The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 sent the world reeling. Yet some had been loudly and publicly warning of the impending danger.

I remember reading about him and his assassination at the time, but had forgotten about it.

Ahmad Shāh Massoud was an Afghan militant leader. He was a guerrilla commander during the resistance against the Soviet occupation during the Soviet–Afghan War. In the 1990s, he led the government’s military wing against rival militia, and actively fought against the Taliban, from the time the regime rose to power in 1996, and until his assassination in 2001.

As described in Wikipedia, In April 2001, the president of the European Parliament, Nicole Fontaine (who called Massoud the “pole of liberty in Afghanistan”), invited Massoud with the support of French and Belgian politicians to address the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium. In his speech, he asked for humanitarian aid for the people of Afghanistan. Massoud further went on to warn that his intelligence agents had gained limited knowledge about a large-scale terrorist attack on U.S. soil being imminent.

Massoud, then aged 48, was the target of an assassination plot in Khwājah Bahā ud Dīn, Takhar Province in northeastern Afghanistan on September 9, 2001.

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Waiting for almost three weeks for an interview opportunity, on September 8, 2001, an aide to Massoud recalls the would-be suicide attackers “were so worried” and threatened to leave if the interview did not happen in the next 24 hours (until September 10, 2001). They were finally granted an interview. During the interview, they set off a bomb composed of explosives hidden in the camera and in a battery-pack belt. Massoud died in a helicopter that was taking him to an Indian military field hospital at Farkhor in nearby Tajikistan. The explosion also killed Mohammed Asim Suhail, a United Front official, while Mohammad Fahim Dashty and Massoud Khalili were injured. One of the suicide attackers, Bouraoui, was killed by the explosion, while Dahmane Abd al-Sattar was captured and shot while trying to escape.

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In late 2001, a computer was seized that was stolen from an office used by al-Qaeda immediately after the fall of Kabul in November. This computer was mainly used by Aiman al-Zawahri and contained the letter with the interview request for Massoud. The two assassins had completed military training in training camps in Afghanistan at the end of 2000 and were selected for the suicide mission in the spring or early summer of the following year.^[144] The Afghan publicist Waheed Muzhda, who worked for the Taliban in the Foreign Ministry, confirmed the two assassins met with al-Qaeda officials in Kandahar and bin Laden and al-Zawahri saw them off when they left.