Afghanistan‘s defiant vice president made one thing clear as the Taliban seized control of the capital following the collapse of his government he will not surrender. It appears he has retreated to the country’s last remaining holdout: the Panjshir Valley northeast of Kabul. I won’t dis-appoint millions who listened to me. I will never be under one ceiling with Taliban.
A day later, pictures began to surface on social media of the former vice president with the son of his former mentor and famed anti-Taliban fighter Ahmed Shah Massoud in Panjshir a mountainous redoubt tucked into the Hindu Kush.
Saleh and Massoud’s son, who commands a militia force, appear to be putting together the first pieces of a guerilla movement to take on the victorious Taliban, as fighters regroup in Panjshir. Famed for its natural defences, the valley never fell to the Taliban during the civil war of the 1990s, nor was it ever conquered by the Soviets a decade earlier.
We will not allow the Taliban to enter Panjshir and will resist with all our might and power, and fight them,” one resident told AFP on condition of anonymity. Such a battle would be the latest in Saleh’s long struggle against the Taliban as a onetime insurgent turned spy chief and later vice premier.
Orphaned at a young age, Saleh first fought alongside guerilla commander Massoud in the 1990s. Saleh’s rise, however, has not been without its share of dramatic stumbles. In 2010, he was sacked as Afghanistan’s spy chief following a humiliating attack on a Kabul peace conference.
Exiled into the political wilderness, Saleh maintained his fight against the Taliban and Islamabad on Twitter, where he fired off daily tweets taking aim at his longtime foes. A return to favour came in 2018 when he briefly oversaw the interior ministry after sealing an alliance with president Ashraf Ghani, who has now fled to an unknown location.
Saleh went on to become the former leader’s vice premier. His most recent political revival came as the US was preparing to exit Afghanistan and coincided with a series of assassination attempts on Saleh by the Taliban.
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Source: eNCA
