Leader of Afghanistan’s resistance movement says he will defeat the Taliban ‘no matter the odds’

Three years after the departure of the final US troops from Afghanistan, the situation in the country is bleak, with the Taliban tightening its grip as it introduces increasingly oppressive laws that restrict political freedoms and suppress the rights of women.

Three years after the departure of the final US troops from Afghanistan, the situation in the country is bleak, with the Taliban tightening its grip as it introduces increasingly oppressive laws that restrict political freedoms and suppress the rights of women. Most Afghans have had to acquiesce to the Taliban not because they embrace their misogynistic ideology but because they have all the guns. Still, there is a nascent resistance movement. I spoke to its leader, Ahmad Massoud, who said he’s engaged in “a fight for the soul and future of our nation, and we are determined to win, no matter the odds.” He is the son of Ahmad Shah Massoud, who led the Afghan resistance to the Taliban more than two and half decades ago when the Taliban first seized power in Afghanistan in 1996. Massoud is now 35, and he leads the National Resistance Front to the Taliban. In our interview, he asserted that his group has carried out 207 military operations around Afghanistan this year and that he has 5,000 soldiers under his control. Verifying this kind of information independently is nearly impossible as there are relatively few international journalists covering Afghanistan, while the Taliban have closed hundreds of Afghan media outlets. The UN put out a report in June that documented a surge of anti-Taliban attacks during the first six months of this year but put the number at 29 operations carried out by the National Resistance Front, while on the group’s X feed, there are claims of far more operations. Massoud told me that “the Taliban’s true victory wasn’t on the battlefield; it was at the negotiating table,” a withdrawal agreement that was negotiated by then-President Donald Trump’s team and carried out by President Joe Biden. Massoud lives in an undisclosed location in Central Asia directing military operations in Afghanistan from outside the country. We conducted our interview over email, and it has been edited for clarity.