Twenty-five years after 9/11, armed resistance against Taliban rule in Afghanistan is growing as the Afghanistan United Front, led by Sami Sadat, began its military campaign in August and has been carrying out more than one attack a day. The escalation now reaches Kandahar and Helmand, where the group has mounted its most audacious attacks.
Sadat, a former Afghan army general, is the public face of the Afghanistan United Front’s campaign. The pace of attacks since August points to a shift from scattered resistance to sustained pressure on Taliban positions, even as the Taliban remain in power across Afghanistan.
Kandahar and Helmand attacks
The Afghanistan United Front has not limited itself to one province. Its strikes in Kandahar and Helmand show that the campaign is now testing Taliban security in areas tied closely to the movement’s core influence. For readers in those places, the practical change is not abstract: armed groups are now operating often enough to make the front line harder to predict.
The source also places the Afghanistan Freedom Front and the National Resistance Front inside the same wider resistance movement. Yasin Zia leads the Afghanistan Freedom Front, and that group has held parts of a district in Badakhshan for some weeks against determined Taliban attacks. Ahmad Massoud leads the National Resistance Front. He is the son of Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was killed by terrorists two days before 9/11. Al Qaeda and the 9/11 toll remains part of the historical frame around which this conflict is being read.
Ahmad Massoud and the resistance network
That lineage matters in Afghanistan because the anti-Taliban camp is not presented here as one movement with one command. The Afghanistan United Front, the Afghanistan Freedom Front, and the National Resistance Front are operating in different places and at different tempos, which makes the resistance harder to measure by territory alone. The source does not say how many fighters any of these groups field, so the clearest gauge is the tempo of attacks and the ability to hold ground in Badakhshan.
Afghan Islamic clerics and scholars have backed the Afghanistan United Front with a fatwa saying, “It is our duty, to destroy the lying and deceptive narrative of the Taliban to save our religion and our people from this extremist and heretical group.” That adds religious cover to a campaign that is already military in practice, not just rhetorical. It also shows why the Taliban are facing pressure from more than one direction at once: battlefield attacks on one side, and a competing legitimacy claim on the other.
Taliban rule in Afghanistan
The Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan five years ago, and the source says the Taliban leadership has no interest in governance. It also says millions are starving in Afghanistan, while the World Food Programme calls the situation there “the largest surge in malnutrition ever recorded.” The Taliban in Kandahar have blocked the training of new midwives, and Afghanistan is once again the most dangerous place in the world to have a baby, as it was during the last Taliban administration in the 1990s.
That pressure is colliding with what the source describes as indifference abroad: western countries are still ignoring Afghanistan and focusing on turning back Afghan refugees. The political gap leaves the resistance groups fighting for attention as well as ground, while the Taliban hold formal power and the humanitarian crisis deepens around them.
What happens next depends less on slogans than on whether these armed groups can keep up the pace. How many fighters they have, how much territory they control, and whether the separate resistance fronts begin to compete with one another are the unanswered questions left by the current campaign in Afghanistan.
