Commander Ahmed Shah Massoud was about to climb into a helicopter for Tajikistan when his press attachΘ pulled him aside. Could the leader of the United Front, the internationally recognised government of Afghanistan, spare just 10 minutes for two Arab journalists? They'd been waiting nine days.

The "cameraman" set his equipment on a table opposite Massoud and fidgeted with it for a long moment. "What would you do with bin Laden if you returned to power?" the "correspondent" asked. Massoud burst out laughing and the camera exploded.

Afghanistan's most charismatic warlord, "the lion of Panjshir" was killed instantly, though the Front tried to keep his death secret while its new leadership was established.

Two days later bin Laden's followers destroyed the World Trade Centre. Massoud's assassination is believed to have been the sign for them to attack. The murder was calculated to destroy domestic opposition to the Taliban before American retaliation. For Afghans, the death of Massoud, not the World Trade Centre, marks the beginning of the war between the US and the Taliban.

Massoud is buried on a high promontory in his native Panjshir Valley. To the north, the river flows through the yellowing autumn trees of Bazarak town. The spires of the Hindu Kush soar to the south, the majesty of nature in contrast with the poor dwellings, the cheap red bricks they're using to build Massoud's still domeless mausoleum. His followers have named the promontory Tapa Salare Shaheedan, the hill of great martyrs.

It is sunset, and a beautiful European woman alights from an aid agency jeep. She wears mourning clothes: a long black dress and a white headscarf that flutters in the breeze. The driver walks a respectful distance behind her as she stands on the earthen bank around the half-finished tomb, looking down on the grave, meditating. A strange, heavy-sweet scent rises from the flowers growing over Massoud's remains.

A mullah squats against the wall of the mausoleum, reading the Koran. The woman turns to go and she is weeping. "Commander Ahmed Shah Massoud helped our hospital very much," she says. "I cannot talk now."

She floats away, an apparition, one more element in the growing mythology of Massoud.

The guards at the tomb keep a visitors' book with entries in French, English, Chinese and Japanese, as well as the Tajiks' language, Dari. The messages - many of them from Western journalists who had interviewed Massoud - are gushing. It seems ironic that Massoud was so admired abroad, when his constant refrain was the danger of foreign intervention.

"We want good relations with foreign countries, but we do not want to be under their control," says the Massoud quotation outside his tomb.

"While he was alive, there was no hand of foreigners in Afghanistan," the 22-year-old guard tells me, apparently forgetting 10 years of Soviet occupation and the Pakistani influence on the Taliban.

"We follow his way by cutting foreign hands from Afghanistan. As long as there are foreign hands, there can never be peace in Afghanistan."

Among the men coming to pray at the graveside, I come across another crucial ingredient of myth-making: the premonition. Hafizullah (60), a cousin of the "great martyr", last saw Massoud a week before he was murdered.

"He was swimming with his son and nephew in the Panjshir river, and while they were swimming, he told his son, 'This is the last time I will swim with you'. That night he woke his wife at 1 a.m. and told her, 'I will not be here long. Soon I will be martyred'."

When I ask the name of Massoud's widow, the interpreter refuses to translate the question. I insist, and receive only embarrassed silence in reply. In Afghanistan, there is a taboo against speaking any woman's name.

In villages, the mere mention of a female leads to fights between her relatives and the imprudent speaker. Despite Massoud's "progressive" Islam, the women in his enclave do not exist, even in name. Massoud had three wives, a western Afghan expert told me, warning that I risked being expelled from "free Afghanistan" if I reported it.

Still trying to understand Massoud's hold over his followers, I spoke to another man emerging from the domeless mausoleum.

"Massoud was a champion," he said. "If you want to know who he was, look at all the burnt-out Russian tanks and vehicles."

As if on cue, he points to the carcass of a T-55, lying at a slant on the mountainside, just 30 metres from the tomb.

But if Massoud was such a great man, I ask, why is the United Front enclave so poor, without plumbing, electricity or paved roads, only gunmen and weapons? The great man's cousin, Hafizullah, answers: "It was better to finish the fight first."