In what seems to be a complete victory for the Taliban, opposition fighters in the last bastion of anti-insurgent territory in Afghanistan — Panjshir — are preparing a surrender agreement in the absence of resources and international support, The Telegraph reported.
Ahmed Massoud, the son of renowned Afghan warlord Ahmad Shah Massoud, is holding the Panjshir Valley — which never fell to the Taliban during the civil war of the 1990s and was not conquered by the Soviets a decade earlier — with other ousted Afghan leaders, including Amrullah Saleh, the vice president who now claims to be the acting leader of Afghanistan.
It wasn’t too many days ago that Massoud had vowed he would not surrender to the Taliban. “I write from the Panjshir Valley today, ready to follow in my father’s footsteps, with Mujahideen fighters who are prepared to once again take on the Taliban,” he wrote in the Washington Post newspaper. “We have stores of ammunition and arms that we have…