The Taliban’s foreign minister said Monday he held addresses in Iran on the weekend with Ahmad Massoud, son of the late fabulous Afghan resistance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, and guaranteed his security if he returned home.
Massoud’s Panjshir Valley forces handed the last resistance in September to the Taliban’s preemption of Afghanistan, weeks after government colors capitulated.
In a videotape posted Monday by state media on Twitter, Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi said he also met Ismail Khan, a Herat fiefdom warlord who surrendered to the Taliban and left the country.
The Taliban had blazoned Muttaqi’s departure to Tehran for addresses with Iranian officers but made no citation of any plans to meet exiled leaders.
“We met commander Ismail Khan and Ahmad Massoud, and other Afghans in Iran, and assured them that anyone can come to Afghanistan and live without any enterprises,”Muttaqi said in the videotape.
“It’s home to all, and we don’t produce instability or other problems for anyone. Everyone can come freely and live,”he said.
The Panjshir Valley is celebrated for being the point of resistance to Soviet forces in the 1980s and the Taliban in the late 1990s, during their first stint in power.
Its most hallowed figure is Ahmad Shah Massoud, known as the”Lion of Panjshir”, who was assassinated in 2001 by Al-Qaeda two days before the9/11 attacks.
His son has since picked up the mantle, and there have been reports of him organising a resistance with other expatriated Afghan leaders.
The Massoud- led National Resistance Front has constantly denounced the Taliban– calling it an” illegitimate government”– but doesn’t appear to have made any physical attacks.
Afghanistan’s former chairman Ashraf Ghani fled the country with numerous top officers as the Taliban closed in on Kabul, but several other prominent leaders remained– includingex-head of state Hamid Karzai.
The Taliban promised a general remittal to all opponents and critics after taking over, but rights organisations say at least 100 people associated with the former governance have been killed since also.
A prominent Afghan university professor and open critic of the Taliban was arrested in Kabul on the weekend after constantly speaking out on TV against the country’s new autocrats.
The strict Islamists have fleetly cracked down on dissent, strongly dispersing women’s rights demurrers and briefly detaining several Afghan intelligencers.
