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Fighting has escalated in Panjshir province since mid-May as anti-Taliban forces there attacked Taliban units and checkpoints, HRW said in a statement. The Taliban have responded by deploying thousands of fighters on search operations targeting communities they allege are supporting the opposition forces, the group added.

“Taliban forces have committed summary executions and enforced disappearances of captured fighters and other detainees, which are war crimes," both in Panjshir and elsewhere in Afghanistan, it said.

The force fighting in the mountainous Panjshir Valley north of Kabul — a remote region that has defied conquerors before — rose out of the last remnants of Afghanistan’s shattered security forces. It has vowed to resist the Taliban after they overrun the country and seized power in Afghanistan in mid-August.

Nestled in the towering Hindu Kush range, the Panjshir Valley has a single narrow entrance. Local fighters held off the Soviets there in the 1980s, and the Taliban a decade later under the leadership of Ahmad Shah Massoud, a guerrilla fighter who attained near-mythic status before he was killed in a suicide bombing.

His 33-year-old foreign-educated son, Ahmad Massoud, and several top officials from the ousted Western-backed government have vowed to resist the Taliban.