Max Jeffrey has narrated this article for you to listen to.
It’s fighting season in Afghanistan again. When the Americans were in charge, after the poppy fields had been harvested in late spring, and the madrassas in Pakistan that supplied the Taliban with fanatical soldiers had finished for the term, the Islamists kicked off the fighting. Between 2001 and 2021, around 200,000 people died, including 453 Britons. Now an insurgent group called the National Resistance Front (NRF) are starting the annual springtime assaults, this time against the Taliban government.
‘The Taliban do not possess the support of the mass of the people. We do’
‘In the past 31 days, we have staged 31 attacks on Taliban, only in Kabul,’ Ahmad Massoud, the NRF leader, cheerily tells me from Tajikistan, where he directs his troops in exile. ‘We have not even had one person captured.’ The NRF’s latest hit, he says, was 500 metres from the presidential palace. With proper support – ideally western arms – he says he can destroy the country’s Islamic Emirate and install a democratic republic. ‘I’m 100 per cent sure it is possible to defeat the Taliban.’
The NRF came together when western forces fled during the Taliban takeover. As the Islamists swept from Kandahar, in the south, up to Kabul, Afghan army soldiers joined a group of fighters in Panjshir, in the north. Now, from a small area of land they still hold, they conduct guerrilla operations in half of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. Massoud says he doesn’t have the firepower to launch a total assault on the Taliban administration, so his NRF missions are limited. A couple of men with AK-47s may carry out a drive-by shooting on a checkpoint; a squad might ambush a Taliban camp at night. The NRF uses weapons left behind by the Americans and the Soviets, and tops up its supplies from Afghanistan’s black markets.
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