Kabul har fallit. Talibanerna har tagit över Afghanistan.

Children passed across a barbed wire from mothers to British soldiers. It is one of the strongest images that the first week of Taliban power over Afghanistan gives us. A photo that together with the video of the boys who fell from the plane, the photos of the first executions and the slaps to a young man with a flag show us the other face of the Emirate. Not that of the "moderation" promised by the men of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, but that of the deepest and most deeply rooted part of the movement.

There is a common thread that binds these images: young people . Babies, teenagers or boys in their early twenties. The children of Afghanistan and of this war are the victims of betrayal. Those who were born after the outbreak of the war or who were too young to remember what Afghanistan was like before September 11, 2001.

Victim children , but also protagonists. Because like those who protest, they flee and are let go in the hope of a better future, even among those who decide there is a new generation. Same names and same enemies.

The first of these Afghan sons is Ahmad Masood , whose father was the legendary "lion of Panjshir". He is leading the revolt from the valleys where his father fought the Taliban with his Mujahideen twenty years ago. He was joined by former vice president, Amrullah Saleh, an old member of the Northern Alliance under the leadership of Commander Masood and self-proclaimed president of Afghanistan. From the international media, the young lion tries to call up as many Afghans as possible, but above all he tries to curry favor with international powers. His father has left his mark: he hopes to do the same, retracing the path of the Northern Alliance commander. It is the noblest face of a war that has never ended and can now be unleashed in all its violence. Army members, warlords and volunteer fighters are gathering in the impregnable villages of Panjshir for the last stand. The thirty-two-year-old Masood is a name that can awaken hearts and hopes, but now he has to fight a war that appears much tougher than his father's against the Taliban.

On the other side is Mohammad Yaqoob , son of Mullah Omar. Compared to Ahmad Masood, Yaqoob lives far from the media, shy of the cameras. With the advance of the Taliban across Afghanistan, the son of the infamous Taliban founder rose to prominence as a possible leader. Since 2020, that is, since the Doha agreements with the United States were activated, Yaqoob has been put in charge of military operations in Afghanistan. And this is already a sign of the favor that the great leader Hibatullah Akhundzada feels towards him .As the Corriere della Sera explains, Mullah Yaqoob is now a trait d'union between the Taliban and Saudi Arabia. And therefore with an ally of Washington. Perhaps this will help him climb the stairs to the Kabul throne, hoping or waiting for Akhundzada to give up. But the world of Koranic students is internally divided, many mullahs hate each other. And the divisions, on which enemies and powers interested in having control of the transition and the future government will blow, could invest precisely the son of Mullah Omar.

But the two of them are not the only "sons of art" of this long war. There is another, darker, who can now have the limelight and his moment of glory, Sirajuddin Haqqani , son of Jalaluddin Haqqani, the founder of the terror network allied with Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, and who operates at border with Pakistan. Sirajuddin has climbed the heights of internal power within the Taliban until he became one of Akhundzada's great deputies. The more violent, freer and more extremist Haqqani members of the various wings of the group now in control of Kabul have become very influential on the battlefield and in the halls of power. And their boss could even aspire to the office of president. Waheedullah Hashimi, a Taliban official, told Reuters that it is possible that an Akhundzada deputy might be put at the helm of the Emirate. One is Baradar, head of the political bureau. The other two are Yaqoob and Jalaluddin, children of this war, allies but not too much, and who now have an enemy who, like them, follows in their father's footsteps: Ahmad Massoud.
Lorenzo Vita, il Giornale