Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
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| Gulbuddin Hekmatyar | |
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| In office 17 June 1993 – 28 June 1994 |
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| Preceded by | Abdul Sabur Farid Kuhestani |
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| Succeeded by | Arsala Rahmani |
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| Born | 1947 Kunduz, Afghanistan |
| Political party | Hezbi Islami |
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (born 1947 in Imam Saheb, Kunduz province, Afghanistan) is an Afghan warlord. He is a Ghilzai Pashtun of the Kharoti tribe, speaks several languages (including English), has three wives and several children. He has stated that he prefers an Afghan civil war rather than occupation by foreigners and foreign troops.
He served as prime minister twice in the 1990s. He was described by the western media government as power hungry, ruthless and cunning. He is considered a supporter of Taliban and has always been a Pro-Pakistani throughout his career, unlike most former Mujahideen, who have turned against Pakistan. After siding with Osama bin Laden, he is currently in hiding.
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[edit] Early life
Gholam Serwar Nasher, Khan of the Kharoti, thought of Hekmatyar as a bright young man and sent him to a military school and then to Kabul University's engineering department in 1968, where Hekmatyar earned the nickname of "engineer Hekmatyar" frequented among his followers.
However, he started his violent political life by 1972 killing a Maoist student leader Saidal Sokhandan. In the crackdown on Islamists following the Daoud coup (1973), he escaped to Pakistan.
In Pakistan, he founded the Hezbi Islami party (1975). It has been said that it was Hekmatyar who began the anti-Daoud movement's resurgence in the area of Panjshir.
What triggered his actions was presumably the fact that Daoud put Gholam Serwar Nasher, Khan of the Kharoti (to which Hekmatyar belonged) in prison. However, members of Hezbi Islami and Hekmatyar himself denied he was ever involved with the communists.
In 1979, Mulavi Younas Khalis split with Hekmatyar and established his own Hezbi Islami, known as the Khalis faction, with its powerbase in Nangarhar.
[edit] Soviet Invasion and Civil War
During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Hekmatyar received billions of dollars in military assistance from Pakistan's ISI and funds the CIA channeled to the mujahadeen through the ISI.
The ISI decisions to allocate the highest percentage of covert aid to Hekmatyar were certainly based on his record as an effective anti-Soviet military commander in Afghanistan. It is important to note that the CIA had no active involvement in allocating funds to individual resistance commanders; the ISI exclusively decided who to provide funds and arms to [1]. However, as the war began to appear increasingly winnable for the mujahedeen, Islamic fundamentalist elements in ISI became increasingly motivated by their desire to install the fundamentalist Hekmatyar as the new leader of a liberated Afghanistan.
Even during the Soviet occupation, Hekmatyar ordered frequent attacks on other rival (and more moderate) factions to weaken them in order to improve his position in the post-Soviet power vacuum. An example of his tendency for internecine rivalry is his involvement in arranging the 1976 arrest of Ahmed Shah Massoud in Pakistan on spying charges [2].
The Hizb-i Islami of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar espouses an extremist religious and anti-Western ideology. At various times, it has fought and allied itself with almost every other group in Afghanistan. Hizb-i Islami received some of the strongest support from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and attracted thousands of religious radicals to Afghanistan, among them Osama bin Laden. On the role of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the emergence of the Taliban, see Human Rights Watch, Backgrounder on Afghanistan: History of the War, October 2001, [1].
After the fall of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, Hekmatyar signed a peace agreement with Ahmed Shah Massoud on May 25, 1992, which made him Prime Minister. However, the agreement fell apart when Hekmatyar was blamed for a rocket attack on President Mujaddidi's plane [3]. The following day, Burhanuddin Rabbani's and Ahmed Shah Massoud's Jamiat and Abdul Rashid Dostum's Junbish forces resumed fighting against Hekmatyar's Hezb-i Islami forces. In 1994, Hekmatyar would shift alliances, joining with Dostum as well as Hizb-e-Wahdat, a Hazara Shi'a party [4]. Together they laid siege to Kabul, fighting Rabbani and his Defense Minister Massoud.
From 1992 to 1996, the warring factions destroyed 70% of Kabul and killed at least 50,000 people, most of them civilians during the Afghan civil war. The devastation and factionalization allowed the Taliban to take control in 1996, even when, a few months before the Taliban captured Kabul in September of that year, Rabbani and Hekmatyar finally formed a power-sharing government in which Hekmatyar was prime minister. Hekmatyar fled to Iran where he continued to lead the Hezbi Islami party.
[edit] Post September 11 activities
On September 18, 2001, Hekmatyar sided with Osama bin Laden and soon warned Pakistan for siding with the United States. After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and the fall of the Taliban, Hekmatyar rejected the U.N.-brokered accord of December 5, 2001, saying the pact negotiated in Germany amounted to a U.S.-imposed government for Afghanistan.
On February 10, 2002, all the offices of Hezb-e-Islami were closed in Iran. Hekmatyar was expelled from his Iranian exile. His whereabouts became unknown.
The United States accuse him of urging the Taliban to re-form and fight the United States. He is also accused of offering rewards for those who kill U.S. troops. He has been labeled a war criminal by members of the U.S.-backed President Hamid Karzai's government. He is also a suspect behind the September 5, 2002 assassination attempt on Karzai that killed more than a dozen people.
Some reports have located him inside Tunisia, but in May 2002 the U.S. claimed that a CIA-operated Predator drone attacked Hekmatyar near Kabul, missing him but killing some of his followers.
In September 2002, Hekmatyar released a taped message calling for a jihad against the United States.
On December 25 of 2002, the news broke that American spy organizations had discovered Hekmatyar attempting to become a member of al-Qaeda. According to the news, he had said that he was available to aid them. However, in a video released by Hekmatyar September 1, 2003, he denied forming alliances with the Taliban or al-Qaeda but praised attacks against U.S. and international forces.
In October 2003 he declared a ceasefire with local commanders in Jalalabad, Kunar, Logar and Sarobi, and stated that they should only fight foreigners. In May 2006 he released a video[2] to Al Jazeera in which he accused Iran of backing the US in the Afghan conflict and said he was ready to fight alongside Osama bin Laden and blamed the ongoing conflicts in Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan on US interference.
| Preceded by: Abdul Sabur Farid Kuhestani |
Prime Minister of Afghanistan June 1993 – June 1994 |
Succeeded by: Arsala Rahmani |
| Preceded by: Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai |
Prime Minister of Afghanistan June 1996 – September 1996 |
Succeeded by: Muhammad Rabbani |
[edit] Notes
- ^ Ewans, Martin, 2005. Conflict in Afghanistan: Studies in Asymmetric Warfare, London: Routledge. p 154
- ^ Hussain, Rizwan, 2005. Pakistan and the emergence of Islamic militancy in Afghanistan, Aldershot: Ashgate. p167
- ^ http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/afghan2/Afghan0701-01.htm#P325_88217
- ^ Harpviken, Kristian. 1998: "The Hazara of Afghanistan", in Post-Soviet Central Asia, Atabaki, T. and John O'Kane (eds)
