NOTRE LIBERTÉ / OUR FREEDOM – MASSOUD

Information

Author:

Ahmad Massoud

Date:

Bouquins
October 2023

Author:

Additional Info

OUR FREEDOM

Rights Holder: Bouquins
Original Language: French (sample English translation available)

Ahmad Massoud, born in 1989, is the founder and Leader of the National Resistance Front of Afghanistan. It’s no coincidence that his father, Ahmad Shah Massoud, was a military commander who led the resistance against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s and later against the Taliban regime until his assassination on September 9, 2011.

In his remarkable memoir, Ahmad Massoud talks about the influence his father has had on him as the current leader of the resistance in Afghanistan. His efforts, like those of his father, have always been about restoring peace, a peace which offers freedom, justice and democracy to all Afghan citizens especially now that the world has left Afghanistan to fend for itself.

After his father’s assassination, Ahmad fled to Iran with his family where he excelled as a student. He had no plans to join the military, he wanted to study astronomy at Princeton University. But when a family friend suggested that it perhaps was his true destiny to follow in his father’s footsteps, he realized that it was indeed his duty to carry on his father’s legacy. He went to military school in the UK to do just that in order to return home and spread the message his father did decades earlier.

Massoud’s memoir is both an intimately personal story and the tale of a nation. He talks about Afghanistan’s history to explain how it became so broken and outlines his ideas (many borrowed from his father) for reforming the current political system and restoring stability.

“Even if our paths were different,” he writes, “the message that my father left for me is to never give up. I won’t run away from the mission that awaits me.”

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