TOTAL CONTROL
TALIBAN RAISES FLAG OVER LAST REBEL ENCLAVE
The Taliban claimed total control of Afghanistan yesterday, raising their flag over Bazarak in the Panjshir Province, even as representatives of the opposition forces there maintained that they would fight on from the mountains.
If the Taliban manage to keep Panjshir under control, it would be a symbolic capstone to the group’s lightning-quick conquest and return to national power.
The Taliban never managed to control Panjshir the last time they ruled Afghanistan, from 1996 to 2001, and it was the launching point for the US-led invasion after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
Soviet forces, during their occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, made advances into the territory on at least nine occasions, only to be repelled each time, sometimes after suffering heavy casualties.
While reports of the Taliban’s having taken over in Panjshir emerged on Monday, it was not until yesterday that the group officially claimed victory.
“Panjshir province completely fell to the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban’s spokesman, wrote in a statement on Twitter.
Taliban fighters posted images online said to be of militants raising the flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as the Taliban call the country, in the provincial capital, Bazarak, as well as of their forces talking to local leaders.
The anti-Taliban National Resistance Front (NRF) initially disputed the claim and Ahmad Massoud, the group’s leader, said he had survived the attack and claimed its forces were still positioned across the Panjshir Valley.
“We assure the people of Afghanistan that the struggle against the Taliban and their partners will continue until justice and freedom prevails,” the NRF said on Twitter.
In an audio recording yesterday, Massoud called for the nation to rise up against the Taliban.
“Wherever you are, whether inside the country or outside, we appeal to you to rise up in resistance for the dignity, integrity and freedom of our country,” he said, according to a transcript of the recording.
He added that, despite the Taliban’s claims to want a peaceful negotiated settlement with the opposition forces, “they began a full-scale military offensive on our people which led to numerous victims, among them my close family members”.
Massoud said the Taliban had attacked immediately after the NRF agreed to a ceasefire resolution brokered by the Afghanistan Council of Ulema, or religious elders.
Massoud did not say whether he was still in Panjshir. The Taliban claimed that he had fled to Tajikistan.
The conflicting accounts of what was happening on the ground in the area 120km north of Kabul, the country’s capital, were hard to verify because internet and telephone service into the region has been cut off.
According the Taliban, thousands of fighters overran the eight remaining districts of Panjshir overnight yesterday, killing several prominent resistance leaders.
The valley had been the stronghold of an alliance of local fighters loyal to Massoud, the son of a renowned anti-Taliban mujahideen leader, and remnants of the Afghan national army who had vowed to fight against the militant group.
The capture of Panjshir, a mountainous region northeast of Kabul, is of symbolic value to the Taliban because of its reputation as a natural fortress and a stronghold of antiTaliban resistance.
Massoud’s father, Ahmad Shah Massoud, was a mujahideen leader who was called “Lion of Panjshir” for his guerilla campaigns against the Soviet occupation of the valley in the 1980s.
He later turned it into a stronghold of the Northern Alliance, the coalition of anti-Taliban warlords who fought against the group’s first regime between 1996 and 2001.
He was murdered by al-Qaeda suicide bombers days before the September 11 attacks, in what was seen as a gift to the Taliban from Osama bin Laden.
The casualties of the Taliban’s weekend offensive included at least one survivor of that assassination.
Fahim Dashty, a journalist who was the NRF’s spokesman, was killed fighting the Taliban on Monday.
Dashty, who was injured by the bomb that killed Shah Massoud, had campaigned for free speech in Afghanistan and ran a Kabul-based newspaper after the Taliban were ousted in 2001.