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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