The Taliban group has urged Ahmad Massoud to surrender Panjshir, which is Afghanistan's last remaining holdout against the Taliban.
“If they surrender within the stipulated time, everything will be fine. Otherwise, we will punish," the group stated, while sharing a video in which it can be seen moving towards Panjshir, Republic World says.
According to Al Jazeera, the Taliban has said “hundreds” of its fighters were heading to the Panjshir Valley.”
“Hundreds of Mujahideen of the Islamic Emirate are heading towards the state of Panjshir to control it, after local state officials refused to hand it over peacefully,” the group reportedly wrote on its Arabic Twitter account on Sunday.
However, the leader of the resistant force, Ahmad Massoud, has refused, making it clear that he and his force do not have the word 'surrender' in their vocabulary.
Ahmad Massoud said he will not surrender areas under his control to the Taliban, Dubai-based al-Arabiya TV channel cited him as saying on Sunday, according to Reuters.
"If anyone by any name would want to attack our homes, our land, and our freedom, just like the National Hero-Ahmad Shah Massoud and other Mujahedeen, we as well are ready to give away our lives and die but will not give away our land and our dignity," Massoud said. He insisted that the resistance would continue 'no matter what'.
The Taliban seized most of Afghanistan much faster than anyone expected. Since the Taliban overran Afghanistan, flickers of resistance have begun to emerge with some ex-government troops gathering in the Panjshir, long known as an anti-Taliban bastion
Ahmad Massoud is an Afghan politician, the son of anti-Soviet military leader Ahmad Shah Massoud.
He was born on 10 July 1989 in Piyu in the province of Takhar in North-East Afghanistan. After finishing his secondary school education in Iran, Massoud spent a year on a military course at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. In 2012, he commenced an undergraduate degree in War Studies at the King's College, London where he obtained his bachelor's degree in 2015. He obtained his master's degree in International Politics from the City, University of London in 2016.
Massoud returned to Afghanistan and was appointed CEO of the Massoud Foundation in 2016. Since March 2019, Ahmad Massoud has officially entered politics. On September 5, 2019, he was declared his father's successor at his mausoleum in the Panjshir Valley.
He has endorsed his father's idea of a Swiss model for internal power-relations in Afghanistan, saying that the decentralization of government and the de-concentration of power from Kabul would give a more efficient allocation of resources and authority to provinces in the country, thereby bringing prosperity and stability to the country as a whole.
Amid Taliban military advances in 2021, Massoud assembled a coalition of ethnic militias in northern Afghanistan called the Second Resistance or Panjshir resistance. After the surrender of Kabul, he joined First Vice President Amrullah Saleh in rejecting Taliban rule.
Panjshir is one of the thirty-four provinces of Afghanistan, located in the northeastern part of the country. The province is divided into seven districts and contains 512 villages. As of 2021, the population of Panjshir province was about 173,000. Bazarak serves as the provincial capital. Tajiks form the majority of the population
Panjshir became an independent province from neighboring Parwan Province in 2004. It is surrounded by Baghlan and Takhar in the north, Badakhshan and Nuristan in the east, Laghman and Kapisa in the south, and Parwan in the west.
