Afghanistan Vice President proclaims himself legitimate leader of the country and calls on the Taliban to resist

The Taliban have taken control of almost all of Afghanistan, but in the Panjshir Valley, northeast of KabulVice President Amrullah Saleh promises to continue to resist and has already declared himself the legitimate president of the country.

The enemy of radical Islamists now in charge, Saleh retired to the last region that was not yet in his hands: the Panshir valley.

According to the Afghan Constitution, in the event of the President’s absence, flight, resignation or death, the first vice-president becomes interim president. I am currently in my country and I am the legitimate provisional president. I ask all the leaders for their support and their consensus ”He explained in English on his Twitter account.

“I will not disappoint the millions of people who have listened to me. I will never be under the same roof as the Taliban. NEVER, ”he wrote on his Twitter account on Sunday before going into hiding.

On social media Images of the former vice-president are already circulating with Ahmad Masud, son of Commander Ahmed Shah Masud, assassinated in 2001 by al-Qaeda, together in the Panjshir valley.

Masud announced Monday in a column published by a French magazine that He would oppose the Taliban and make his father’s fight for freedom his own, hero of the anti-Soviet resistance.

The pair appear to be laying the foundation stone for a rebellion against the new regime as armed men begin to regroup in the valley of Panjshir, an area difficult to access and which never fell into the hands of the Taliban: neither during the civil war of the 1990s, nor during the Soviet occupation, a decade earlier.

“We will not allow the Taliban to enter Panjshir and we will resist with all our might“He told the agency AFP a resident who preferred to remain anonymous.

For Saleh, a native of Panjshir, it would be the last in a long list of battles. This Afghan fought alongside Commander Masud in the 1990s. He was then part of his government before being overthrown by the Taliban in 1996, when they entered Kabul.. On occasion, he said the Taliban tortured his sister to try to get him out of hiding.

“My opinion of the Taliban has never changedHe said last year in an editorial published by the magazine Time.

After the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, he became an important source of information for the CIA. This led him, after the fall of the Taliban, to between 2004 and 2010 headed the National Security Directorate (NDS), the Afghan intelligence agency.

In this role, he created an extensive network of spies e infiltrators among the Taliban, Afghanistan and also in Pakistan, where most of their leaders are located. Thus, he gathered evidence, according to him, that the insurgents they continued to benefit from the support of the Pakistani army, information denied by the armed forces of the neighboring country.

However, his rise to the vice-presidency was marked by several setbacks. In 2010, he was sacked from his post as head of the NDS after a humiliating attack on a peace conference in Kabul.

He then retreated from politics for a few years, but continued to attack the Taliban and Pakistan from social media.

In 2018, he became Minister of the Interior for a few months, after joining forces with President Ashraf Ghani., who fled Afghanistan on Sunday to a foreign country. Subsequently, he was promoted to vice-president in 2019.

Saleh escaped several Taliban attacks, most recent in September 2020 when a car bomb exploded as his convoy passed and killed at least 10 people.

Hours later, he reappeared in a video, his left hand covered in bandages and vowing to return every blow. “We will continue our fight”, he claimed.

The region that resisted the Soviets and the Taliban

The road between Panjshir and Kabul is bounded by remains of old Soviet and Western military machines, checkpoints and old bridges which can be exploited at will to ban the arrival of invaders, according to Spanish media The world.

The province is safe and all state organizations remain active, residents are prepared for any type of attack by the Taliban, he assured the press agency EFE the head of the department of economics of Panjshir, Abdul Rahman.

“We are ready to resist the Taliban for the second time”Rahman said, referring to how under the previous Taliban regime, Between 1996 and 2001, the Panjshir Valley was the only region in Afghanistan to have avoided occupation by insurgents..

At the forefront of this resistance was the charismatic guerrilla leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, known as the “Lion of Panjshir”, What Thanks to his talents as a strategist and the natural strength of the valley, he managed to avoid the fall of the province under Taliban control., as it had done before during the Soviet invasion.

Corn the “Lion of Panjshir” died two days before the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, at the hands of two journalists suspected of Arab origin, who detonated an explosive charge hidden in a fake camera, an action which has been linked to al-Qaeda.

Now Much of the troops who did not resist the Taliban in their rapid offensive in the country, which in just over a week conquered 33 provincial capitals, are in Panjshir. support political leaders such as the first vice-president of the former Afghan government, Amrullah Saleh.

(With information from AFP)

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