Corpses of civilians killed during Soviet-Afghanistan war troops in a slaughter organized by the bandits of Ahmed Shah Massoud in the Panjshir Province, 22 July, 1988.

Soviet troops invading Afghanistan killed an Afghan resistance group organized by Ahmed Shah Masood in Panjshir province on July 22, 1988. The bodies of slaughtered Afghan residents were scattered. Soviet forces destroyed villages, livestock, and crops in the troubled region in air raids and armored ground assaults. Soviet troops bombed nearby villages where guerrillas had attacked Soviet convoys and supported resistance groups.

    Soviet-led forces invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979, to support the Afghan puppet communist regime. The war took its toll on the Afghan people, killing about 1.8 million Afghans and leaving about 5.5 million refugees until the Soviets withdrew in 1989. The official Soviet military death toll reached approximately 14,453 killed, 53,753 wounded, and 415,932 sick.

    Afghanistan fell into a state of civil war upon the withdrawal of Soviet-led forces, and President Mohammad Najibullah, who was supported by the Soviets, was ousted in 1992. For the next four years or so, the mujahidin faction jostled for power, resulting in repeated civil wars, and the Taliban regime from 1996 onward gained hegemony. Against it, Ahmad Shah Masood's Northern Alliance urged nearly five years of resistance; the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City sparked the war in Afghanistan, which began on October 7, 2001, and the Taliban regime collapsed on November 3, 2001. It became the longest battlefield in history for U.S. forces until August 15, 2021, when it was retaken by the Taliban.

　The Panjshir Valley is where the late Afghan commander Ahmad Shah Masood held off Soviet forces in the 1980s and the Taliban in the 1990s. Since then, he has reported resistance attacks against Taliban positions in the Panjshir Valley. Under Ahmad Shad Masood's regime, Panjshir was the only resistance force in Afghanistan during the Taliban's rule of the country from 1996 to 2001. At the very least, it has managed to maintain a base of resistance to the Taliban. The Northern Alliance fought the Taliban in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the northeastern provinces of Afghanistan supported the backbone of the Afghan army from 2004 to the Presidential Republic era of 2021.

　On August 15, 2021, the Taliban raided and overrun the Afghan capital of Kabul; in June, attacks on Taliban positions killed dozens of civilians and imprisoned several in a roundup. By September, however, his son Ahmad Masood had fled with other resistance commanders to neighboring Tajikistan. Panjshir is now occupied and neutralized by the Taliban. Looking at Afghanistan as a whole, the opposition has been greatly weakened. The Taliban are Islamic fundamentalists, have never believed in peace negotiations, and have become more radical and more repressive.