The Afghan moon cast a shadow of a lone figure on his knees. Before entering the embattled city of Kabul that fateful night of April 25, 1992, he bowed in prayer for his country and his faithful followers of ten thousand troops. Now legendary as the most powerful Afghan commander, Ahmed Shah Massoud was born in the year 1953 in the village of Jangalak in the Bazarak district of Panjsher Valley. The name of his family was "Nawroozkhel." Dost Mohammad, Massoud’s father, was an army officer who spent most of his life in Kabul.

Massoud received his primary and secondary education in Lesa-e-Isteqlal. Later he joined Pole-e-Technic of Kabul. During the reign of Daoud Khan, Massoud, along with other members of a party called Jawanan-e-Musulman, fled with their professors to Pakistan to avoid repercussions of their anticommunist statements.

In 1975 the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Zulfaqar Ali Butto, commissioned the Pakistani intelligence service, the Frontier Corps (later known as ISI), to create unrest in major cities and strategic points in Afghanistan. By forcing the government to spread its forces, he paved the way for a coup by the Ikhwani groups within his army. To launch this plan, Butto recruited and trained a group of Afghans in the Bala-Hesar of Peshawar, in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province. Among these young men were Massoud, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and other members of Jawanan-e-Musulman.

Massoud’s mission was to create unrest against the communists in northern Afghanistan. Later, after Massoud and Gulbuddin had a terrible falling out, Massoud withdrew from Jawanan-e-Musulman and joined Rabbani’s newly created party in Pakistan, Jamiat-e-Islami. When in December 1979 the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, the Pakistani ISI undertook the formation of tanzeems, political parties, in Peshawar. Massoud, who by now had been appointed a Jamiat commander in Panjsher, returned to Panjsher in the winter of 1979. He went into battle but nearly died before he began from a leg wound. His already tiny force had dwindled to ten men with only mulberries to eat. "All the people had left us," Massoud recalled. "We joined hands and promised ourselves that we would either liberate our country or die here, but that we would never leave."

Massoud’s capture of the important emerald mining area of Dara-e-Khanj in late 1981 gave him an extensive and unprecedented financial resource. According to the Associated Press, 10 September 1982, Radio Free Afghanistan, Massoud’s yearly income from the Dara-e-Khanj precious stone mines reached $100 million dollars. (That report most likely referred to a retail value in Europe or the USA and not the value of rough, or unfinished, material in Afghanistan.)

In 1982 Massoud signed a ceasefire agreement with the Soviets at their request, which resulted in two ceasefires of six months each. He created Shora-e-Nazar, a coalition of the regional commanders. Then, aided by Western intelligence experts, he began forming a network of spies that kept him aware of the activities of other Afghan commanders as well as Soviets in the region.