Talk:Ahmad Shah Massoud

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Lutfi17.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 13:39, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Parent information is incorrect

Dost Mohammad Khan was a Pathan/Pakhtun speaker and Ahmed Shah Massoud was a TAJIK/Persian speaker, they are not related in any way. Please correct this mistake as it leads to disinformation for students/readers wanting to learn about history.

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:

• Flag flown in Panjshir (2019).svg

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 04:38, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

Assassination and al-Qaeda connection

Massoud had survived assassination attempts over a period of 26 years, including attempts made by al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the Pakistani ISI and before them the Soviet KGB, the Afghan communist KHAD and Hekmatyar. The first attempt on Massoud's life was carried out by Hekmatyar and two Pakistani ISI agents in 1975 when Massoud was 22 years old.

This sentence has been introduced with this edit and cites Roy Gutman but neither on p. 34 nor in the book there is something that would back this claim. Looks like a fake reference.

The article writes “Analysts believe that Osama bin Laden personally ordered the assassination himself”. Analysts do not only believe bin Laden ordered the assassination, there's also evidence for this claim. This should be way clearer in the article (I usually refrain to make larger edit because I am not sure if my English is good enough but feel free to use the references below).

Bergen, Peter (2021). The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden. New York: Simon & Schuster. pp. 136–137. ISBN 978-1-9821-7052-3.

During the summer of 2001 bin Laden was plotting what he hoped would be his two greatest victories. Advancing quickly were the plans for the attacks on the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, and the World Trade Center. The second plot was to eliminate Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the anti-Taliban forces known as the Northern Alliance. Without Massoud, what remained of the resistance to the Taliban in Afghanistan would collapse. But this was not bin Laden’s primary motive for plotting to kill him. If he could get rid of Massoud, the Taliban would have reason to owe bin Laden a favor, and he was soon going to need one. Massoud’s assassination would give the Taliban an important gift to compensate them for what bin Laden knew was coming: the spectacular attacks in New York and Washington that surely would pose significant problems for his Taliban hosts.
Bin Laden asked some of his followers: “Who will take it upon himself to deal with Ahmad Shah Massoud for me, because he harmed Allah and His sons?” Two volunteers acquired credentials as “journalists” from the London-based Islamic Observation Center. Bin Laden’s men shipped to Afghanistan an old TV camera in which they inserted a bomb. When the two Arab “journalists” arrived for the interview with Massoud on September 9, 2001, Massoud jokingly asked an aide, “Are they going to wrestle with us? Neither looks much like a reporter to me. Perhaps they are wrestlers.”

p. 301

Youssef al-Aayyiri took control of al-Qaeda’s operations in the Gulf region in 2002. Voice of Jihad, an al-Qaeda magazine in Saudi Arabia, printed his biography in which he described al-Qaeda’s role in Massoud’s assassination.

Gall, Sandy (2021). Afghan Napoleon. The Life of Ahmad Shah Massoud. London: Haus Publishing. p. 303. ISBN 978-1-913368-22-7.

Waheed Mozhdah, an Afghan who served in the Taliban Foreign Ministry and sometimes interpreted at high-level meetings between the Taliban leadership and bin Laden, later confirmed that the two assassins had held meetings in Kandahar with al-Qaeda officials. It was there that they collected the video camera, which arrived in a consignment of office supplies driven in from the Pakistani city of Quetta for them. In an article posted on his Facebook page, Mozhdah pieced together events that he and others had witnessed in Kandahar but only fully understood after Massoud’s assassination. One of the people working at al-Qaeda’s cultural office saw Abu Hani and the ‘journalists’ unpack the camera and was surprised there was such a fuss over a battered second-hand camera. When the two ‘journalists’ were departing from Kandahar’s airport to fly to Kabul, all the top al-Qaeda leaders, including bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, assembled at their hotel to see them off.

Gutman, Roy (2013). How We Missed the Story. Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, and the Hijacking of Afghanistan (2nd ed.). Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace. pp. 269–271. ISBN 978-1-60127-146-4.

The target was Massoud, and the planning had been under way apparently since April, following Massoud’s trip to Europe. Tow Tunisian men had received training in bin Laden’s camps starting in late 2000, and sometime in spring or early summer of the following year, they were selected for the suicide mission.

Coll, Steve (2005). Ghost Wars. The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. New York: Penguin Books. pp. 574–575. ISBN 978-0-14-303466-7.

The conspiracy they represented took shape the previous May. On a Kabul computer routinely used by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian doctor who was bin Laden’s closest partner, an al Qaeda planner wrote a letter of introduction in patchy French. On behalf of the Islamic Observation Center in London, the letter explained, “one of our best journalists” planned to produce a television report on Afghanistan. He sought an interview with Ahmed Shah Mas-soud. A list of proposed questions written on the computer in French included one infused with dark irony: “How will you deal with the Osama bin Laden issue when you are in power, and what do you see as the solution to this issue?”

p. 666

The Wall Street Journal, December 31, 2001. The draft letter was discovered on a computer hard drive acquired by Journal reporters in Kabul during the autumn of 2001.

See also:

• Cullison, Alan; Higgins, Andrew (2001-12-31). "Forgotten Computer Reveals Thinking Behind Four Years of al Qaeda Doings". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2021-11-03.
• Cullison, Alan (September 2004). "Inside Al-Qaeda's Hard Drive". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2021-11-03.

--Jo1971 (talk) 20:32, 3 November 2021 (UTC)