“Everyone tries to have some sort of Plan B. “They don’t want to be disgraced again,” Mr. Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim, an ethnic Tajik commander who is President Karzai’s first vice president, said in a speech in September, “If the Afghan security forces are not able to wage this war, then call upon the mujahedeen.”Īnother prominent mujahedeen fighter, Ahmad Zia Massoud, said in an interview at his home in Kabul that people were worried about what was going to happen after 2014, and he was telling his own followers to make preliminary preparations. A Photographer’s Journal: A look at 20 years of war in Afghanistan, chronicled through one Times photographer’s lens.Face to Face: A Times reporter who served as a Marine in Afghanistan returned to interview a Taliban commander he once fought.

On Patrol: A group of Times journalists spent 12 days with a Taliban police unit in Kabul.Our reporter and photographer witnessed it. Inside the Fall of Kabul: In the summer of 2021, the Taliban took the Afghan capital with a speed that shocked the world.And he has begun enlisting new recruits and organizing district command structures. Khan rallied thousands of his supporters in the desert outside Herat, the cultured western provincial capital and the center of his power base, urging them to coordinate and reactivate their networks. Khan has rankled Afghan officials and stoked fears that other regional and factional leaders will follow suit and rearm, weakening support for the government and increasing the likelihood of civil war.

Now, in announcing that he is remobilizing his forces, Mr.

Khan is one of the strongest of a group of warlords who defined the country’s recent history in battling the Soviets, the Taliban and one another, and who then were brought into President Hamid Karzai’s cabinet as a symbol of unity. HERAT, Afghanistan - One of the most powerful mujahedeen commanders in Afghanistan, Ismail Khan, is calling on his followers to reorganize and defend the country against the Taliban as Western militaries withdraw, in a public demonstration of faltering confidence in the national government and the Western-built Afghan National Army.

Warlords call to arms charge