Anti-Taliban Leaders: If They Launch An Attack, They Will Face Hard Fight From Us

Anti-Taliban group leader Ahmad Massoud. (Twitter @AhmadMassoud01)

JAKARTA - Anti-Taliban leader Ahmad Massoud has said he is ready for peace talks with the Taliban who seized power in Kabul. However, he and his troops are always ready to fight.

"We want to make the Taliban realize that the only way forward is through negotiations," he told Reuters by telephone from his stronghold in the Panjshir valley northwest of Kabul.

"We don't want war to break out," said the man who managed to gather a troop consisting of remnants of the regular army units and special forces and local militia fighters.

The comments came as a statement on the Taliban's Alemarah Twitter account said hundreds of fighters headed for Panjshir after local state officials refused to hand him over peacefully.

Massoud, son of Ahmad Shah Massoud, one of the main leaders of Afghanistan's anti-Soviet resistance in the 1980s, said his supporters were ready to go to war if Taliban forces tried to invade the valley.

"They want to defend, they want to fight, they want to fight any totalitarian regime," he stressed.

But there is some uncertainty about whether operations by Taliban forces have started or not. A Taliban official said an attack had been launched in Panjshir. But an aide to Massoud said there was no sign of the troops actually entering the narrow gap into the valley and there were no reports of fighting.

Ahmad Massoud (Wikimedia Commons/Hamid Mohammadi)

In the only confirmed fighting since the fall of Kabul on Sunday 15 August, anti-Taliban forces recaptured three districts in the northern province of Baghlan, which borders Panjshir last week. But Massoud said he had not organized the operation he said had been carried out by local militia groups reacting to the brutality in the area.

Massoud called for an inclusive and broad-based government in Kabul, which represents all of Afghanistan's different ethnic groups, and said the totalitarian regime should not be recognized by the international community.

The wreckage of Uni Soviet armored vehicles that still fill the valley shows how hard the Panjshirs were in the past. However, many outside observers questioned whether Massoud's army would have been able to last long without outside support.

He said his army, which an aide said numbered more than 6,000, would need international support if it were to go to war. But he said they didn't just come from Panjshir, a Persian-speaking Tajik region long at odds with the Pashtuns who form the core of the Taliban movement.

"There are many other people from many other provinces seeking refuge in the Panjshir valley, who stand with us and who are unwilling to accept another identity for Afghanistan," he said.

Earlier in a Washington Post editorial, Ahmad Massoud said members of the Afghan military including some from elite Special Forces units had banded together for his cause and he asked for Western help.

"We have an arsenal of ammunition and weapons that we have been patiently gathering since my father's time, because we knew this day might come," he said in an editorial, adding that some of the troops who joined him had brought their weapons.

"If the Taliban warlords launch an attack, they will, of course, face stiff resistance from us," he said.

To note, Ahmad Shah Massoud was killed a few days before the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States by Al Qaeda militants who enjoyed Afghanistan's protection under the Taliban rule.