Afghanistan’s vice president Amrullah Saleh, a former spy chief who has survived more than one assassination attempt by the Taliban, is a trenchant critic of Pakistan.
Afghanistan’s defiant vice president made one thing clear as the Taliban seized control of the capital following the collapse of his government he will not surrender.
Saleh and Massoud’s son, who commands a militia force, appear to be putting together the first pieces of a guerilla movement to take on the victorious Taliban, as fighters regroup in Panjshir.
Famed for its natural defences, the valley never fell to the Taliban during the civil war of the 1990s, nor was it ever conquered by the Soviets a decade earlier.
Such a battle would be the latest in Saleh’s long struggle against the Taliban as a onetime insurgent turned spy chief and later vice-premier.
Orphaned at a young age, Saleh first fought alongside guerilla commander Massoud in the 1990s.
He went on to serve in his government before being chased out of Kabul when the Taliban captured it in 1996.
The hardliners then tortured his sister in their bid to hunt him down, Saleh has said.
“My view of the Taliban changed forever because of what happened in 1996,” Saleh wrote in a Time magazine editorial last year.
