THE ASSASSINS.(killers of Afghani guerrilla leader Ahmed Shah Massoud)

Ahmed Shah Massoud was a wiry, thin-boned man with a long, handsome face that was distinguished by an aquiline nose and by deep furrows in the cheeks and around the eyes. He usually wore a pakul, a kind of flat-topped, soft wool hat that he and his mujahideen had adopted from the Nuristani tribe, a pale-skinned people who claim to be descendants of Alexander the Great's army, in northeastern Afghanistan. In the fall of last year, Massoud was forty-nine years old, and a dramatic white streak had appeared in his dark hair, above his left temple.

Massoud had been at war pretty much steadily since 1975, when he and several other anti-Communist Islamist students made a series of botched attacks on outposts of the government of Mohammad Daud. King Zahir Shah had been overthrown by Daud two years earlier, and Daud himself was ousted and killed in a coup in 1978. In December of 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Massoud was the most charismatic military leader of the decade-long jihad against the Soviets that followed. He was a brilliant tactician, and his popularity helped his party, the Jamiat-i-Islami, take the leading role in the mujahideen government that ruled Afghanistan in the early nineteen-nineties. But no one was able to establish control over the various Afghan political and ethnic factions for very long, and by early September, 2001, the Taliban had pressed Massoud's forces--a coalition of mainly Persian-speaking groups then known as the Northern Alliance--into the northeastern corner of the country. The front line extended from the edge of the Shamali plain, which lies between the Panjshir Valley and Kabul, up to the Tajik border, where Massoud had his headquarters, in a little smugglers' town named Khoja Bahauddin.

That summer, Massoud had begun receiving intelligence reports that a large number of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters, as many as sixteen thousand, were massing along his northernmost front, among them many Arabs, Pakistanis, Chinese, Uzbeks, and Tajiks. These numbers seemed preposterously inflated, and he dismissed them. Early in September, he and several of his commanders flew over the front line in a helicopter. Massoud sat in the cockpit with binoculars. It was a dangerous trip, one of the men who was with him recalled recently, "but we knew that Allah would help us and that Amur Sahib"--a phrase meaning, more or less, Big Boss, which is what Massoud's men called him--"was with us." They photographed the area, and Massoud instructed his commanders where to position their men.

Massoud stayed up reading Persian poetry aloud with several colleagues until three in the morning on September 9th. A few minutes after he went to sleep, his personal secretary--a young man named Jamshid, who was also his nephew and his brother-in-law--received a call from a Northern Alliance commander, Bismillah Khan, saying that the Taliban had attacked the Shamali front. Jamshid woke Massoud up, and Massoud and Bismillah Khan talked on the phone until daybreak. Then Massoud went back to bed. Around seven-thirty, Jamshid learned that the Taliban were in retreat, and he let his uncle sleep until nine.

After breakfast, Massoud was about to leave on a reconnaissance trip when he decided to see two Arab journalists who had come to Khoja Bahauddin from the Panjshir Valley nine days earlier and had been waiting to interview him. They had sent word that they had to leave Khoja Bahauddin that day. The Arabs had arrived with a letter of introduction from the director of an organization called the Islamic Observation Centre, in London. Jamshid says that he was also contacted by a man who worked for Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, one of the founders of the Afghan Islamist movement, who now commanded a thousand-odd anti-Taliban fighters from a base in the Panjshir. Jamshid was told that the Arabs were friends of Sayyaf's.

I asked Jamshid if he had noticed anything unusual about the Arabs, since most Arabs in Afghanistan at the time were associated with Al Qaeda.

"No," he said. And his uncle thought they could be of use. "He wanted to say through them to the Muslim world, 'We are not kafirs' "--unbelievers--" 'we are Muslims, and we don't have Russians and Iranians fighting here.' " Massoud was religious. He prayed five times a day, in the orthodox fashion, and his wife wore a burkha. But he was a Sunni Muslim at war with other Sunni Muslims--the Taliban--and they professed to be righteous and incorruptible, while he had accepted support from Iranian Shiites and from non-Muslim governments.