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1
A Lion's Death
I met Wali Massoud a little over ten years ago, at a friend's house in Wimbledon. He was in his mid-twenties, a slight, amiable man with black hair and a mustache. Wali was the youngest son of an ethnic Tajik officer in the Afghan Army and had come to Britain to study international relations. He had a famous older brother, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Lion of Panjshir, who led a band of mujahideen that fought off seven major offensives by Soviet forces in the great mountain valley of Panjshir, in northern Afghanistan, during the 1980s. In 1992, three years after the Soviets withdrew from the country, Massoud's forces-the Jamiat-i-Islami (Society of Islam), a moderately conservative group composed mostly of ethnic Tajiks and led by the Islamic scholar Burhanuddin Rabbani-defeated the brutish regime the Soviets had left in power. Ahmad Shah Massoud became the defense minister and, later, vice president of the new Islamic State of Afghanistan.
In 1996, when the Taliban militia gained control of Kabul, the capital city, and most of the rest of the country, Massoud and Rabbani returned to the mountains in the north. With limited backing from Iran, Russia, and India, they fought off the Taliban and managed to hold on to somewhere between 5 and 20 percent of the country. Massoud led a motley coalition of tribal-based guerrilla forces that are usually referred to as the Northern Alliance but are officially called the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan.
Wali Massoud stayed in London. He got married, had two daughters, and earned an MA in diplomacy. He is now the chargé d'affaires at the Afghan embassy to the Court of St. James's. The Northern Alliance controls Afghanistan's UN seat and all of its forty-odd embassies, except for the one in Pakistan, which is run by the Taliban. The Taliban is officially recognized only by Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, and Osama bin Laden's homeland, Saudi Arabia.
The London embassy is a cream-colored early Victorian building across the street from Hyde Park in Knightsbridge. I met Wali Massoud there at eleven a.m. on Friday, September 14, 2001, while Londoners were standing for three minutes of silence in memory of the victims of the attack on the World Trade Center. Wali, who is just as thin and amiable as he was a decade ago, wore a gray pin-striped double-breasted suit and held a cell phone, which rang again and again, and which Wali answered each time, with an apology to me. The previous Sunday, his brother had been attacked at his headquarters while giving an interview to two Arabs carrying Belgian passports. They were posing as television journalists and carrying a bomb. When it went off, it killed one of the "journalists" and one of Massoud's men and wounded Massoud and several other people. The second attacker tried to flee but was killed.
The suicide bombers had come into Northern Alliance territory from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, across the front lines, which was an unusual breach of security and has thus far not been explained. "They arranged this with someone at headquarters," a Northern Alliance official in London told me. "We are investigating." He said that the men are believed to have been either Moroccan or Algerian, and that they traveled from London to Pakistan before reaching Afghanistan. They are suspected of having links to an extremist group, the Islamic Observation Centre, in London.
Initial press reports said that Massoud had died in the attack, but all week Wali had been telling me that his brother was recovering. He was about to leave for Afghanistan, he said, to be with him. Wali was concerned about the stability of the coalition. Massoud was an extraordinarily gifted military tactician and was revered by his people. "The opposition can continue to function," Wali said, "but not the same as before." Then the phone rang again, and this time, as he listened, Wali hunched forward in his chair, holding his knees tightly together. He repeated the Farsi word bale-"yes"-and his voice became barely audible. He seemed about to weep.
Later that evening, the BBC confirmed Massoud's death. After the attack, he had been taken to a hospital in Tajikistan by helicopter. On Saturday, September 15, his body was brought back to his hometown, the mountain village of Bazarak, where he was buried. His thirteen-year-old son, Ahmad, spoke. "I want to be my father's successor," he said. While Massoud's bereaved relatives and thousands of followers were observing a period of mourning, the Taliban launched a large-scale military offensive against the Northern Alliance.
The timing and circumstances of the attack on Massoud, which came just two days before the strike on the United States, do not appear to be coincidental. Anyone who knew that the United States was going to be attacked and that Osama bin Laden and the Taliban would be blamed would also have known that Massoud would suddenly become an important ally for the West. "Without very good intelligence in Afghanistan, you can't do anything," an Afghan living in London said to me. "Bin Laden has a thousand caves to hide in." Ahmad Shah Massoud had been waging war in Afghanistan for more than twenty years, and he knew most of its hiding places.
