP reports....

Follow up to my earlier post about 14 Belgians arrested for being al Qaeda members. It turns out one of them is Malika El-Aroud, who has been arrested in the past for running an al Qaeda support website. If you speak French and hang around the eHadis, you'd probably recognize her from her frequent appearances at the minbar-sos forum.

BRUSSELS -- A Belgian court extended Tuesday the detention of a 35-year-old Moroccan accused in connection with the killing last year of the Afghan anti-Taleban commander Ahmad Shah Masood, officials said. The suspect, whose identity has not been officially revealed, was arrested on October 8 in Antwerp and has been charged with complicity in the September 2001 killing of the Afghan opposition leader, a spokesman as said. The Brussels court extended his detention warrant by a month pending an investigation into an operation to provide false passports, AFP quoted prosecution spokesman Jos Colpin as saying. Belgian press reports have named...

Looking for New Partners Although not all CIA officers had lost faith in the tribals' capabilities-many judged them to be good reporters-few believed they would carry out an ambush of Bin Ladin. The chief of the Counterterrorist Center compared relying on the tribals to playing the lottery. He and his associates, supported by Clarke, pressed for developing a partnership with the Northern Alliance, even though doing so might bring the United States squarely behind one side in Afghanistan's long-running civil war. The Northern Alliance was dominated by Tajiks and drew its strength mainly from the northern and eastern parts of...

Ahmed Shah Masood (c. 1953–September 9, 2001) (variant transliterations include Ahmad, Massoud, etc.) was a Kabul University engineering student turned Afghan military leader who played a leading role in driving the Soviet army out of Afghanistan, earning him the nickname Lion of Panjshir. Various transliterations include: Ahmad / Ahmed / Akhmad / Achmad, Shah / Schah / Chah, Massoud / Massud / Massood / Mas’ud. Ahmad Shah Massoud was born 10.06.1332 (01.09.1953)[2] in Jangalak[3]/ Panjsher[5]as son of police commander Dost Mohammad Khan. At the age of five, he started grammar school at Bazarak and stayed there until second grade....

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - Opposition leader and former defense chief Ahmed Shah Massood was injured and his close aide was killed Sunday in an explosion in northern Afghanistan, said Hajji Kahar, an opposition spokesman. Two men from Algeria posing as journalists apparently hid the explosive device in their camera, Kahar told The Associated Press in a satellite telephone interview from Khodja Bahauddin in northern Takhar province, where the explosion occurred. It's not clear whether the two men with the camera were killed. It's believed they were suicide bombers. "There was a lot of noise and smoke," said Kahar. Massood ...

On the matter of ABC’s “Path to 9/11” and the controversy it has produced, I have no inside knowledge of what ABC intends to do tomorrow night, but I am considering two things: 1. in all fairness I do not agree with the grouping of several real incidents into one fictitious incident and putting fake dialogue in the mouths of real people as this film is reported to do. I think former President Clinton, former Secretary Albright, former National Security Advisor (and convicted felon) Sandy Berger, along with others in the Clinton Administration, were completely incompetent