It is official. Ahmad Massoud, the leader of anti-Taliban National Resistance Front and the son of legendary resistance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud and Amrullah Saleh, the former vice-president and self-declared acting president, are in Dushanbe under the protection of the Tajikistan government.

In another development, former officers of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan who left the war-torn nation after the takeover by the Taliban set up the Afghan government in exile, headed by the previous Vice-President Amrullah Saleh.

“After the escape of Ashraf Ghani and his rupture with Afghan politics, his first vice-president (Amrullah Saleh) will be leading the country,” said the statement released by the Afghan embassy in Switzerland.

The joint statement of the leaders of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan,Political Leaders, and Political Personalities pic.twitter.com/utoHIXKeT5

— Afghanistan in Geneva (@AfghanistanInCH) September 28, 2021

 It says that the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is the only legitimate government of Afghanistan that is elected by the votes of people and no other government can replace a legitimate one. The statement has also announced their support to the resistance front– the anti-Taliban front led by Ahmad Masoud and has added that all the embassies and consulates of Afghanistan will be functional as normal.

Ahmad Massoud and Amrullah Saleh both are in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan.

According to the Financial Times, Massoud and Saleh were joined by another anti-Taliban leader Abdul Latif Pedram, the head  of the National congress party of Afghanistan and his wife, journalist turned politician, Fereshta Hazrati. Hazrati is the cousin of late Ahmad Shah Massoud. She had formed a resistance council to plan their next steps in Dushanbe.

We plan to announce formal resistance to the Taliban within a month,” Pedram told FT. The Taliban has announced a $200,000 bounty on his head.

“Either we accept the Islamist state or we resist. Nothing is more important to us than freedom. We cannot afford to live in the circumstances we have under the Islamist state,” he said.

Tajikistan is the natural homeland of Tajiks and the Tajiks of Afghanistan who make up the Afghan resistance, always have an invisible umbilical cord connecting them to Tajikistan.

For Tajikistan, support of the ethnic Tajiks is non-negotiable. The Tajik president Emomali  Rahmon emphasized that Dushanbe will not recognize the Taliban government "created by humiliation and ignoring the interests of the people of Afghanistan as a whole, including those of ethnic minorities, such as Tajiks, Uzbeks, and others." Referring to the US withdrawal of its troops, Rahmon warned of possibilities of another 9/11 type incident.  “If we leave the situation without attention there is a risk of the 2001 situation repeating” he said. Rahmon pointed out that “the whole weight of the negative consequences of the international coalition departure is falling on the shoulders of the neighbouring countries”.

Rahmon made his stand clear by bestowing upon Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Order of Ismoili Somoni, Tajikistan’s highest honour on 20th anniversary of his assassination. The same was also awarded to former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani. These two played a massive role in helping end the devastating civil war in Tajikistan during the 1990s.

But that was a different time when Ahmad Shah Massoud and his Northern Alliance had all the support from the US, Russia, India and other countries in his war against the Taliban.

But can his son and his resistance forces get more support?

Pedram said the resistance had “very good” contacts with Moscow and hoped Tajik president Rahmon would push the resistance’s case with President Vladimir Putin. But the resistance force needs more support. Mohammad Zahir Aghbar, Afghanistan’s ambassador to Tajikistan from the former government and now considered Saleh’s deputy, told FT: “ We don’t want a couple of countries to support us, we want the international community to support us. Because it’s international terrorism we are talking about here and it threatens the whole world.”

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