Ahmad Shah Massoud

Ahmad Shah Massoud
Ahmad Shah Massoud
Nickname(s)	"Lion of Panjshir" (Persian: شیر پنجشیر‎‎)
Born	(1953-09-02)September 2, 1953 Bazarak, Panjshir, Afghanistan
Died	September 9, 2001(2001-09-09) (aged 48) Takhar Province, Afghanistan
Service/branch	Mujahideen Afghan military United Islamic Front
Years of service	1978–2001
Rank	Commander Minister of Defense Vice President of Afghanistan
Commands held	Prominent Mujahideen commander during the Soviet war in Afghanistan Defense Minister of Afghanistan and commander of the anti-Taliban United Islamic Front
Battles/wars	Soviet war in Afghanistan Afghan Civil War †
Awards	National Hero of Afghanistan

Ahmad Shah Massoud (Dari Persian: احمد شاه مسعود; September 2, 1953 – September 9, 2001) was an Afghan political and military leader. He was a powerful military commander during the resistance against the Soviet occupation between 1979 and 1989 and in the following years of civil war, during which time he became known as the Lion of Panjshir (Persian: Shire Panjshir ; شیر پنجشیر‎‎). Massoud was assassinated on September 9, 2001.

Massoud came from an ethnic Tajik, Sunni Muslim background in the Panjshir valley of northern Afghanistan. He began studying engineering at Polytechnical University of Kabul in the 1970s, where he became involved with fundamentalist Muslim anti-communist movements around Burhanuddin Rabbani, a leading Islamist. He was part of a Pakistan-backed failed rebellion against Mohammed Daoud Khan's government. After the Soviet occupation of 1979, his role as an insurgent leader earned him the nickname of "Lion of Panjshir" (شیر پنجشیر) among his followers. In 1992, after he disturbed the UN plan to install an interim government to replace that of President Mohammad Najibullah, he was appointed as the minister of defense through the Peshawar Accord, a peace and power-sharing agreement, in the post-communist Islamic State of Afghanistan. His militia fought to defend the capital against militias led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, Abdul Ali Mazari, Abdul Rashid Dostum and eventually the Taliban, who started to lay siege to the capital in January 1995 after the city had seen fierce fighting; at least 60,000 civilians were killed, many more injured, public property, government offices and the Kabul Museum had been looted, and two thirds of the population had fled the city.