Afghanistan: resistance to Taliban is organized in Panchir, says Russia – The HuffPost

Mohammad Ismail via Reuters

AFGHANISTAN – Resistance to the Taliban is being organized in Panchir with former Afghan vice-president Amrullah Saleh and the son of the late commander Massoud, the Russian foreign minister said Thursday (August 19th), Sergey Lavrov, calling for talks on “representative government” in afghanistan.

“The Taliban do not control all of Afghanistan. Information is arriving on the situation in the Panchir valley ”, north-east of Kabul,“ where the resistance forces of Vice-President Saleh and Ahmad Massoud are concentrated ”, he noted during a press conference in Moscow.

Sergey Lavrov called once again “for a national dialogue that will allow the formation of a representative government”, stressing that Russia was already insisting on such a mechanism to end the Afghan conflict before the Taliban took control of Kabul and of most of the country.

Moscow has supported an initiative in this direction by former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, and made many reassuring and even respectful comments about the Taliban.

The Lion of Panchir

Former vice-president Amrullah Saleh, for his part, pledged not to submit to the Taliban and retreated to the Panchir Valley.

On Monday August 16, images circulating on social networks showed him with Ahmad Massoud together in this region, seeming to lay the foundation stone of a resistance movement.

This valley, difficult to access, never fell into the hands of the Taliban during the civil war of the 1990s, nor a decade earlier during the occupation of the country by the Soviets.

Ahmad Massoud’s father, Ahmed Shah Massoud, nicknamed the Lion of Panchir, had been a hero of the anti-Soviet resistance and then against the Taliban, before being killed in an attack two days before the attacks of September 11, 2001.

In a column published Wednesday by the Washington postAhmad Massoud called for American support in arms and ammunition for his militia in Afghanistan in order to resist the Taliban.