September 8, 2002	Sunday	Jamadi-us-Saani29,1423

NEW DELHI, Sept 7: He spoke until dawn about war and then poetry. He was going to meet two “Arab journalists” and then lunch on the shores of the Oxus with an old friend. But within hours, Ahmad Shah Masood was dead.

Masood Khalili, who was injured but not killed in the attack, recounted the last hours of his old friend, the legendary Afghan commander.

“Come as soon as possible.”

Masood had suddenly wanted to see Khalili, his friend of more than 20 years, for an evening of poetry, in which the battle-hardy warrior took refuge when he could take no more.

Masood was “concerned,” Khalili remembered.

He was worried that the Taliban regime was becoming run by Osama bin Laden. That the harsh Afghan winter was due to hit soon.

“He was waiting for a massive attack of the Taliban in the area of the Shomali plains and also around Takhar,” said Khalili.

Masood spoke by telephone with other key fighters in the Northern Alliance.

Then, around midnight, Masood talked to Khalili. Not about war, but about poetry and Sufi mysticism.

“Many times in the last 23 years I’ve heard from him, ‘poetry makes me peaceful, it makes me relax.’

“I knew that in the middle of being exhausted he was taking refuge in that. I knew that this man who is my friend needs to be relaxed, needs peacetime, serenity. The load on him was so heavy.”

Masood asked his friend to read to him the Persian poet Hafiz.

“Open it, see what will come.”

As per tradition, a verse from Iran’s most celebrated writer, chosen at random, shows the signs of the future.

Khalili read. “This night we are talking together value it, because many days pass, many months go, many years come, you will not be able to find this night that we are together.”

Masood sat up. “He told me, ‘Read it, read it again.’ It was around 3:30 in the morning. Around nine hours later he was killed.”

The commander was to see two “Arab journalists” who had waited for the big interview for days. He brought along Khalili — so the two could go later to the Oxus River for lunch and then journey on to the Panshir Valley.

In a tiny room of the Afghan “foreign ministry”, Khalili, sitting to the right of Masood, couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary coming.

The self-described reporter read the 15 questions he was going to ask, eight of them about bin Laden — “Why do you call bin Laden a fanatic? Why don’t you accept his leadership?”

Masood’s good humour left him.

“He was feeling uncomfortable; he lost his good mood. He was not happy to hear these questions.

“Then the commander said, ‘OK, the camera is ready?’

“Yes,’ the boy said very calmly, very quietly. ‘What is the situation in Afghanistan?’”

“I didn’t see the slightest worry in his eyes,” Khalili recalled. “Nothing. Nothing suspicious.”

At most the first word got translated when Khalili heard a huge boom.

“That’s it. Two or three minutes after, I think, he died.”—AFP