Max Jeffrey has narrated this article for you to listen to.
It’s fighting season in Afghanistan again. When the Americans were in charge, after the poppy fields had been harvested in late spring, and the madrassas in Pakistan that supplied the Taliban with fanatical soldiers had finished for the term, the Islamists kicked off the fighting. Between 2001 and 2021, around 200,000 people died, including 453 Britons. Now an insurgent group called the National Resistance Front (NRF) are starting the annual springtime assaults, this time against the Taliban government.
‘The Taliban do not possess the support of the mass of the people. We do’
‘In the past 31 days, we have staged 31 attacks on Taliban, only in Kabul,’ Ahmad Massoud, the NRF leader, cheerily tells me from Tajikistan, where he directs his troops in exile. ‘We have not even had one person captured.’ The NRF’s latest hit, he says, was 500 metres from the presidential palace.
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