NIGHT LETTERS

CHRIS SANDS
with
FAZELMINALLAH QAZIZAI

Night Letters
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Afghan
Islamists Who Changed the World

HURST & COMPANY, LONDON

First published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by
C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd.,
41 Great Russell Street, London, WC1B 3PL

© Chris Sands & Fazelminallah Qazizai, 2019

All rights reserved.

The right of Chris Sands and Fazelminallah Qazizai to be

identified as the authors of this publication is asserted
by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988.

A Cataloguing-in-Publication data record for this book

is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 9781787381964

www.hurstpublishers.com
 For
Mumtaz, Hanzala and Najwa,
Afghanistan’s future.
 AUTHORS’ NOTE

Most of the information in this book is drawn from more than 300
interviews carried out across Afghanistan and Pakistan between 2013
and 2019. It also draws on interviews from before that time, as well
as English, Pashto, Dari and Arabic source material. We made every
effort to speak to all the main characters in Hizb-e Islami’s history.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar became aware of the project soon after its
inception. Although he never agreed to a sit-down interview, to our
knowledge he made no effort to stop other Hizbis cooperating with us.
He also answered questions we put to him in writing.

vii
 CONTENTS

Authors’ Note vii

Map 1: Afghanistan xi
Map 2: Kabul xii
List of Illustrations xiii
Principal Characters xv
Prologue: The Return 1
PART ONE
MONARCHY AND REPUBLIC 1965–1978
 1. Earthquakes 13
  2. A New World 33
  3. ‘The Ancient Enemy’ 47
  4. The Insurrection 71
 5. Spies 91
PART TWO
JIHAD 1978–1991
  6. The Revolution 115
 7. Devils 127
  8. Professions of Faith 143
  9. Culture Wars 161
10. ‘The West is Afraid’ 175
11. Black Tulips 193
12. The Mother Party 215
13. Baghdad 239
14. Exit Wounds 257
15. ‘The Century of Islam’ 271
ix
 CONTENTS

PART THREE
CIVIL WAR 1991–1996
16. The Fall 289
17. The Islamic State 305
18. ‘Victory or Martyrdom’ 321
19. Collusion 341
20. The Great Game 363
PART FOUR
THE TALIBAN 1996–2001
21. The Next War 379
PART FIVE
THE AMERICANS 2001–2017
22. The Guests 401
23. The Reckoning 417
Notes 435
Acknowledgements 475
Further Reading 477
Index 479

x
Map 1: Afghanistan
 N Khair Khana

Kabul airport

United States
Embassy
Kabul
Polytechnic
To ive r
Kart-e K a b ul R
Paghman Presidential
district Parwan palace
Kabul
University Old City To
Deh Pul-e
Mazang Charkhi
prison
Kart-e Char
Kart-e Pul-e
Se Khishti

Russian
Embassy

Chihil Sutun
0 2 To
km Chahar Asyab © S.Ballard (2019)

Map 2: Kabul
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1: Senior members of Hizb-e Islami. Photo courtesy of Haji

Abubakr.
Fig. 2: Sulaiman Layeq. Photo courtesy of Sulaiman Layeq.
Fig. 3: Sulaiman Layeq. Photo courtesy of Sulaiman Layeq.
Fig. 4: Sulaiman Layeq. Photo courtesy of Sulaiman Layeq.
Fig. 5: Funeral of the Pashtun nationalist leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar
Khan. Photo courtesy of Sulaiman Layeq.
Fig. 6: Afghan communist officials meeting with PLO emissary Abu
Khalid. Photo courtesy of Sulaiman Layeq.
Fig. 7: Shahnawaz Tanai pins a medal on another senior communist
official. Photo courtesy of Sulaiman Layeq.
Fig. 8: Communist demonstrators mark International Workers’ Day.
Photo courtesy of Sulaiman Layeq.
Fig. 9: Babrak Karmal and Noor Mohammed Taraki escorting the
body of Mir Akbar Khyber for burial. Photo courtesy of
Sulaiman Layeq.
Fig. 10: Mir Akbar Khyber is laid to rest. Photo courtesy of Sulaiman
Layeq.
Fig. 11: Thousands of mourners trail the funeral cortege of Mir Akbar
Khyber. Photo courtesy of Sulaiman Layeq.
Fig. 12: The Hizb commander General Muzaferuddin in Al’a Jirga.
Photo courtesy of General Muzaferuddin.
Fig. 13: General Muzaferuddin with his mujahideen in the Maruf
district of Kandahar. Photo courtesy of General Muzaferuddin.

xiii
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 14: General Muzaferuddin’s mujahideen in Al’a Jirga. Photo

courtesy of General Muzaferuddin.
Fig. 15: Hizb fighters under the command of General Muzaferuddin
parade through Al’a Jirga. Photo courtesy of General
Muzaferuddin.
Fig. 16: Fazel Haq Mujahid. Photo courtesy of Ijaz-ul-Haq Mujahid.
Fig. 17: Fazel Haq Mujahid. Photo courtesy of Ijaz-ul-Haq Mujahid.
Fig. 18: Toran Amanullah and Fazel Haq Mujahid at Toran Amanullah’s
base. Photo courtesy of Ijaz-ul-Haq Mujahid.
Fig. 19: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar at Hizb’s base in Spin-e Shiga. Photo
courtesy of Sayed Rahman Wahidyar.
Fig. 20: Hekmatyar speaks over a military radio during the 1992–1996
civil war. Photo courtesy of Ijaz-ul-Haq Mujahid.
Fig. 21: Hekmatyar delivers a speech in Jalalabad during the civil war.
Photo courtesy of Ijaz-ul-Haq Mujahid.
Fig. 22: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar andYunis Khalis meet in Jalalabad after
the fall of the city. Photo courtesy of Ijaz-ul-Haq Mujahid.
Fig. 23: Sayed Rahman Wahidyar, commander of Hizb’s Fatah division.
Photo courtesy of Sayed Rahman Wahidyar.
Fig. 24: Haji Abubakr, commander of the Army of Sacrifice. Photo
courtesy of Sayed Rahman Wahidyar.
Fig. 25: Sayed Rahman Wahidyar moves from Spin-e Shiga to Logar
to support the Army of Sacrifice. Photo courtesy of Sayed
Rahman Wahidyar.
Fig. 26: Members of the Army of Sacrifice gather at their main base.
Photo courtesy of Haji Abubakr.
Fig. 27: Ustad Abdul Saboor Farid in Kabul after being sworn in
as prime minister in 1992. Photo courtesy of Ijaz-ul-Haq
Mujahid.
Fig. 28: Hizbis prepare to capture part of Logar and move towards
Kabul. Photo courtesy of Haji Abubakr.

xiv
 PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

Abdul Rahim Niazi — An Islamic law student at Kabul University and

the Muslim Youth’s first leader.
Ahmad Shah Massoud — Hekmatyar’s principal rival. The most
prominent commander in the mujahideen party Jamiat-e Islami
and leader of the Northern Alliance.
Burhanuddin Rabbani — Head of Jamiat-e Islami and Massoud’s
political leader. President of Afghanistan during the 1992–1996
civil war.
Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman — The Muslim Youth’s strategist and the
architect of its move from political activism to armed struggle.
Engineer Tareq — A Hizb commander who repeatedly clashed with
Massoud’s forces during the Soviet occupation.
Faqir Mohammed Faqir — A central figure in the 1978 communist
coup and subsequent crackdown on Hizb.
Fazel Haq Mujahid — A Hizb commander with close ties to Osama
bin Laden.
General Muzaferuddin — A former communist soldier who defected to
Hizb and became one of the party’s most important commanders.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar — Co-founder of the Muslim Youth and leader
of Hizb-e Islami for most of the party’s existence.
Haji Abubakr — Commander of Hizb’s Army of Sacrifice.

xv
 PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

Haji Islamuddin — Hekmatyar’s chief bodyguard and a key link

between Hizb and Al-Qaeda.
Jalaluddin Haqqani — Led the first Hizb military operation after the
1978 communist coup. Later left the party and became a famous
commander in his own right.
Jan Baz Sarfaraz — Hizb’s international envoy during the jihad against
the Soviets and its liaison officer with Arab fighters.
Jan Mohammed — A prominent MuslimYouth activist whose death lay
at the heart of the feud between Hekmatyar and Massoud.
Kashmir Khan — Hizb’s most revered military commander in the
wars against the Soviets and the Americans.
Mohammed Amin Weqad — The first leader of Hizb-e Islami. Replaced
by Hekmatyar in 1978.
Najib — Also known as Dr Najib, or Dr Najibullah. The communist
regime’s head of intelligence during the Soviet occupation and,
later, president.
Professor Ghulam Mohammed Niazi — The founding father of
Islamism in Afghanistan. Dean of Islamic law at Kabul University
and a spiritual mentor to the Muslim Youth.
Saifuddin Nasratyar — A close friend of Hekmatyar. Co-founder of the
Muslim Youth and one of the movement’s most extreme activists.
Sayed Rahman Wahidyar — Commander of Hizb’s Fatah Division.
Fought alongside Osama bin Laden in the war against the Soviets.
Sibghatullah Mojaddedi — An Islamic scholar and rival of the Muslim
Youth who briefly served as president in the first mujahideen
government.
Sulaiman Layeq — Co-founder of the Afghanistan communist party
and a key leftwing ideologue.
Toran Amanullah — Commander of Hizb’s Sama division and a staunch
Hekmatyar loyalist.

xvi
 ‘The devil flows in mankind as blood flows.’
– Saying attributed to the Prophet Mohammed
 PROLOGUE
THE RETURN

As the sun set on a chill January day in northern Tehran, Gulbuddin

Hekmatyar waited. Shadows from the Alborz mountain range played
across the third floor room, covering him half in darkness. The years
of living in exile, forgotten and humiliated, were about to end. His
moment had come. Four months had passed since a band of fanatics
crashed planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, shattering
the myth that America ruled unchallenged over the post-Cold
War world. A conflict between the forces of militant Islam and the
US now raged in his homeland, Afghanistan, just as he had always
predicted it would. In the spreading tumult he sensed the chance for
his resurrection.
Less than a decade earlier Hekmatyar had been the most
formidable Islamist insurgent on earth, on the brink of seizing Kabul
after leading the mujahideen to victory over the Soviet Union. Back
then, he intended to make the Afghan capital the centre of a messianic
empire that would ignite revolutions from Kashmir to Jerusalem. His
greatest wish, however, was to wage war against America, and he had
planned to mobilise his army of tens of thousands of radical Muslims
for a confrontation that would reshape the international order. But
in 1992, with Kabul about to fall into his grasp, rival Afghan militant

1
 NIGHT LETTERS

groups counter-attacked and the city descended into violent chaos.

Hekmatyar was defeated and fled to Iran.
As the years dragged on, the torpor of exile took its toll; his beard
turned grey and his eyesight began to fail. Although the embers of
his youthful zeal still burned, at the age of fifty-three he feared he
had become yesterday’s man. Then came 9/11 and his imagination was
sparked back into life. Within weeks of the attacks on New York and
Washington the US had invaded Afghanistan, looking for revenge. The
conflict galvanised Hekmatyar. Suddenly, he felt relevant again.
As American air strikes pounded villages and local warlords drove
the Taliban from power, Hekmatyar sprung into action as Al-Qaeda’s
fixer. Paid by Kuwaiti and Emirati middle-men, in the autumn and
winter of 2001 he used his unrivalled contacts in the region’s militant
and criminal underground to smuggle Osama bin Laden’s lieutenants
out of Afghanistan, outflanking US Special Forces and the CIA.
Hekmatyar provided the fugitives with shelter, setting them up in safe
houses in Iran as he embarked on the first stage of his comeback; he was
determined to become a revolutionary in word and deed once more.
Senior military and intelligence officials in the Iranian government
monitored the operation and quietly smoothed its progress, content to
let him move into position. They knew they could keep him as a wild
card they could play against the US later, if the need arose.
Saif al-Adel, a brilliant Egyptian military strategist who served as Al-
Qaeda’s security chief, was among those to benefit from Hekmatyar’s
aid. He would soon turn Al-Qaeda from a tight knit organisation into
a decentralised movement that thrived on multiple fronts, lighting
the fuse for ‘a war everywhere in the world.’1 Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
the future godfather of ISIS, would lead the way in this murderous
campaign. Badly bruised and with broken ribs as a result of a US air
strike on the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, Zarqawi was hell-
bent on revenge when Hekmatyar sheltered him at an orchard on the
outskirts of Tehran. The Jordanian was not yet a member of Al-Qaeda
and his arrogant demeanour alienated many of his fellow militants,
but Hekmatyar was happy to help him and would come to admire his
toughness, courage and independence.2
Zarqawi and Adel both sensed that America had been lulled into
a false sense of superiority by the swiftness of its post-9/11 victory
2
 PROLOGUE

in Afghanistan, and they were convinced Iraq was next in its sights.
Hekmatyar had visited Baghdad in the year 2000 on a clandestine
fact-finding mission and he concurred. He had his own reasons for
wanting to drag the Americans into a wider conflict, and that winter
he worked together with Al-Qaeda and its affiliates to make it happen.
While Adel and Zarqawi strategised at separate locations inside Iran,
Hekmatyar looked on with pride. It would soon be time for stage two
of his comeback—a return to Afghanistan.
***
In the fading light that first week of January, Hekmatyar was waiting
for a group of visitors he planned to use as unwitting messengers for
his cause. They arrived at his villa in Niavaran, a plush suburb 7.5 miles
north of central Tehran, just after 5pm. Hekmatyar rose to his feet
and descended the stairs, a black turban wound tightly on his head,
thick-lensed glasses balanced on his aquiline nose. There was a regal
authority to his bearing and a certain grace to his movements; he had
not been fattened by the trappings of wealth or slowed by infirmity.
When he reached the ground floor, Hekmatyar greeted the three
men who had come to see him with his customary limp handshake
and a thin smile. Out of politeness they called him ‘Engineer Sahib,’
an honorific reflecting the subject he had studied at university in the
late 1960s. Hekmatyar invited his visitors to join him in the evening
Maghrib prayer. They filed into line behind him, letting him lead the
ritual as he began to recite verses from the Qur’an. The pitch of his
voice perfectly captured the hypnotic cadence of the words. When he
finished a few minutes later he led them back up the stairs, this time
settling on the second floor, where he liked to entertain guests.
The three men were former mujahideen who had served in
Hekmatyar’s militant group, Hizb-e Islami (the Islamic Party), during
the resistance to the 1979–1989 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Now civil society activists who had turned their backs on soldiering,
they were in Tehran to attend a UN conference on the reconstruction
of their battered country. One of the men was from Helmand, in
Afghanistan’s southwest, and specialised in helping refugees; another
was a writer and journalist from Badakhshan in the northeast; the third
was an NGO worker from Panjshir, near Kabul.
3
 NIGHT LETTERS

In contrast to Hekmatyar, the visitors had welcomed the 7 October

2001 American invasion as a necessary evil, believing it was the only
way to bring lasting peace to their homeland. Now they wanted to
know their former emir’s intentions. They had no idea he was already
aiding and abetting Al-Qaeda. As the guests sipped tea, Hekmatyar
launched into an eloquent denunciation of the Americans. His words
were delivered with the subtle malevolence typical of his past status as
one of Afghanistan’s great orators. At his peak, Hekmatyar’s confidence
and charisma had been electric and, with his spirits now revived, that
old magnetism was returning. This time, however, he was preaching
to a sceptical audience. As the evening wore on, the relief worker
from Helmand grew agitated and complained that Afghans were tired
of bloodshed. Hekmatyar laughed. ‘I am old and you also seem old
but jihad is not the job of old people, it is the task of the young,’ he
said. The relief worker continued to protest; he reminded Hekmatyar
that when the mujahideen fought the Russians they received help
from governments throughout the world, including the US. Now the
international community overwhelmingly backed American military
action. ‘The Qur’an says that if you are a Muslim you must do jihad,’
Hekmatyar replied, confident that political and military realities
would eventually bend to God’s will. ‘When the Afghan youth start
to fight the Americans and the puppet government, people inside and
outside Afghanistan will support them,’ he said. This was the message
Hekmatyar wanted his guests to convey to the world: he was still the
same mixture of firebrand cleric and guerrilla leader who believed in
an endless jihad without frontiers. If he was to die fighting, at least he
would die a martyr.
After two hours of debate, the guests prepared to leave, convinced
Hekmatyar did not understand the insurmountable odds he faced. The
relief worker from Helmand could not resist delivering a warning.
‘Be careful,’ he remarked, only half joking. ‘If you think like this the
Americans might count you as a member of Al-Qaeda.’ Hekmatyar
brushed the comment aside, but knew he would not be able to conceal
his secret links with the Arab extremists forever. In fact, the CIA had
already been alerted to his partnership with Al-Qaeda, and the US State
Department was increasingly confident that Tehran would transfer him
to the custody of the Afghan interim government and ultimately to
4
 PROLOGUE

American control. If his final chance at redemption was not to slip

through his hands, he had to move.3
***
Across town, the atmosphere at the UN conference was optimistic for
very different reasons. While Hekmatyar was busy stoking the global
conflict he had spent his life working towards, the seventy delegates
at the international summit believed Afghanistan to be on the cusp
of a bright new dawn. The Taliban had been forced out from every
major city in the country and it seemed only a matter of time before
Osama bin Laden and his militants were captured—or, more likely,
killed. The Afghan interim government was planning for a long and
prosperous future. Sayed Mustafa Kazimi, Kabul’s genial new minister
of commerce, charmed the conference with his intelligence and
wit, but his easy-going disposition belied the scale of the challenge
facing him and his colleagues. More than twenty years of conflict had
obliterated Afghanistan’s infrastructure and traumatised the national
psyche: roads were unpaved and agricultural fields were laced with
landmines; the public health system was in ruins and most of the
population was illiterate. Even if peace prevailed and prosperity
could be assured it would take decades for the country to recover.
Hekmatyar knew this gave him an advantage over his adversaries.
With several Al-Qaeda operatives under his protection, and his own
network of radical loyalists reactivated, he was primed to exploit the
vast problems the US and its allies would inevitably encounter trying to
rebuild such a desperately shattered land. He was also convinced that
Afghans were, at their core, hostile to foreign occupation. Those who
had been seduced by the West’s money and power had forgotten the
most important lesson of their country’s history: in the end, invading
armies are always vanquished.
On 11 January, three days after the UN summit finished, the US
sent its first prisoners to Guantanamo Bay, blindfolded, shackled and
dressed in orange jumpsuits. Hekmatyar took this as confirmation
that America was not just engaged in another foreign war but had
embarked upon a religious crusade like the Christian forces of old.
Always fastidious, he became obsessed with the minutiae of the prison
flights. One particular detail stood out to him: the thought that the
5
 NIGHT LETTERS

captives had been left to defecate into bags, on the long journey from
Afghanistan to Cuba, was an indignity he regarded as the worst kind of
torture imaginable for pious Muslims.4
Hekmatyar was under no illusions about his relationship
with  Tehran. He was dispensable to the Iranians and, in the right
circumstances, he knew they would not think twice about giving him
up. On his arrival in 1997, Tehran had granted him diplomatic status
not out of sympathy for his plight or support for his cause, but in the
knowledge that he might one day serve as a useful bargaining chip in
its own conflict with the US. Hekmatyar accepted the offer of refuge
out of reluctant pragmatism; he simply had nowhere else to go. He
was a Sunni extremist who had long viewed most Shia, including
Iran’s rulers, with suspicion. All that united him with Tehran was their
mutual hostility towards the US and their shared hatred of the Taliban
regime, which Iran regarded as a threat to its sovereignty and which
Hekmatyar blamed for his defeat in the Afghan civil war. Hekmatyar
viewed the wild-looking mullahs in the Taliban as little more than
uneducated hicks who had usurped his rightful place as national
leader, aided by traitorous mujahideen rivals. He despised their lack of
ambition and parochial, insular approach to Islam. While they wanted
only to rule Afghanistan, he wanted to spread his radical vision across
the world. The Taliban’s leadership had hosted Al-Qaeda not because
of a strong affinity with bin Laden’s internationalist agenda, but out of
a sense of duty laid down by ancient Afghan tribal codes. In contrast,
Hekmatyar viewed Al-Qaeda as the ideological offspring of his party,
Hizb-e Islami.
By early 2002 the alliance of convenience between him and
Tehran had reached breaking point. The Taliban had scattered and
Iran’s priority was to end its diplomatic and economic isolation by
improving its relations with the West. Several officials in the reformist
government of Mohammed Khatami were ready to give Hekmatyar up
to facilitate this thaw. Even the hardliners in the Iranian intelligence
establishment who had helped Hekmatyar shelter his Al-Qaeda
protégés were prepared to hand him to the Americans. Just as a deal
was about to be reached, however, US President George W. Bush used
his State of the Union Address on 29 January 2002 to condemn Iran as
part of an ‘axis of evil’ that included Iraq and North Korea. Furious at
6
 PROLOGUE

the insult and fearing it was already on Washington’s hit list precisely
for harbouring men like Hekmatyar, Tehran decided to let him return
to the battlefield to face the Americans.
In early February, a senior official from Iran’s intelligence ministry
travelled to Niavaran, carrying an urgent message. The moderates
in the government were about to end their formal connection with
Hekmatyar and revoke his diplomatic status, he said. The next step
would be his expulsion—albeit on Tehran’s, rather than Washington’s,
terms. He asked Hekmatyar if he was serious about starting an
insurgency against American troops in Afghanistan. ‘You do know
they have Apaches?’ he said, in reference to the formidable helicopter
gunships which were a symbol of US firepower. ‘The Russians also
had helicopters,’ replied Hekmatyar. The Iranian placed his hand on a
Qur’an lying on a table in front of them and took an oath of loyalty. ‘If
you are really doing jihad, we are ready to help,’ he declared.
***
Little more than a week later, on a Monday afternoon in mid-February,
an official representing Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs made much
the same journey as the mysterious intelligence agent before him,
but, as promised, carried a far more abrasive message. Arriving at the
villa, he found Hekmatyar waiting with his secretary. Accompanied by
several colleagues, the official issued the Hizb-e Islami leader with a
formal warning: leave the country by Wednesday or be deported, by
order of ‘the highest authorities.’ Hekmatyar sought to buy some time
by pointing out that the Iranians were holding his diplomatic passport,
having recently taken it for renewal, and insisted he would have already
left if the travel documents had been in his possession. Embarrassed,
the official apologised and, changing to a more respectful tone,
extended the deadline by a few hours. Hekmatyar would, he said, still
have to leave Iran by Wednesday afternoon.
As soon as the delegation left, Hekmatyar instructed his staff
to prepare a car for his escape. A lifetime of intrigue and double
dealing had given him a well honed instinct for conspiracy, and he
was convinced that elements of Iran’s political establishment were
preparing to sell him out to Washington. Hekmatyar was determined
to leave in a manner, and at a time, of his choosing. His family lived
7
 NIGHT LETTERS

with him in the spacious villa but his two wives and nine children were
out that day—only his mother was home. Following the late afternoon
‘Asr prayer he walked upstairs to bid her farewell and began to make
the final preparations for the difficult journey ahead. The first step was
to disguise his appearance: reluctant to trim his facial hair, he used
curlers and a flat iron to restyle his beard; he put on a wooly hat and
stuck two white plasters across his nose and cheeks, in the shape of a
large cross, as if he had suffered an injury to his face. That evening his
driver, Majeed Yarizada, was waiting to take him away in a black Toyota
Land Cruiser. Just before leaving, Hekmatyar gave clear instructions
to his secretary not to tell anyone about his impending escape. ‘Say
nothing to anyone for three days,’ he told him, writing it down to
emphasise the point.
The original plan was to drive into central Tehran and catch a bus
to Zahedan, a bleak desert town near the tip of a triangle where south-
east Iran meets Afghanistan and Pakistan. It would have been a bone-
jarring, twenty-two-hour ride, but as they headed to the bus station
an aide came up with a better alternative. Rather than travel by road,
he decided they should catch a plane, convinced that no one in airport
security would cross-check their credentials for a domestic flight.
Airlines flew regularly to Zahedan, so the driver dropped Hekmatyar,
the aide and a third Hizb-e Islami member at Tehran’s Mehrabad
International Airport, where they waited anxiously. Hekmatyar had a
habit of carrying two pistols with him in Iran and he was accustomed to
passing security checks with the weapons barely concealed, confident
his diplomatic status would protect him from being searched. But he
was now travelling incognito and on a second ordinary Afghan passport.
It hadn’t occurred to him that this time he should leave the weapons
behind. As he walked through a metal detector at the airport, the
alarm sounded. With their cover about to be blown, his quick-thinking
aide casually remarked that Hekmatyar must have loose change or keys
in his pockets. The guards shrugged and let them go.
Back at the villa, Hekmatyar’s driver told the secretary about the
decision to catch a plane rather than a bus and asked him to phone
Hizb-e Islami’s office in Zahedan to say some party members would
soon be arriving. The secretary made the call and, in case the phone
was tapped, purposely withheld the fact that it was Hekmatyar on the
8
 PROLOGUE

aircraft. After a two hour flight the three fugitives arrived in Zahedan.
A colleague, Malim Ghulam Sarwar, was waiting at the local airport
and took them to his house, where everyone except Hekmatyar started
to relax. Sarwar was an ethnic Tajik who spoke with the thick accent of
an Afghan from the western province of Herat. Stern and punctilious,
he was also loyal to a fault and had played a minor role in helping some
of the Al-Qaeda fighters settle in Iran earlier that winter.
With its flat, featureless landscape, stifling heat and air of lingering
menace, Zahedan resembled a tough frontier town from an old
Hollywood western. Once known by the name Dozda, the Farsi
word for ‘thieves,’ it was more popular with bootleggers and drug
traffickers than tourists or government officials, who were wary of
the large and often hostile Sunni community. Bandits roamed a nearby
mountain range and even the locals didn’t venture out much after dark.
Hekmatyar had no desire to stay there any longer than necessary and
he told his men to make sure that come sunrise he was not praying in
Iran. He wanted to return as soon as possible to the one place he knew
he would be safe: eastern Afghanistan. There, he would move the last
pieces of his plan into position and suck the Americans deeper into the
war. Just as he had done as a young man, he would change the world.5

9
 PART ONE

MONARCHY AND REPUBLIC

1965–1978
 1

EARTHQUAKES

It was mid-afternoon on 1 January 1965 when Sulaiman Layeq climbed

aboard a bus near his home in the Kart-e Parwan neighbourhood of
Kabul. Traffic was sparse as he headed west in the pale winter light;
the weekend was drawing to a close and most people were inside,
trying to keep warm. Through misted windows he glimpsed one of
the royal family’s old summer palaces on a hill, recently refurbished
and converted into a restaurant after years of disrepair. The bus rattled
on towards a brilliant horizon of distant white mountains, turned left
where the new polytechnic was being built, and continued south past
the massive Soviet-funded grain silo. It picked up speed under heavy
skies, accelerating between meadows and fields on one side and the
city on the other. A mile later, Layeq reached his first stop at a petrol
station in a market square. He disembarked and caught his breath as he
waited to catch his next bus. Wearing an overcoat, a suit and a peaked
cloth cap in the style of Lenin, he would not have looked out of place
as a commuter in London, New York or Moscow. A few minutes later
he boarded the second bus, paid for his ticket and looked around at the
rest of the passengers, ordinary Afghans going about their business.
There were Sunni and Shia, young and old, male and female. He alone
carried the burden of a secret that would affect them all.
Thirty minutes after he left home, Layeq arrived in the suburb of
Kart-e Char. He thanked the driver and stepped out into a world of
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grey and brown. He moved briskly, walking a short distance along

quiet tree-lined streets bordered by open gutters. Trails of smoke
from wood burning stoves drifted into the air. With the cold starting
to bite, he arrived at his destination: a single-storey house built on
stone foundations and surrounded by a high wall, on the corner of two
inconspicuous and nameless back roads. The front gate had been left
discreetly ajar. Layeq walked in.
For more than two years leftist activists had been gathering in small
units, theorising and planning. Now twenty-seven of them had come
together at the house to establish an underground Marxist movement
with the aim of overthrowing Afghanistan’s king, Zahir Shah, and
toppling the monarchy. Layeq, aged in his mid-thirties, erudite and
outspoken, was the most sophisticated political operator among them,
and would play a central role in the revolt and its aftermath. Unknown
to him and his fellow communist agitators, their actions would,
ultimately, unleash a virulent strand of Islamic extremism and usher
in the rise of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Hizb-e Islami. From opposite
sides of an ideological chasm, both movements would lay waste to the
country they loved.
On that cold January afternoon, however, as the Marxists gathered
in Kart-e Char, this was far in the future. Layeq was not the first to
arrive, nor the last. He greeted the others with a tentative hug and his
hand on his heart, and they made small talk while they waited for the
entire group to assemble. Once everyone was there, this improbable
band of friends and acquaintances, pragmatists and ideologues,
moderates and militants, decided to capture the moment, convinced
it was of historical importance. As the sun shone weakly through the
clouds, they shuffled into position and stood stiffly together in the yard
to pose for a series of photographs taken by one of their comrades. The
men, who would help drag Afghanistan, and the world, into a series of
interlocking and devastating wars, looked more like a group of mild
mannered academics than violent revolutionaries; they were mostly
thoughtful, middle-aged members of the intelligentsia and carried
no weapons. With the pictures taken, they went inside. Chairs were
already laid out in the meeting room and there was a table and lectern
at the front. Red flags were draped over the table and hung on the
wall behind it: symbols of the classless utopia they hoped to create.
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The photographer took to the lectern and opened the meeting. He

asked each man to stand, introduce himself, explain his background
and swear allegiance to the party. He then introduced two comrades
sitting beside him: men who were favourites to lead the movement.
The first of them was the owner of the house, Noor Mohammed
Taraki. With his friendly demeanour, and his hair and moustache
showing flecks of silver, he was the embodiment of the moderately
successful writer he had spent his life struggling so hard to become.
Fiercely ambitious, Taraki had risen from humble beginnings in a poor
family from the rural south, before moving to India of his own accord
as a teenager and working as a clerk in Mumbai. After returning to
Afghanistan he became involved in a nationalist youth movement
and embarked on a career in journalism. His competence as a writer
earned him a short spell as press attaché for the Afghan embassy in
Washington DC, until the posting came to an end after he penned an
article criticising the king. In the resulting furore, he exploited the
small amount of fame he acquired for all it was worth. Returning to
Kabul, Taraki worked as a translator with the US aid mission and the
American embassy; rumours quickly spread that the jobs were a cover
for his real role as a Soviet agent. Nevertheless, by the mid-1960s
Taraki had sufficiently burnished his reputation as a learned man and
committed political activist to earn the approval of his comrades, if not
their unanimous respect.
In the meeting at his house extracts from his writings were read
out, provoking a mixed reaction among the men in the room. To
Taraki’s most loyal followers, the words were proof of his eloquence
and knowledge. Yet others were distinctly unimpressed by what they
felt was just a rehash of ideas they had heard before, and Layeq was
among those who sat in bored and embarrassed silence through the
entire monologue.Taraki was neither an original thinker, nor a political
or military strategist. He was a well-connected elder whose status and
experience would be of value if the communists were to convince the
Afghan public that they held the solution to the nation’s ills.
Babrak Karmal, the second leader-in-waiting, was then introduced
to the room in the same formal manner as Taraki.1 With thick eyebrows
and a large beak-shaped nose, he knew he was far harder to warm to.
He rarely smiled and even those who admired him, like Layeq, thought
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he was egotistical. This air of arrogance and sense of entitlement could

be traced back to his youth; as the son of an army officer and former
provincial governor, Karmal was born into privilege and was never
able to shake off a sense of superiority.To his supporters, though, there
was no doubt he was prepared to make great personal sacrifices for
his political beliefs. Karmal had served time in prison for his leftwing
activism and enjoyed a considerable following in Kabul, particularly
among students. He and Taraki represented two different factions that
were emerging on the Afghan left. With one from the rural poor, the
other from the urbanised upper class, theirs was an uneasy alliance.
After the speeches, they held a vote to elect a five-man central
committee. Everyone was given a piece of paper on which they were
asked to write the names of their choices; they could vote for anyone,
including themselves. Taraki, head of the largest faction, received the
most support and was elected leader or ‘general secretary.’ Karmal
was chosen as his deputy. Because political parties were still illegal in
Afghanistan, the communists named themselves the Jerian-e Democratic-e
Khalq (The People’s Democratic Current). It was a semantic sleight of
hand to avoid flagrantly violating the law.
The call to dawn prayer had not yet sounded across the city on 2
January when the men said their goodbyes. The meeting had dragged
on for thirteen hours, the formalities of the vote punctuated by excited
chatter and occasionally raucous debate. At one point the communist
plotters stood out in the yard, eating home-cooked kebabs and looking
up at the night sky as they contemplated the magnitude of their task.
By the time the meeting was over it was too early in the morning for
Layeq to get a bus or find a taxi, so he made the long walk back to
Kart-e Parwan, lost in his thoughts. When he finally reached home he
was too tired to go to work.2
***
Layeq and his twenty-six comrades had come of age watching socialist
movements in the developing world throw off the yoke of colonialism
and dictatorship in the name of freedom, and that was what pulled
them together. ‘Every day or every month, a country in Africa, Latin
America or Asia was raising its own national flag,’ he remembered. ‘It
was wonderful for the young generation and very attractive. The West
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was shamed morally and the East was strong.’3 The communists were
optimistic that they could play an integral role in this global revolution.
Afghanistan was not a colony and there was no occupying army to
resist, but the conspirators inside Taraki’s house regarded the monarchy
as venal and corrupt and they resented the British who had redrawn
the border that separated Afghanistan and the Raj in 1893, cutting
through a large slice of Afghan territory in the process. The Pashtuns
among them felt particularly keenly that this was a historical injustice
they needed to put right. They were the country’s largest ethnic group
and they had friends, relatives and millions of fellow tribesmen across
the frontier, people who still called themselves Afghans despite living
in the new state of Pakistan. These ties of blood and nation were of
primary importance to the communist plotters, and certainly more
significant than the economic and social theories of the left.
While the communists’ Pashtun nationalism was hardly novel
among Afghans, their condescending, often hostile, attitude towards
religion certainly was; even if they were to topple the king and seize
power they would have to confront this far bigger obstacle. One thing
guaranteed to provoke outrage in Afghanistan was an attack, real or
perceived, on Islam. The Islamic faith, in all its various manifestations,
was the thread that held the predominantly Muslim nation together.
From the steppes of the north to the deserts of the south, Islam
connected otherwise isolated districts and towns. Villages throughout
the country had unique local identities that set them apart from their
neighbours, but they were united at prayer time when men, women
and children faced west towards Mecca, closed their eyes and bowed
in submission before God.
From the meeting in Kart-e Char onwards, the founding members
of the communist party did not openly refer to themselves as
communists, knowing there would be a backlash if they did. At this
early stage they were still trying to reconcile politics and religion, and
their ideology remained muddled. One of their heroes was Gamal
Abdel Nasser, the president of Egypt, who had come up with his
own solution to the dilemma. He realised Egypt could not ignore the
bonds that tied it to the Islamic world but he treated the religion as an
aspect of his nation’s heritage, instead of a foundation for government.
Similarly, the Afghan communists did not yet regard Islam as totally
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incompatible with their leftist ideals, but the decision to meet on the
first day of a new year was not only symbolic of the fresh start they
were determined to make; it was also a sign of a burgeoning hostility
towards the clergy. 1 January 1965 happened to be a Friday, the holiest
day of the week in Islam.
The religious establishment was a major pillar of society and a key
source of the royal family’s power, propping up the monarchy with the
aid of tribal leaders known as khans or maliks. The lasting, deep-rooted
change the communists sought required the obliteration of them both.
Although they were reluctant to say so openly, they regarded the Islam
being practised in Afghanistan as a regressive force holding the country
back economically, politically and socially. The clerical establishment
was also apathetic about the Pakistan border and the land that had been
taken from the Pashtuns by the British. Rather than carry out a coup,
the communists’ initial plan for change was to gradually build popular
support among the masses, spreading dissent and fatally undermining
the king. This cautious strategy soon changed, swept along by the tide
of history.
***
International politics in the mid-1960s was the domain of dreamers.
A radical new wave of activists, artists and guerrillas was pushing
back against tired ideas and ways of living that seemed more suited
to a bygone era. It was an exciting and hopeful time. It was also a
fearful one, with America and the Soviet Union trapped in a Cold
War that left no country untouched. Less than a month before the
communists’ meeting in Kabul, Che Guevara had addressed the UN
General Assembly in New York. Dressed in military fatigues, he called
for universal nuclear disarmament, denounced America for aiding
Belgian atrocities in the Congo and warned about the escalating
conflict in Vietnam. The discontent he symbolised spanned continents.
Faced with a stark choice between communism or capitalism and the
looming prospect of losing everything in a nuclear holocaust, ordinary
men and women were increasingly making their voices heard.
Located at the crossroads between Central and South Asia,
Afghanistan was not isolated from the winds of change. In the previous
year, 1964, the king had launched his great democratic project,
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drawing up a radical new constitution that granted people freedom

of thought, expression and assembly. It also limited the powers of
his royal family, banning them from holding ministerial positions or
heading the supreme court. For the first time, elections would select
members of a modernised parliament. As part of his reforms, the
king pledged to legalise political parties; it was that promise—one
he would never fulfil—which gave the Afghan communists the last
piece of encouragement to push ahead with their own plans. Sulaiman
Layeq, the communist on the bus with the Lenin hat, could now step
into a role he always felt destined to play.
Layeq was born on 12 October 1930, in the small provincial town of
Sharana, in the Pashtun heartland of Paktika in southeast Afghanistan.
Old honour codes were central to life there, with blood feuds and
khans and maliks holding more authority than the government among
local communities. Layeq’s main influence was his father, a revered
tribal and religious leader who left home to take up arms against the
British Empire’s soldiers in the Raj, ambushing their convoys across
the frontier until he was silenced in mysterious circumstances. Family
lore held that an Afghan prime minister with close links to the British
tricked his father into visiting Kabul. Once there, the prime minister
asked him to stay as his personal imam for the next seventeen years
and, bound by codes of honour, he had little choice but to comply.
He was eventually allowed to resettle in Baghlan in the north of the
country on the condition that he did not reconnect with the Pashtun
tribes in the south east. He did as instructed but from then on it always
felt like a curse had been placed upon the family.
For Layeq, this was a childhood lesson never to trust authority.
As a boy, he stood out from his peers due to the sharp intellect and
rebellious streak he inherited from his father. He excelled at the
government-run Habibia High School in Kabul, then left before the
seventh grade to further his religious education at what became known
as the Abu Hanifa madrassa in Paghman, not far from the capital. With
its spectacular backdrop of jagged mountain peaks reaching towards
the heavens, generations of Afghan royals had used Paghman as a
holiday retreat. One of the king’s predecessors had even built a replica
of the Arc de Triomphe there. It was at the newly formed madrassa
that Layeq’s turbulent political career started to take shape. Close to
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graduating, he instigated an anti-government strike and was expelled

for ill discipline along with a number of fellow students. Despite being
reinstated and allowed to sit his exams, he had earned a reputation
as a troublemaker that he would never shake off. Upon graduation
he studied Islamic law at Kabul University but was soon dismissed
from the faculty without explanation. He pleaded with a Ministry of
Education official to let him learn medicine instead, ‘where there is
no politics’ involved, only to be told his case was with the security
services. After more negotiations, he managed to earn a degree in
literature and philosophy; work as a journalist in the state-owned
press followed.
When the communists held their founding meeting, Layeq was
working for the government-controlled Radio Afghanistan, the nation’s
only station. The international community was taking a keen interest
in the country and this was reflected in the programmes that were
being broadcast, including items in Arabic, Urdu, French, English,
German and Russian. As far as Layeq was concerned, the job was a
stepping stone towards better things. Married, ambitious and highly
intelligent, he soaked up an array of influences that ranged from the
Ghanaian political leader Kwame Nkrumah to the American authors
Jack London and Ernest Hemingway. Layeq’s liberal attitude towards
life meant he was not liked by some of his more pious relatives, who
admired his intellect but noticed that he was neither a regular at
the mosque nor a supporter of the more conservative traditions in
their culture. He was not shy about speaking his mind or criticising
the prevailing attitudes of the time: he thought too many clerics had
become lazy and complacent, hindering progress, propping up the
royal family and failing in their Islamic duty to question authority.They
were ‘asleep,’ he told friends and colleagues, and were ‘not a dynamic
force, even on religious issues.’
Layeq was confident in his ability to rise to the top of Afghan politics.
In a country where people often choose their own surnames, he had
adopted one that epitomised his self-belief: the word Layeq meant
‘intelligent’ in the nation’s two main languages, Pashto and Dari. As
well as being a journalist and activist, he was a poet and an ideologue,
and it was all these different aspects of his personality that first brought
him into contact with Taraki, the leader of the communists, at a writers’
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association in Kabul. Although they were never great friends, the two
of them shared a love of writing and a political vision that drew them
together and pushed them to cooperate.4
Layeq understood better than most of his comrades that their ideas
would not be accepted without a fight. He had already warned them
that a new strand of politically-engaged Islam was emerging on Kabul’s
streets, more extreme than anything Afghanistan had seen before, and
ready to challenge the spread of Marxism with force if necessary. At
the centre of this Islamic movement was an enigmatic teacher named
Ghulam Mohammed Niazi, who had studied alongside Layeq when
they were both still children. Having grown apart in the intervening
years, they now found themselves reunited—this time as enemies at
the forefront of a generational struggle for their country’s future.
***
Niazi was reticent by nature. Somewhat dull and studious in appearance,
he seemed as plain and ordinary as the shapeless suits he wore, but his
polite and shy demeanour masked a clinical and radical mind equally
as determined as Layeq’s to overthrow the monarchy. Born into a
Pashtun family in 1932, he was from the village of Rahim Khail in
Andar, a desperately poor and remote part of rural Ghazni.The nearest
town was more than an hour’s walk away. Like most of the men in the
village, his father, Abdul Nabi, was a farmer who struggled to grow
wheat on the parched, cracked land that depended on underground
springs for water. One of three children, Niazi studied at the local
school, where he was diligent and competent enough to win a place
at the madrassa in Paghman. It was his route out of poverty and he
soon found himself lodging in the same dormitory as Layeq, who was
in the year below him. The two teenagers could not have been more
different: Layeq, the son of a tribal leader, had a brash self-confidence,
read widely and was already becoming politically active; in contrast,
Niazi was unassuming and well behaved. Still every bit the deferential
young villager, he avoided controversy and concentrated on the books
he was assigned. They knew each other only in passing.5
Niazi left the madrassa and went briefly to Kabul University to read
Islamic law. He was a good enough student to be swiftly rewarded
with a prestigious scholarship at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, one of
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the most renowned centres of learning for Sunni Muslim scholars in

the world. He arrived in Egypt in 1951 wide-eyed, impressionable
and with no previous experience of life outside Afghanistan. Ghazni
and Paghman were parochial hinterlands compared to the anarchic
splendour of Cairo. The city that had once been at the heart of two
Islamic caliphates was a frightening and intoxicating place, and Niazi
fell in love with its kaleidoscopic sights and sounds.
He had been there for about a year when, in 1952, the country was
convulsed by a revolution.The uprising—a military coup led by Gamal
Abdel Nasser of the Free Officers movement—marked a surge in Arab
nationalism that had been building for years. The creation of Israel on
14 May 1948 had ignited a profound existential crisis that gripped the
Middle East, with Cairo the epicentre of the new, secular pan-Arab era.
True to his quiet nature, Niazi tried to busy himself in the faculty of
the Principles of Religion as the unprecedented turmoil reverberated
around him. Nevertheless, he could hardly ignore the resurgence of
an Islamist organisation already associated with puritanical idealism,
martyrdom and violence.
Jamaat al-Ikhwan al Muslimin, popularly known as the Muslim
Brotherhood, had thrown its weight behind the revolution, describing
the Free Officers as a ‘blessed movement.’  The Brotherhood,
established in the 1920s in opposition to British imperial control,
had spent decades railing against the shame of living under foreign
occupation. ‘A tide of atheism and lewdness overtook Egypt,’ wrote its
founder, Hassan al-Banna. ‘In the name of individual and intellectual
freedom, it devastated religion and morality.’6 The Brotherhood spoke
for a public left behind by colonialism and found common cause with
a disenfranchised youth. It presented itself as the new protector of
Islam, ready to sweep out a fetid religious establishment that had
allowed Egypt to fall into disrepute under foreign influence. ‘Western
civilisation has invaded us by force and with aggression on the level of
science and money, of politics and luxury, of pleasures and negligence,
and of various aspects of a life that are comfortable, exciting and
seductive,’ warned Banna.7 He regarded ‘genuine Islam,‘ rather than
nationalism, as the only solution to humanity’s ills. To this end, less
than two years before his death he outlined a series of political goals
that amounted to his manifesto for all Islamic countries. He wrote that
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the West was on the brink of collapse, and now had the chance to live
‘under the tranquility of Islam,’ if Muslim countries would take the
initiative and lead the way. ‘All it requires is a strong Eastern power to
exert itself under the shadow of God’s banner.’
His political vision included prohibiting free mixing between male
and female students, and discouraging ostentatious dress and ‘loose
behaviour.’ ‘Fornication’ should be recognised as ‘a detestable crime
whose perpetrator must be flogged,’ he wrote. Sent to rulers across the
Islamic world, Banna knew implementation of the proposals would take
time and patience, but that did not deter him. He wanted the content
of theatres to be closely monitored, songs censored and ‘provocative’
books confiscated. Elementary schools in villages should be merged
with mosques. When it came to economics, he believed people should
be protected ‘from the oppression of multinational companies,’ usury
should be banned and the salaries of junior civil servants raised. In this
new nation of Islam, ‘the spirit of Islamic jihad’ would be ignited in the
armed forces and among youth groups; that did not mean they would
lash out in unprovoked violence, he said. Banna denounced Mussolini’s
fascism, Hitler’s Nazism and Stalin’s communism for being based on
pure militarism. Islam, on the other hand, ‘sanctified the use of force’
but ‘preferred peace.’8
The Brotherhood ended up pursuing a mixed strategy of missionary
work, mainstream political engagement and armed resistance—
contrasting approaches that caused lasting divisions within the
movement. In the late 1930s Banna formed a secret military unit to help
Arabs fighting British colonial rule in Palestine; it was soon carrying
out operations against British forces in Egypt. The Egyptian state also
became a target for the Brotherhood’s more militant followers, and a
growing campaign of violence led to the assassinations of a prominent
judge and the prime minister. Banna tried in vain to distance himself
from the bloodshed. On 12 February 1949, he was murdered by
government agents.
After the Free Officers coup in 1952 the Brotherhood appeared to
have turned a corner. Many of its activists were released from jail and
some of its members were even rewarded with government positions
as the new regime courted Islamic allies to shore up its fledgling rule.
The detente did not last. As the Free Officers consolidated power,
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the government changed course and turned against the Islamists,

banning the Brotherhood and rounding up hundreds of its members.
The crackdown intensified when Nasser survived an attempt on his
life in 1954. Blaming his erstwhile allies, he ordered the arrests of
thousands of suspected Islamists and hanged six men, marking the start
of a sustained assault on the Brotherhood.
From his vantage point at Al-Azhar, Niazi watched on, horrified by
the oppression but inspired by the sacrifices men much like him were
prepared to make for their religion. He completed his bachelor’s
degree in Islamic law, and was just coming to terms with all that he
had seen when another momentous event shook Egypt. Exercising
its newfound independence, the government nationalised the
Anglo-French company that ran the Suez Canal, a vital international
shipping route. The British, having just pulled out their military
forces, panicked. Looking for a pretext to redeploy troops and seize
control of the canal, they colluded with France and Israel to draw
up a plan for war. Israel attacked Egypt in October 1956, as agreed,
giving the two European powers the excuse to invade as concerned
third parties intent on keeping the peace. It was a debacle and, after
a UN brokered ceasefire in November, the canal was returned to
Egyptian control. Chastened by the whole episode, the Suez Crisis
came to herald the end of British colonial influence in the Middle
East; it also cemented the reputation of Nasser as a man who could
face down the world’s great powers and his enemy, Israel. Egypt’s
military leader became a hero for a defiant, anti-colonial generation,
among them the Afghan communists.
Niazi remained at Al-Azhar for one more year, going on to complete
a master’s degree in the subject of Sunnah and Hadith, the actions and
sayings of the Prophet Mohammed. In his time in Cairo he witnessed
the suffering of the Brotherhood, the dark side of nationalism and the
pernicious relationship between Israel and the West. It was a political
education that changed him forever. All his learning at the Paghman
madrassa was brought to life. Islamic history was full of great warriors
and epic battles, and to men like Niazi who knew the stories well
it often felt as if the religion’s best days were consigned to the past.
Egypt showed him that a life-and-death struggle to reignite the faith
was ongoing. He also watched as Britain conspired with Israel in the
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heart of the Muslim world, convincing him of the need for Muslims
to unite against their common enemies. Years earlier, Niazi had left
Afghanistan for Egypt with a temperament akin to a librarian. He
returned a fervent revolutionary.
Arriving home in 1957 Niazi was hired to teach at Kabul University.
Allowed to choose his subject, he selected the history of Islam and the
work of the ninth century scholar Mohammed ibn Ismail al-Bukhari,
whose collection of Hadith is one of Islam’s most revered texts. Niazi’s
job gave him the perfect opportunity to influence a generation of
Afghan students and shape their ideas according to his own newly
zealous views; he would teach them to be Islamists, men who believed
that Islam was not just a matter of private faith but a blueprint for
governance. Some of the conservative students already feared apostasy
was taking hold at the university and Niazi, who shared their alarm,
began to organise them. He was convinced that under the king the
state had strayed badly from the teachings of Islam. The prevailing
attitude of Afghanistan’s clerical establishment was that religion and
government should be separate. As long as the state let Muslims
practise their faith, as long as the king did not flagrantly violate the
word of God, they were content. Niazi wanted more than that; he
wanted a government that was subservient to Islam in everything it
did. Settling for less, as the clergy were doing, was an affront to God
and an unacceptable compromise.9
Although still a polite and quiet man, post-Egypt Niazi was a
virulent anti-communist and opponent of the monarchy, caught up
in the tailspin of the post-colonial world. In conversations with the
students at Kabul University he talked for hours about the Brotherhood,
Zionism and the rise of the Socialist Ba’ath parties in Syria and Iraq.
As a mark of respect they called him Professor—the name by which
he would find notoriety. He believed that rather than wait for an
Islamic state to be created, Muslims must cause ‘an earthquake inside
the position of the enemy,’ infiltrating the regime and collapsing
it from within.10  That did not necessarily require force; it could be
done ideologically, by making those in power change their ways. His
stance was nevertheless a radical departure from the accepted practice
of Afghanistan’s mainstream clerics and similar to Layeq’s view that
Afghanistan’s mullahs were asleep on the job. The communists and the
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Islamists had come to the same diagnosis about the problems afflicting
Afghanistan, with very different ideas about the cure. They would
soon be bitter enemies fighting for control over the country and its
bewitching capital.
***
The Kabul of the 1960s was not the city the world would come to
know in later years. Situated in a bowl-shaped valley carved out of
mountains and hills, the overwhelming majority of the population was
Muslim but there were also large communities of Sikhs and Hindus and
a smaller number of Jews who were free to worship as they pleased.
Afghans of all ethnicities lived there—though predominantly Tajiks,
they were joined by Pashtuns, Hazaras, Uzbeks and Turkmen. A river
meandered through the city and in summer months boys splashed
in its shallows, screaming with joy as they dived from wood and
stone bridges. Neither fast nor wide, the river would rise and gather
pace when the mountain snows melted, as it snaked eastwards and
broadened out before eventually reaching Pakistan. Men bathed in its
coolness and women stood on its banks washing clothes with bars of
laundry soap.
Some people thought Kabul got its name from Qabil, the Arabic
pronunciation of Cain, a son of Adam and Eve who was damned
by God to wander the earth for murdering his brother. During the
eighteenth century, as Kabul grew and flourished, it took over from
Kandahar as the nation’s capital, and by the mid-nineteenth century it
was a densely packed town of market stalls and houses crammed into
an area of under two square miles. Caravans from across Asia arrived
there to barter and trade amid the dust and the dirt. By the 1960s
Kabul had expanded significantly, absorbing surrounding villages and
farms; it was set on a path of ceaseless growth. The Old City was now
just one neighbourhood in a sprawling town, lying in the shadow of
a mountain and an ancient wall that local legend said was made of
human bones. Nearby was a marshland where royalty once roamed on
the backs of elephants, hunting wildfowl in the tall grass below. The
king’s main palace was just across the river, on the north bank.
Kabul was a city that assaulted the senses. Hustlers roamed the
streets with monkeys on chains, making the animals dance for money;
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elderly men, faces creased by a lifetime of hard labour and extreme

temperatures, filled shadowy rooms in back alleys where they gambled
on bird fights between quails or partridges; fortune-tellers read the
palms of widows; con-artists sold amulets to the desperate; and the
sick and lonely bent down at the graves of saints to ask for miracles.
Many of the women still chose to wear veils or burqas but others had
taken to short skirts and Western-style dress, strolling through the
more developed parts of town where they flirted with young men
in bell-bottomed trousers and open-necked shirts. Only a few of the
main roads were paved and on weekdays the traffic was a mixture of
donkey-drawn carts, bicycles, ornately decorated trucks, VW camper
vans and brand new Mercedes cars. Pedestrians spilled out into the
streets, walking where they pleased.
Most of the city’s houses were one or two floors high, made of
mud and with flat roofs. They were dark inside, designed to keep cool
in summer and warm in winter, with the privacy of the occupants
protected by a high exterior wall. Running water was in short supply
and the majority of the homes did not have electricity. There were
no television broadcasts in Afghanistan so people huddled around
the radio at night and mothers entertained their children with folk
stories they learned from their own parents. In late spring the evening
sky filled with brightly coloured kites, and in summer families
threw extravagant wedding parties. Drunk on wine and romance,
they danced to the rhythm of drums in gardens where grapes and
mulberries grew.
There was an other-worldliness about Kabul that separated it
from the major capitals of the East. It was not a place of magnificent
architecture or breathtaking monuments; instead, its beauty came
from the natural landscape that wrapped its arms around the city and
etched itself into the souls of Afghans. Home to 1.2 million people,
Kabul possessed a culture, history and an independence of spirit that
welcomed guests and despised intruders. While life in Afghanistan’s
capital could be kind, generous and resplendent with the best of human
nature, day to day existence was often harsh and unforgiving, especially
outside the wealthier neighbourhoods. Afghanistan in the 1960s was
marked by a clear urban-rural divide and growing inequality between
rich and poor. People from across the country washed up on Kabul’s
27
 NIGHT LETTERS

streets searching for work, travelling from remote villages untouched

by the central government. They found a city that at times resembled
an island being slowly consumed by turbulent seas. Once again the
empires of the world were looking at Afghanistan with covetous eyes.
***
Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century two imperial
powers, Britain and Russia, competed for political leverage over Kabul.
Their rivalry led to the first Anglo-Afghan war, from 1839 to 1842,
and one of the most infamous defeats in British military history, when
thousands of soldiers and their Indian camp followers were killed by
Afghan tribesmen who picked them off mercilessly on their retreat east.
Britain fought two more wars in a futile attempt to secure Afghanistan
as a buffer state that could protect its most prized asset, the Raj, from
its imperial rival, Russia. The last of these wars resulted in Afghan
independence and the ratification of the Durand Line, the border that
now divided Pashtun territory between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and
which so angered the communists. When the British Empire began to
crumble after World War Two and London’s influence overseas started
to diminish, Britain lost interest in Afghanistan. By the 1960s America
and the Soviet Union were the pre-eminent imperial forces and they
were equally intent on making the country a strategic outpost.
For any emerging superpower wanting to establish its political and
economic dominance, Afghanistan was an obvious target. To the west,
south and east, it shared borders with Iran and Pakistan, as well as
China; immediately to its north were the Uzbek, Turkmen and Tajik
Soviet Socialist Republics. In 1946 America seemed on course to win
the race for influence in the country, with the US company that built
the Hoover Dam hired to undertake a huge irrigation project in the
southern province of Helmand. Its progress was cut short when the
cost of the scheme spiralled out of control, straining relations between
the US and Afghanistan. Further damage was done in the 1950s when
America rejected a request for arms supplies from the king’s cousin,
brother-in-law and prime minister, Mohammed Daoud Khan. Daoud
was desperate to strengthen Afghanistan’s armed forces in order to
put pressure on Pakistan over the disputed border, the Durand Line.
But Washington was also trying to strengthen its ties with Islamabad
28
 EARTHQUAKES

and did not want to antagonise Pakistan, a more useful ally. Although
limited help continued in the years that followed, with the US building
Kandahar airport and hosting training courses for hundreds of Afghan
army officers, Daoud felt humiliated. Accordingly, he turned to the
Soviet Union, which had signed a symbolic treaty of friendship with
Afghanistan in 1921. A month after his arms request was rejected by
Washington he accepted Moscow’s offer of military assistance.
In the following year, 1956, Kabul signed a $100 million loan
agreement with the Soviets that resulted in the launch of development
projects including an airport at Bagram, north of Kabul, and two
hydroelectric plants. Daoud could still not forget the divided Pashtun
land and in 1960 he deployed soldiers disguised as tribesmen across
the frontier. He followed up with another, larger, incursion a year later.
This time the invading force was met by the growing might of Pakistan’s
military, including air strikes from newly supplied US-made aircraft. A
diplomatic crisis ensued and Islamabad blocked all cross-border trade
routes. Intent on escalation, Daoud wanted more political power to hit
back but resigned in 1963 after his brother-in-law, the king, refused.
Admired by the Afghan communists for his social liberalism and
Pashtun nationalism, Daoud had been the most powerful man in
government, head of state in all but name. His resignation gave the
monarch political space to proceed with his own constitutional
reform. As part of his modernisation drive, the king, Zahir Shah, saw
few dangers in the apparent warmth of the Soviet embrace. Included
in its development package, Moscow had agreed to construct the
Salang highway, connecting Kabul to northern Afghanistan and the
underbelly of the Soviet Union itself. The highway was a stunning
piece of engineering that featured a 1.7 mile-long tunnel cut through
a mountain at an altitude of more than 11,000 feet. Opened as work
was being done on the new democratic constitution, the king hailed it
as ‘a symbol of the friendly cooperation extended to us on numerous
occasions by our great northern neighbour.’11 The highway and the
airport at Bagram would later be used as routes into the country by
invading Soviet troops.
By the time of the Afghan communists’ founding meeting,
Moscow—not Washington—was the country’s main benefactor,
unveiling a long-term plan to redevelop Kabul. The capital was an
29
 NIGHT LETTERS

increasingly confused and divided city, a mixture of liberalism and

conservatism ill at ease with itself. The king’s reform programme had
given Layeq and his comrades the opportunity to manoeuvre against
the monarchy. It had also provided ammunition for the arguments of
Professor Niazi’s Islamists who feared the country was straying from
God’s path. For them, the spread of leftwing ideas in Afghanistan,
and Kabul’s growing cosmopolitanism, epitomised a malign outside
influence on the politics and culture of their nation. They saw Islam
itself as under threat.
As Professor Niazi began to promulgate his ideas, men and women
from the Afghan ruling class happily socialised with their foreign
counterparts, blissfully dismissive of the unrest filtering into the
streets around them.12 There was always something happening in
Kabul: an art exhibition, a concert, a cultural exchange. Afghanistan
was on the old Silk Road and the cheap hashish and opium made it a
popular destination for hippies and drifters in search of the spiritual
enlightenment and quality drugs they couldn’t find at home. Cinemas
in the capital routinely hosted English and Russian-speaking audiences,
entertaining them with films like Pillow Talk, starring Rock Hudson
and Doris Day. An airline offered flights to Peshawar in Pakistan for
$20 return, taking out an advert that showed a man dressed in a suit
and bow tie standing beside a blonde-haired woman in a sleeveless top,
skirt and no headscarf.13 Beneath all this, however, lay a simmering
undercurrent of violence.
***
In the autumn of 1965 the first parliamentary elections were held,
in keeping with the new constitution. Political parties were still not
legal so the communists put forward several members as nominally
independent candidates. Noor Mohammed Taraki, their leader, ran
unsuccessfully for his home district of Andar in Ghazni, while Layeq
suffered defeat standing for Pul-e Khumri in Baghlan. But three other
candidates, including the deputy leader Babrak Karmal, won.14 They
began to antagonise the government almost immediately, accusing it of
corruption and nepotism. On 24 October 1965, the prime minister-
designate, Mohammed Yousuf, was due to present his newly appointed
cabinet for approval at the parliament, close to the Soviet embassy.
30
 EARTHQUAKES

Under the instigation of Karmal, leftwing students forced parliament

to adjourn, filling the spectators’ gallery and the floor of the lower
house. When a closed session was scheduled for the following day,
Karmal urged the protestors to ‘return every day until our rights have
been granted.’
At 7am the next day, 25 October, the demonstrations began. They
were still under way when, just after 5pm, government troops opened
fire. At least three protestors were killed and dozens wounded, but
instead of breaking the protestors’ spirit, the shootings simply added
to the sudden sense of crisis. Schools were closed for several days
and the prime minister resigned, replaced by Mohammed Hashim
Maiwandwal, a former ambassador to Britain, the US and Pakistan.
Still furious, on 4 November students held a memorial rally on the
campus of Kabul University. Fearing that their anger could spiral out
of control, Maiwandwal turned up at the gathering and expressed
regret for the protestors’ deaths on behalf of himself and the king.
He agreed in principle that a student union could be opened and
announced that all students who had been in jail were now released.
The crowd hoisted him onto their shoulders in triumph, but the joy
did not last. In late November students protested again, this time
staging a strike demanding the lowering of pass marks and a relaxation
of class attendance rules. The demands were partially accepted by
the university.15
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar came to remember these events as ‘the start
of the protests in the country,’16 ushering in a long period of unrest
that would propel his rise to power. The demonstrations were an early
victory for the communists, adding to their credibility as spokesmen
for Kabul’s increasingly agitated and rebellious youth. For the Islamists,
they were another sign that their religion’s rightful place at the centre
of Afghan society was under threat. Professor Niazi, their leader, was
a gifted theorist, not a man of action. As a student, he had watched
helplessly as Egypt was rocked by political turmoil that reverberated
throughout the Middle East. Now he found himself speechless once
again. It would require younger, more courageous men than himself to
take the fight to his ideological enemies.

31
 2

A NEW WORLD

Professor Niazi knew he was not well suited to lead a revolution. Tall,
clean shaven, bespectacled and with thinning hair, he had unusually
white skin and his friends joked that he looked like a foreigner.1 He
was a scholar rather than a fighter, but he used that to his advantage.
After returning from Cairo and assuming his teaching post at Kabul
University, he had risen to become dean of Islamic Studies, a prestigious
job he enjoyed. The role gave him the ideal platform to introduce the
teachings of radical Islam to a generation of young Afghans.
Kabul University was formally established in 1946, with faculties
for medicine, law, science and letters spread across the capital. It took
another five years for Professor Niazi’s department—commonly known
as the Sharia faculty—to open. In the early 1960s the university was
expanded and brought together on a single site, built with US aid money.
The new campus symbolised the king’s aspirations for the country:
pine trees lined its wide thoroughfares, giving it an air of tranquility in
the otherwise bustling city; American and European academics taught
alongside their Afghan counterparts, while girls and boys mingled freely
in Western dress; beards and shalwar kameez were forbidden; poetry
and music encouraged. The Sharia faculty, however, was something of
an ideological outpost. Located just inside the northern entrance, near
one of the mountains that split Kabul like a jagged tooth, it stood alone
as a defender of conservative values. Far smaller than most of the other
33
 NIGHT LETTERS

faculties, in 1967 it had 222 male students. Women were not allowed
to enrol in its classes until a year later.2
Although the unified campus was designed to streamline
Afghanistan’s education system, its convenient location on a single site
turned it into a centre of political fervour. For the first time in the
nation’s history, young people from across the country could easily
mix with each other, sharing ideas and finding out about life beyond
their own villages and towns.
Students who followed Sulaiman Layeq’s brand of communism
were not the only threat to Professor Niazi’s vision. A vocal minority
of their friends adhered to an even more extreme version of Marxism,
finding hope in the brutal social and economic reforms of Mao
Zedong’s regime in China. They in turn argued with classmates
who shared their antipathy towards Islam but advocated a different
solution: full democracy and closer ties with the US. These divergent
beliefs were more than just abstract theories to the young men of the
university; they were ways to fight for a better world. Across campus
there was a feeling of unbridled, rebellious optimism. Professor Niazi
exploited this to the full. Wary of catching the attention of the king’s
still draconian security forces, he adopted a methodical and diligent
approach to fomenting sedition. From his top floor office, he preached
against the government, cajoling and encouraging his impressionable
students to take a stand, while always careful to avoid any direct
confrontation.3 Inspired by his message, in 1969 a group of young men
formed the Muslim Youth Organisation (Sazman-e Jawanan-e Muslimin).
Its driving force was an itinerate orphan, whose fragile physique and
clean-cut features belied his innate leadership skills and thirst for
violent revolution.
***
Habib-ur-Rahman was destined for a short and extraordinary life.
Born in 1951 in the province of Kapisa, 40 miles north of Kabul,
his early childhood mirrored that of most rural Afghans. His family
and neighbours knew nothing of Islamism, communism or the Cold
War. Those who could read did so by the light of candles or kerosene
lanterns. Their mosques were decrepit mud-brick buildings and
their roads were unpaved. The harsh environment was also strikingly
34
 A NEW WORLD

beautiful. Snow covered the high ground in late spring. When the
weather began to warm, flocks of birds passed through Kapisa on long
migratory journeys from South Asia to the Soviet Union. The arrival
of Siberian cranes, flamingoes, Pallas’s gulls and sparrows marked the
changing of the seasons and the passing of the years. Surrounded by
such magnificence, a belief in God was not only understandable, it
was logical.
Habib-ur-Rahman was from the district of Nijrab, which is divided
into two main valleys, one large, the other small. An ethnic Tajik, he
came from the village of Juma Khail, in what locals simply called the
Big Valley. He was one of seven children, the youngest of five sons.
His mother, Noor Jahan, died when he was two and his father, Sefat
Khan, passed away three years later, after which he was raised by a
brother and a sister-in-law. Habib-ur-Rahman means Beloved Friend
of the Merciful, and it was an appropriate name for a boy who was
smart, observant, innovative and impressively mature. The organiser
among his group of childhood friends, he was a sensitive soul who
remarked that the birds were praying to God when they sang. Had he
stayed in Kapisa, there is every chance he would have become one of
the most respected men in his village, married off at a young age as a
much sought-after groom for any bride to be. But he was destined for
a higher calling.
When Habib-ur-Rahman was still a child, his uncle helped his
brother get a job as the government’s deputy chief of intelligence for
the north of Afghanistan, based in the city of Mazar-e Sharif. Although
the posting was less impressive than it sounded, it provided steady work
and paid a reasonable wage. Habib-ur-Rahman’s brother was raising
him at the time and decided they should move north together. Mazar
was a vibrant city of mysticism, trade and history, far removed from
the insularity of rural Kapisa. According to a local legend, it was also
the burial place of Ali, the Prophet Mohammed’s cousin and son-in-
law. Since the fifteenth century a blue tiled shrine had commemorated
the site where Ali’s grave was said to be, attracting pilgrims from
across the land who turned up to beg for money and ask for miracles,
embracing the Sufism that had long been part of Afghanistan’s heritage.
Mazar remained Habib-ur-Rahman’s home for several years until
he and his brother moved a short distance south to Samangan. Then,
35
 NIGHT LETTERS

in 1967, aged sixteen, he joined one of his other siblings in Kabul,

entering Naderi High School in the eleventh grade.4 His move to the
nation’s capital came at a pivotal juncture in the history of modern
Islam: in June of that year Israel routed the armies of Egypt, Jordan
and Syria, taking just six days to occupy the West Bank, Gaza and
the Golan Heights. The conflict reshaped the Middle East, creating a
climate of despair and anger that gave birth to a new generation of
radical Arab Muslims who blamed the outcome on their own secular,
leftist governments. A similar atmosphere was gradually permeating
Kabul, where the communists had captured the imagination of many
of the city’s youth.
By the time Habib-ur-Rahman arrived, Marxist propaganda was
everywhere. Some of the material was translated by the Soviets but most
came via a communist movement in neighbouring Iran. Copies of Das
Kapital and the works of Maxim Gorky were widely available and small
demonstrations by leftwing students were a regular occurrence. The
communists had even been publishing a newspaper that claimed to be
the ‘democratic voice of the people’. Banned by the attorney general’s
office following pressure from religious members of parliament,
during its brief print run in 1966 it vowed to stop ‘the boundless
agonies of the oppressed,’ demanded land reform and criticised ‘the
feudal system which dominates Afghan society’.5 Professor Niazi’s
Brotherhood-inspired doctrine was also filtering from the university
into the capital’s schools and Habib-ur-Rahman listened intently to the
arguments of the Islamists and the communists, biding his time for the
right moment to speak out. He did not have long to wait.
The precocious young orphan had just graduated from high school
in 1968 when people across the world rose up in revolt against the
international order, with mass protests breaking out in cities from
Paris to Islamabad. Marxist Palestinian militants hijacked an Israeli
passenger plane and forced it to land in Algiers. In Vietnam, meanwhile,
the Tet Offensive proved once and for all that US troops were fighting
a war they could never hope to win. The unrest in Afghanistan was
not as spectacular but it was just as significant: dozens of workers’
strikes broke out across the country, from a wool mill in Kandahar to
a gold mine in Takhar; leftist students and teachers took to the streets
in Nimroz and Paktia.6
36
 A NEW WORLD

As the civil unrest intensified at home and abroad, Habib-ur-

Rahman enrolled to study engineering at Kabul Polytechnic. From his
living quarters in room number fifty-four, dormitory block one, he
began to get involved with the newly formed MuslimYouth.7 Although
the polytechnic was only a year old, it was already a hive of communist
activity, with seventeen Soviet professors working there to help train
Afghans for jobs in government.8 Habib-ur-Rahman was stunned at
the extent of the Russians’ influence. No longer content to sit idly
by, listening to the theoretical arguments of his fellow students, he
shuttled back and forth between the polytechnic and the university,
two miles away, rallying intelligent, disenfranchised young men like
himself to stand up for Islam.
***
The Muslim Youth started out as an amorphous group, with no firm
organisational structure or long-term plan for seizing power. Activists
held several small meetings in Kabul and, in the words of one of them,
came to the conclusion that ‘neutrality did not have any meaning’9
in the fraught and exciting political climate of the time. They would
defeat the communists and spread their own brand of radical Islam
across Afghanistan. In an early signal of their intent, the young Islamists
turned a dormitory room that other students had been using for music
concerts into a mosque. One of the few places in which they felt at
ease, it soon doubled as their de facto headquarters, giving them the
space they needed to plan how to fight back against the growing Soviet
and US influence in their country. Then, on 3 April 1969, a collection
of eight activists held their most important meeting yet. It was a rainy
night and the university campus was unusually quiet as they huddled
together in the Faculty of Education. Although Professor Niazi opted
not to attend the meeting, the students had his informal blessing.
Drawing on his teaching, they composed a statement calling on the
youth of Kabul to ‘tighten their belts’ and prepare for ‘Islamic change.’
Signed on behalf of the ‘MuslimYouth,’ the statement was what Afghans
referred to as a night letter—a scrawled threat or proclamation that
seemed to embody the darkness in which it was delivered. Night letters
would become a hallmark of the Muslim Youth and their successors in
Hekmatyar’s Hizb-e Islami. Nailed to walls and the doors of mosques
37
 NIGHT LETTERS

in villages across the country, or pushed under the cracks of wooden

gates at the homes of men earmarked for assassination, they were used
to spread news and sow fear.
The Muslim Youth typed up their first night letter and reprinted
it with the help of a friend who worked for the UN, with copies
distributed across the campus and in schools and markets throughout
Kabul.10 News of this new movement spread in the days that followed
and Habib-ur-Rahman, who was not at the 3 April meeting, joined
what quickly became a core group of twelve young men, six of
them students of Islamic law.11 Ever-mindful of being too directly
associated with civil disobedience, Professor Niazi continued to keep
his distance. He had already made his biggest contribution to the cause
by introducing the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideas to Afghanistan, and
although he would always be on hand to offer advice, activists fifteen
or twenty years his junior were now taking over.
The man who led them was one of the professor’s students and,
though unrelated, he shared his surname. Abdul Rahim Niazi was
born in Pashtun Kot in the northern province of Faryab, on the
Soviet border. Humble yet charismatic, he spoke Pashto, Dari, Uzbek
and Arabic. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he became one of the
most vocal critics of communism in Afghanistan. He was a student
in the Sharia faculty and was there on the rainy April night when
the Muslim Youth issued its decisive first statement. Cerebral and a
strong performer in campus debates, he soon established himself as
the Islamist movement’s foremost member. Like Professor Niazi, his
elder and namesake, Abdul Rahim regarded Islam as the blueprint for
government and was adamant that the king’s regime was not following
Islamic law. Knowledgable in Sharia, he was able to present his case in
a clear, reasoned and persuasive manner to other students.
Not all the Muslim Youth had the rhetorical skill to effectively
counter their opponents on the left. Their hostility towards Marxism
was instinctive, coming from a deeply ingrained belief that they
must defend their religion. Abdul Rahim astutely realised that the
communists had valid arguments and needed to be fought on an
intellectual, as well as a practical, level. He agreed with their case that
inequality was increasing in Afghan society, acknowledging that on
this ‘the Muslims and communists have little difference.’ But he was
38
 A NEW WORLD

convinced that the problem could be solved using the system of Zakat,
one of the five pillars of Islam, which requires Muslims who have the
financial means to give 2.5 per cent of their net worth to the poor.12
In insisting that the rich were obliged to help those less fortunate than
themselves, he invoked the Qur’an’s promise that the righteous will go
to paradise ‘because of the good they did before: sleeping only little at
night, praying at dawn for God’s forgiveness, giving a rightful share of
their wealth to the beggar and the deprived.’13
Unlike Professor Niazi,   Abdul Rahim was not afraid of
confrontation. One evening he temporarily assumed the role of imam
at the makeshift mosque in the university dormitory, leading the final
prayer of the day, ‘Isha. Dressed in old clothes, which were riddled
with holes, he cut an unlikely figurehead. ‘Surely God hasn’t given us
this man as our leader?’ one of the student worshippers muttered to
himself. But Abdul Rahim spoke passionately, telling his audience they
must go and disrupt a communist meeting taking place nearby. He left
the mosque and burst into the meeting hall, striding up to the stage:
‘Now it is my turn. I want to speak,’ he told the crowd. He began in
the fashion of all pious Muslims, reciting the opening words of the
Qur’an, ‘In the name of God, the Lord of Mercy, the Giver of Mercy!’
The communists shouted him down, but his defiant presence unnerved
them and they ended the meeting soon afterwards. Confident of more
success in future, Abdul Rahim turned his attention to the tougher
battles he knew lay ahead.14
The prospect of victory for the Islamists wasn’t as far-fetched as it
appeared.While the communists were better organised and considerably
more experienced than the Muslim Youth, an internal power struggle
had already begun to divide and distract them. The cliques around
the two main personalities in the party, Noor Mohammed Taraki and
Babrak Karmal, had become entrenched, splitting the left into distinct
factions. Taraki, the rumoured Soviet spy who had once worked at the
US embassy, led a group called Khalq (The Masses). Karmal, the stern
former political prisoner, was head of another bloc named Parcham
(Banner or Flag), which on 14 March 1968 began publishing a new,
self-titled newspaper with Sulaiman Layeq as the editor.
When another round of parliamentary elections was scheduled a
year later, Layeq decided to run again despite his previous failure. In
39
 NIGHT LETTERS

the build-up to the vote a night letter was sent to his father, Khalifa
Mullah Abdul Ghani. Covering two sides of paper, at first glance the
note could have come from a relative wishing to impart some family
news or a member of a nearby village seeking religious guidance. The
blue handwriting was neat and the introduction, ‘To His Excellency
the Respected Khalifa Sahib,’ suggested that whoever sent it was
brought up the right way.  After luring the old man into a false sense
of security, the authors quickly shifted tone; the letter warned that
Layeq was straying from his father’s wise guidance and ‘deriding
Islam.’ A list of evidence was given to support this claim: Parcham, the
newspaper Layeq edited, published propaganda ‘based on the orders
of the apostate Soviets;’ he was also guilty of dismissing Islam as a
product of poverty that is used to justify oppression. Most seriously of
all, Layeq was accused of denying that God was the creator of all nature
and therefore denying the existence of God. ‘He does not count as a
Muslim anymore,’ the letter said. It was signed ‘With respect from a
number of Kabul scholars,’ but Layeq was convinced that the authors
were in fact two founding members of the Muslim Youth. One was
Saifuddin Nasratyar, an engineering student from Baghlan, where
Layeq’s father lived. The other was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.15
***
Hekmatyar hailed from a long line of nomadic herders who in
generations past would wander from southern Afghanistan to Dera
Ismail Khan in what was then India. They moved with the weather,
staying ahead of the summer’s stifling heat and the winter’s biting
cold. His mother, Kimya, was from Qarabagh in Ghazni, a desolate
area of deserts, plains and mountains. His father, Abdul Qader Khan,
came from Zabul, one of Afghanistan’s poorest regions, but made his
reputation as a successful businessman in the northern province of
Kunduz. It was there, in the district of Imam Sahib, that Hekmatyar
was born in September or October 1948, the same year his parents
settled in the area. They gave him the name Gulbuddin, Flower of
Religion. Although Hekmatyar was a Pashtun from the Ghilzai tribe,
he mingled freely with local Uzbeks who lived in his village,Warta Buz.
As the second of five brothers and with three sisters, he grew up in a
typically large Afghan family and remembered his childhood fondly.
40
 A NEW WORLD

His father was an important man in the community, often invited to

meet visiting dignitaries from the government; he owned a large tract
of land, two gristmills and three trucks. By Afghan standards the family
was wealthy.
While attending school, Hekmatyar had private lessons with a
religious scholar16 until he was selected to attend the military academy
in Kabul—an honour reserved for the most talented or best connected
students. He studied at the academy through the sixth, seventh and
eighth grades before leaving in controversial circumstances that he put
down to a set of disputed exam results. He ran away to one of his
sisters who lived in Zabul, and eventually his family agreed he could
return north. Back in Kunduz, he entered Shir Khan High School in
the provincial capital. He later maintained that his political evolution
began there, when he was still a teenager.
Hekmatyar recalled being in the tenth grade when an influx of new
students arrived from Kabul. They were a window into a different
world, wearing the latest clothing, sporting fashionable haircuts and
using terms like ‘feudalism’ that were alien to most school children
in Kunduz. One of them, Asadullah, was the nephew of Hafizullah
Amin, a prominent communist. Hekmatyar would remember how he
spent an entire day arguing with Asadullah at school; they continued
their debate on the way home, walking together to a house in town
where Hekmatyar was renting a small room. As they parted company,
Asadullah asked if it was possible to prove God’s existence. Religious
belief was taken for granted in Afghanistan and Hekmatyar was
stunned that anyone could be so crass. The two nearly came to blows
until other students intervened. ‘After that moment I made a decision
to struggle,’ Hekmatyar recalled.
The transformation he described was akin to an epiphany, a
sudden realisation that he should strive for social change ‘in an Islamic
framework,’ causing ‘the collapse of the regime.’ Until his debate with
Asadullah, he thought the communists were only against the monarchy
and inequality; now, to his shock, he understood they were also against
religion. He remembered having no one to guide him, no like-minded
friends or political tracts to show him the way. For inspiration, he
looked to a story in the Qur’an that tells how Moses became involved
in a dispute between an Egyptian and an Israelite. After striking the
41
 NIGHT LETTERS

Egyptian and killing him, Moses repented to God but the pharaoh
ruling Egypt sentenced him to death. Moses fled and was eventually
made a prophet, whereupon he received divine orders to return to
the pharaoh’s court and invite him to worship the one true God. On
doing so, the pharaoh denounced him as a madman and a sorcerer.
Challenged to prove his spiritual powers, Moses threw his staff to the
floor and turned it into a snake. The pharaoh still refused to believe
he was a prophet, so Moses escaped and eventually reached the sea.
Hunted down, he parted the waves, drowning the pharaoh and the
pursuing Egyptian army behind him.The pharaoh proclaimed his belief
in God as he was about to die, but to no avail: his death would forever
be a warning to future generations.
Hekmatyar interpreted the story as a lesson to stand up for his
beliefs, whatever the cost. From this point on, the more he saw and
heard, the more he hated the communists. Once he was on his way
to play football with some classmates when he passed the house of a
well-known leftwing activist. He could hear music coming from inside
and his friends told him women often danced there and alcohol was
regularly served. If this was how they recruited the young, he knew he
had chosen the side of the righteous.
Not everyone believed Hekmatyar’s account of his transformation
into a radical Islamist, however. Many years later, when his power was
at its height and Washington was beginning to fear him, a report by the
Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare in the US House
of Representatives would posit a theory that he ‘became actively
involved in radical leftist politics and conspiratorial activities’ while
at the military academy in Kabul. It claimed Hekmatyar was expelled
from the academy but continued to work as a communist activist
and ‘was ordered to penetrate a cell of the Muslim Brotherhood’ to
discredit the Islamist cause.17 From there his career as a secret agent
took off.  The report went on to state that Hekmatyar and other senior
Hizb-e Islami members may have been part of ‘a crucial component in
a Soviet master deception operation against the US.’18
Exactly how or where these ideas originated is unclear. Layeq, the
leftwing ideologue, also claimed Hekmatyar was in the communist
party and was dismissed for ‘moral corruption.’ Hizb-e Islami would
always deny that its leader was ever a Marxist, and the accusations did
42
 A NEW WORLD

not cause lasting damage, as most Islamists knew it was not unusual for
friends and colleagues to show an interest in communism when they
first became politically active. Both groups shared the same sense of
idealism and injustice, but the Muslim revolutionaries usually moved
on when they decided leftwing thinking was incompatible with their
religious beliefs.
Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry were Hekmatyar’s strongest
subjects at high school and he was promoted straight from the tenth
to twelfth grade before breezing through the university entrance
exams. By the time he returned to Kabul for his higher education he
was a committed Islamist. He was also married, having wed in his late
teens at the behest of his father. Before university, he enrolled at an
engineering institute in Kabul, where he shared a dormitory room with
seven students. Next door was Saifuddin Nasratyar, who would listen,
impressed, to their debates through holes in the thin wooden wall. He
and Hekmatyar got to know each other soon afterwards, when they
both entered the Faculty of Engineering at Kabul University in 1969.
They quickly became close friends and both attended the Muslim
Youth’s founding meeting that April.19
There was no firm evidence that Hekmatyar and Nasratyar wrote
the threatening night letter sent to Layeq’s father in the run up to
the 1969 elections; nonetheless, the subjects, terminology and style
were extraordinarily consistent with the rhetoric of both men. In that
same year—his first at university—Hekmatyar authored a 149-page
book entitled The Priority of Sense Over Matter. Split into four chapters,
it was given to fellow Islamists on one condition: they must use
carbon paper to make three copies—one for themselves, the other
two for distribution. In the preface, Hekmatyar sounded eerily like
the Brotherhood’s Egyptian founder, Hassan al-Banna. He warned that
‘old colonialists’ were using political, economic and cultural means
to commandeer the country, instead of relying on military force. ‘For
this purpose they are spending millions of rubles, pounds, dollars and
yuan,’ he said. Hekmatyar accused some Afghan writers and workers of
being slaves to outside powers and ‘attacking Islam.’ He described his
book as ‘a message’ to the communists, who denied the existence of
God. By his own admission, the text was partly an effort to provide an
Islamist counterweight to the work of the German philosopher Georg
43
 NIGHT LETTERS

Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose ideas had influenced Marxism.20 In

the first chapter, ‘Physics,’ Hekmatyar sought to demonstrate that
Islam was not against science.The second chapter, ‘Biology,’ referenced
the seventeenth-century Italian researcher Francesco Redi, who went
against the prevailing scientific wisdom of his era when he showed that
parasites are not produced spontaneously but come from eggs; for
Hekmatyar, this was more proof that life had to originate somewhere
and its source was God. The third chapter, ‘Philosophy,’ dismissed the
argument that God does not exist because he cannot be seen: ‘No
one is able to see gravity,’ he wrote. In the fourth and final chapter,
‘Sociology,’ Hekmatyar criticised materialists who claimed that all
ideas and beliefs are a product of social and economic conditions.21
The similarities between the book and the threatening letter were
too striking to be mere coincidence. Layeq had emerged as a prime
target for the Muslim Youth’s anger because the young Islamists knew
that, as a respected tribal and religious leader, he was well positioned to
win the trust of Afghans and turn them onto communism. His Islamic
education also meant he could formulate arguments about the Qur’an
that stressed its compatibility with Marxism. Hekmatyar was quick to
identify these attributes as a unique danger to the Muslim Youth. After
the Islamist group was established in 1969, he travelled to the north
of Afghanistan and stopped for the night at Nasratyar’s family home in
Baghlan. The next day was Eid and he went to a nearby mosque where
he gave a forty-five-minute speech to the assembled worshippers,
including Layeq’s father. In Afghanistan it was extremely rare for a
young man to possess the confidence and nerve to lecture elders, but
Hekmatyar did not hold back. His fervour and Brotherhood-style call
to arms shocked the worshippers, who were much more accustomed
to a quieter, more moderate brand of Islam. At the end of the speech, a
cleric stood up and announced that Hekmatyar would never be allowed
to speak in the mosque again.
***
Layeq ignored the night letter and stepped down as Parcham editor to
run for parliament, only to fall short yet again. Convinced his own
failings could not be to blame, he attributed his defeats in both the
1965 and 1969 elections to fraud. In truth, though, his talents lay
44
 A NEW WORLD

elsewhere; Layeq was a writer and a thinker, not a populist politician.

His sharp tongue and keen intellect won him many admirers on the
left, but also provoked outrage among the Islamists. Although he liked
to say that ‘anybody who talks about himself is a devil,’ he could be
conceited and cocksure, bragging that as a young student he was so far
ahead of his classmates he had no competition.22 It was this unshakable
self-confidence—bordering on arrogance—that would leave him
dangerously exposed at various stages of his political career. For Layeq,
however, the risks of being a communist in a god-fearing country were
part of its attraction.
Rather than dwell on his second successive election defeat, after the
parliamentary campaign of 1969 he returned to edit Parcham. In April
1970 the editorial board held a routine evening meeting at its offices
in Kabul’s Gulzar market to discuss an upcoming commemorative
edition, marking the centenary of Lenin’s birth. Layeq had just come
back from a trip to the east of the country when he sat down with
the four other board members. Three of them were co-founders of
the communist movement: Babrak Karmal, Sultan Ali Keshtmand
and Hassan Bareq Shafiee, while the fourth, Mir Akbar Khyber, was
a prominent figure behind the scenes. One piece of writing triggered
a long debate. A poem written by Shafiee celebrated Lenin using the
word ‘doroud,’ a term denoting a range of invocations used by Muslims
when praying for the Prophet Mohammed. Eulogising him for creating
a ‘new world’, it could not have been more provocative. After the
editorial board approved the poem’s publication, Layeq pleaded for
a last minute alteration. ‘Within a week you will see a reaction. It’s a
very big mistake, let me change it,’ he said, but the board went ahead
regardless.23 The anniversary edition hit the market on 22 April 1970,
and almost immediately a few hundred protestors gathered outside the
Ministry of Information, shouting that those responsible were infidels.
Clerics and elders then led a demonstration at Pul-e Khishti mosque in
town, with protestors coming from across the country.
Rather than panic, Layeq sought to take advantage of the situation.
With help from communist sympathisers in the secret police, he
instructed activists to infiltrate the demonstration and turn the
protestors’ anger against the government, whose printing press
Parcham had used to publish the paper.24 The plan worked: when the
45
 NIGHT LETTERS

protestors directed their ire towards the state, the security services
dispersed the crowd; Parcham was shut down, but the incident severely
damaged the king’s reputation and marked a serious escalation in the
battle between the communists and Islamists.
Although the Muslim Youth were not behind the demonstration,
they were unhappy at the ease with which the security forces broke it
up. In the aftermath, Hekmatyar and the other young Islamists decided
they must get more actively involved in confronting the communists.
When a Soviet propaganda film was shown in the polytechnic, Habib-
ur-Rahman deemed it blasphemous and threw a shoe at the screen;
in another incident a copy of the Qur’an was dropped from an upper
floor of a university dormitory, leaving the pages torn and scattered
on the snow-covered ground below. The communists were blamed—
something they denied—and the accusation galvanised the Islamists.
Hekmatyar regarded the incident as ‘very painful,’ with some Muslim
students even breaking down in tears, shocked at the disrespect their
religion had been shown. In response, Muslim Youth activists staged
a protest in front of the university rector’s office. Professor Niazi’s
acolytes were finally putting his beliefs into action.25

46
 3

‘THE ANCIENT ENEMY’

The great changes sweeping through Afghanistan did not extend to the
king’s lavish lifestyle. At the dawn of the 1970s, Zahir Shah divided
his time between several palaces, listened to classical Western music,
subscribed to French journals, played bridge and tennis, and went duck
hunting on the occasional Friday. His wife of almost forty years enjoyed
interior decorating.1 Insulated from the trials of their impoverished
nation, the royal family wallowed in resplendent denial, unperturbed
by the growing opposition around them. The king ascended to the
throne in 1933 following the murder of his father, Nadir Shah, and
although he was socially and politically progressive, he nurtured the
sense of entitlement that came with his position. He had a reputation
as a dilettante and a ladies’ man; rumours circulated through town that
his courtiers were cruising the streets of Kabul, looking for beautiful
young women to entertain him. Aloof and naive, the constitution he
invested so much hope in would prove to be his undoing, giving his
opponents the platform they needed to challenge his regime.
The Afghan constitution decreed that ‘the king is not accountable
and shall be respected by all.’2 To the Muslim Youth, this contravened
the very tenets of Islam; they were in no doubt that he was taghut,
a false idol and a tyrant. Having mobilised at Kabul’s university and
polytechnic, the young Islamists began to stage regular protests at
Zarnigar Park, less than half a mile from the monarch’s main residence
47
 NIGHT LETTERS

in the capital. The park was another symbol of the rapid progress that
had transformed the city over the last decade. Co-designed by foreign
landscapers and opened in December 1964, it was promoted as one of
Kabul’s new tourist attractions. Houses, shops and a communal bath
had all been demolished to make way for the grass, flower beds, trees
and benches.3 The park was named after a building that once hosted
independence negotiations between Afghan and British officials, and
for the Muslim Youth it was the perfect stage; located near the city’s
bustling central market and flanked by busy roads, a hotel, a school and
government ministries, the park gave them a ready-made audience of
hundreds of passers-by. The young revolutionaries met regularly there,
waving hand-painted banners and shouting slogans: ‘Death to western
and eastern colonialists! Death to foreign-linked groups! We want an
Islamic regime! Islam will solve all our problems!’4 Habib-ur-Rahman,
Hekmatyar and Saifuddin Nasratyar gave long, unscripted speeches
that delved into politics, religion and history, their words rising in a
crescendo of emotion as teenage couples picnicked on the lawns and
old men rested in the shade. Even Afghans who disagreed with their
arguments were impressed with the passion they showed. The three
leading activists spoke simply but powerfully, mixing the colloquial
language of the street with the more formal dialect of the mosque.
In doing so, they were able to articulate the hopes and fears of their
generation in a way the clerical establishment was not.5
Nasratyar could manipulate a crowd like a conductor leading an
orchestra. Men and women gathered to listen to him, entranced by
the sight and sound of someone so young so brazenly challenging the
combined strength of the government and the Soviet Union. The blare
of car horns from the chaotic city streets faded into the background
as he poured forth a stream of invective and the audience yelled ‘God
is greatest’ in reply. In one speech he warned that the regime had sold
its soul to Moscow, ‘but the Muslims realise these people don’t have
prestige, don’t have honour.’ The nation was being cheated and the
time would come when the Soviets showed their true colours. ‘We
made friends with a bear and one day the bear will hit us in the head
with a stone because it is ignorant. The bear has looted our resources,’
he said. Nasratyar believed it was forbidden to work with anyone
who questioned the sanctity of God. He denounced fellow Afghans
48
 THE ANCIENT ENEMY

who claimed to be politically neutral: ‘Muslims have a responsibility

to struggle, they can never refuse it,’ he shouted, whipping up the
crowd into a frenzy. ‘We say the Soviets are exploiting us, the Soviets
are infidels, the Soviets are atheists,’ he went on. ‘Death to the
Soviets!’ roared the audience in reply, their shouts audible inside the
nearby palace.6
The park was not just a focal point for the Islamists. All the
emerging political groups of the era congregated there, often turning
up on the same day and occupying different corners of the grounds as
they competed for the attention of curious onlookers.The communists
issued radical speeches on the themes of inequality and imperialism,
using a combination of anger and mordant humour. On one occasion
they took along a dog as a prop, having shaved its fur to resemble
the king’s bald head—a clear insult in Afghan culture, which regards
dogs as unclean. Sulaiman Layeq was a frequent speaker, as was the
Marxist MP Babrak Karmal, who had led those first bloody protests
in parliament years earlier. Maoists, nationalists and liberals held their
own rallies; some of them were supporters of the ex-prime minister,
Mohammed Hashim Maiwandwal, who resigned from his post in
1967 and was now campaigning for greater accountability in politics.
Hekmatyar had no sympathy for any of his rivals. He particularly
despised those who called themselves democrats, regarding the term
as alien to Islam and Afghanistan.
As the speeches intensified and the crowds grew in size, tempers
inevitably frayed and violence erupted. On one occasion, the Muslim
Youth’s leader, Abdul Rahim Niazi, joined Hekmatyar in ordering their
acolytes to forcefully disrupt a communist gathering at the park. Their
opponents that day included a physically imposing medical student
named Najib. A protégé of Layeq, whom he regarded as his leader, Najib
was known as a skilled debater among his peers; he was also built like
a wrestler and loved to fight. After confronting the men he mockingly
called ‘Ikhwanis,’ in reference to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood,
he was stopped in his tracks when one of them pulled out a pistol
and threatened to shoot him. But Najib was not easily deterred. He
would rise to power and notoriety in the 1980s, first as the head of the
state’s intelligence service, then as president of Afghanistan, when he
was better known as Dr Najib or Dr Najibullah.7
49
 NIGHT LETTERS

Layeq was too astute to get directly involved in any violence, and
preferred instead to influence events behind the scenes. This approach,
which he developed over time, owed much to his friendship with Najib, a
brutally efficient enforcer who did the communist’s dirty work for him.
While the Muslim Youth regarded Najib as a man of infantile rage who
dumbly repeated whatever Layeq said, the truth was more complex.
Najib was only a thug when violence served his best interests; at other
times, for example when performing in front of an audience or speaking
at a party meeting, he could be warm and jovial. This ability to be both
gregarious and violently intimidating unnerved some communists,
who privately whispered about him being unhinged—a ‘child of the
streets’ let loose like a firework in a crowded room to cause chaos on
the political scene.8 Their epithets served as a backhanded compliment.
Najib was perfectly able to control his anger and knew exactly when
to switch between the two contrasting sides of his personality. Layeq
recognised those abilities and felt a deep platonic love for him.
Throughout the early 1970s, the Islamists and the communists used
their ideologies to justify violence that often took the form of nothing
more sophisticated than gang warfare. Najib was at the heart of this
bloodletting: he climbed onto the entrance gates of high schools,
wielding a club to provoke pious students as they left class; he shouted
and brawled on the university campus; and acted as a crowd control
bouncer at Zarnigar Park. The Muslim Youth struck back, assaulting
leftist students as they wandered Kabul’s avenues. In one clash, an
Islamist activist stabbed and wounded Najib’s younger brother Sadiq.
The Muslim Youth were determined to be aggressive rather than
copy the meek capitulation of the clerics and elders who protested
against the inflammatory pro-Lenin poem in 1970. When another
newspaper—this time run by a democratic nationalist—printed an
article criticising the MuslimYouth, Hekmatyar stormed into its offices
with five other activists, hurling insults at the editor and warning him
not to push his luck.9
***
While Professor Niazi surveyed the Muslim Youth’s development
with unabashed pride, he remained careful not to get involved in any
violence. His caution frustrated the young Islamists, who respected
50
 THE ANCIENT ENEMY

his intellect but yearned for him to take a more direct role in their
activities. Hekmatyar lamented that their mentor would not use his
‘love, faith and sympathy’ for the Muslim Youth to assume leadership
of the movement. ‘His answer was always that I am an outsider
supporting and praying for you,’ he recalled years later.10
Professor Niazi, however, could see that his discreet approach
was working. He lived with his young family in Khair Khana, a
neighbourhood in the foothills of north Kabul, where the government
had donated land to a number of teachers at the university. A simple,
single-storey structure made from wood, the house was built with
money given to him by his brother, who had rented out the ancestral
farm back in Ghazni. It had four rooms and a yard where Professor
Niazi could park his car—a government issue, Soviet-made Volga,
a perk of being dean. He drove the thirty minutes to and from the
university each day, turning the campus into an incubator for his
Islamist revolution. Only once did he arouse the king’s suspicion,
when five of his female students came to class with their hair fully
covered by hijabs, the Islamic headscarf. It was rare for young Afghans
in the cosmopolitan city to dress conservatively and Professor Niazi
was summoned to the Ministry of Interior to explain whether he told
the women to cover up. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘They have chosen to.’11
Layeq knew Professor Niazi was the real force behind the Muslim
Youth. Despite the recent spike in confrontations, he remained more
worried about his quiet former classmate than the militant students
around Hekmatyar. After thoroughly researching the Brotherhood
in his student years, Layeq had developed a certain grudging respect
for the Egyptian movement and its founder, Hassan al-Banna. He did
not consider the young Afghans worthy successors; with a twinkle in
his eye, he ridiculed the Muslim Youth’s public displays of earnestness
and piety as hallmarks of their ignorance and immaturity. Always self-
confident, he was convinced he knew more about the Qur’an than
any of them. ‘Hekmatyar challenged me to a debate several times, but
when I said okay, he didn’t turn up,’ he crowed.12 Instead, their rivalry
played out in a twilight world of secret plots and street violence.
Layeq’s father still lived in Baghlan, in northern Afghanistan. It
was there that the old Pashtun tribal leader received the letter from
Hekmatyar and Nasratyar, denouncing his son as an apostate. As 1970
51
 NIGHT LETTERS

wore on, the Muslim Youth again decided to confront the family over
its communist ties. Layeq’s nephew was leaving a mosque in Baghlan
when a group of twenty or twenty-five men approached, Nasratyar
among them; after a brief argument, Layeq’s nephew was stabbed by
one of the mob. With his intestines bulging through a deep wound
just above his hip, he rushed to hospital cradling his guts in the flap
of his blouse. He survived, but only after three weeks of intensive
medical treatment. The nephew harboured no particular ill-will
towards Nasratyar, who had not been wielding the knife, but Layeq
was outraged. He had been in Baghlan when the attack happened and
became convinced he was the intended target. It was not the first time
he believed the MuslimYouth had tried to kill him: before the stabbing,
Layeq had been shopping in Kabul when he heard a loud bang. He
turned to see people scattering in different directions, as if fleeing
from a gunshot he decided was aimed at him. After the assault on his
nephew he was certain he was a marked man.13
In taking the fight to their enemies, the Muslim Youth were
demonstrating one aspect of their growing focus and determination.
Another side of their activism was a successful plan to entrench their
influence at Kabul University. Nine of the group’s members were
elected to the students’ union in 1970. Despite winning fewer votes
than the communists and Maoists, it was an important first step in
their efforts to gain control of the campus. They even managed to get
the Islamic invocation, ‘In the name of God,’ written at the top of the
union’s constitution.14 Meanwhile, across Afghanistan, the movement
was beginning to find fresh recruits. Although some prospective
members were swayed by the protests at Zarnigar Park, many others
were talked into joining by friends, relatives or teachers at their
schools.The notion that Islam was under threat acted as a highly potent
rallying cry for excitable, educated men looking for a sense of meaning
in a rapidly changing world. The communists were just as determined
to win the battle of ideas, and they continued to compete for the
same sort of recruits: intelligent, motivated and impressionable young
Afghans drawn to the promise of creating a better society.
***

52
 THE ANCIENT ENEMY

Since the night he acted as imam in his hole-filled clothes in the

third-floor dormitory mosque at Kabul University, Abdul Rahim
Niazi had commanded the Muslim Youth with a gravitas, diligence
and studiousness unmatched by his colleagues. His humility—a prize
quality in Afghan culture—was central to the movement’s allure,
winning over countless new disciples nationwide. While Hekmatyar’s
passion and fervent determination to fight the communists at any cost
had its own particular appeal, Abdul Rahim had the ability to present
radical ideas in a calm and reasoned manner, making them attractive to
a broad audience. He was, in a very conventional sense, a good Muslim:
kind, generous, uninterested in the trappings of wealth and well-versed
in scripture. At times he seemed more like an old fashioned missionary
than a hardened revolutionary, travelling the land to ensure people
did not stray from the straight path of Islam as laid out in the Qur’an.
In one instance, he went to the eastern province of Nangarhar for a
ceremony marking the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed. One of
his legs was in a plaster cast following a recent accident, but he walked
for two hours to attend the meeting, with a sandal on his injured foot
and a shoe on the other. People were so impressed that they allowed
him to continue talking long after his allotted time was up.15
Before he could deliver on his promise to defeat the communists,
however, his health sharply deteriorated. In the summer of 1971 he
went to Aliabad Hospital in Kabul, where he was examined by a doctor
who coincidentally worked as a physician for the king. After receiving
cursory treatment, Abdul Rahim’s condition drastically worsened;
some Muslim Youth members feared he had been poisoned and, rather
than seek a second opinion in Afghanistan, they decided to send their
leader to India, where better healthcare was available. Supporters
donated money for three plane tickets—a measure of Abdul Rahim’s
popularity. He was to be accompanied by his brother as well as an
Islamist friend who worked at the Ministry of Agriculture and spoke
fluent English.The friend—a Pashtun named Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai—
was not a member of the Muslim Youth and thought Hekmatyar was
too volatile for his own good, but he respected Abdul Rahim and was
happy to help. They left for India as soon as possible.
With his health ailing alarmingly, Abdul Rahim seemed to realise
he would not be around to lead the movement much longer. On the
53
 NIGHT LETTERS

flight to Delhi, he sought assurances from his friend that the Muslim
Youth would never forget the origins of their struggle. He asserted
that without his elder and namesake, Professor Niazi, ‘we wouldn’t
have been able to start this movement.’16
In Delhi, Abdul Rahim went to the All India Institute of Medical
Sciences, where he was diagnosed with the latter stages of blood
cancer. He died shortly afterwards, in the early hours of Saturday 19
June 1971. Reeling in shock, his brother flew back to Afghanistan
to make funeral arrangements, while his friend watched over his
remains at the hospital in Delhi. Abdul Rahim’s body was only flown
to Afghanistan after several delays, convincing the friend that the
authorities were trying to prevent its return. Nevertheless, hundreds
of mourners had waited patiently at Kabul airport; among them were
Professor Niazi and Hekmatyar. Police tried to confiscate the coffin
as it was carried from the plane, ordering the crowd to say a farewell
prayer there and then, but the friend refused. He insisted that the
body needed to be washed before burial, according to Islamic custom.
Climbing onto the shoulders of a fellow mourner, he shouted for the
crowd not to hand Abdul Rahim’s corpse over to the government.
The police retreated and the coffin was transferred to the university
dormitories. With the body now safe, the Muslim Youth issued a
formal death notice to Radio Afghanistan. A memorial ceremony
would be held at Pul-e Khishti mosque the next day, the site of the
April 1970 protests against the pro-Lenin poem.
At 9am the following morning, Abdul Rahim’s body was loaded
onto an ambulance and slowly driven from the university. A procession
of student activists and elders walked behind, their shadows stretching
out beneath a blazing sun. So many people were in the procession
that some shopkeepers closed their stores and fled, fearing trouble.
But, except for occasional cries of ‘God is greatest,’ the mourners
were silent. When the ceremony at Pul-e Khishti was over, the crowd
crossed the river and loaded Abdul Rahm’s coffin on to a bus. A small
group of Muslim Youth activists on board drove the coffin to his home
province of Faryab, in northern Afghanistan.Abdul Rahim was buried
beneath a simple headstone in the district of Pashtun Kot. Still in his
twenties when he died, he was engaged to be married and had not yet
graduated from university.17
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 THE ANCIENT ENEMY

Abdul Rahim’s unexpected passing at such a young age left a huge

void in the Muslim Youth and fuelled suspicions within the group
that the government was out to destroy them. Conspiracy theories
abounded, and Hekmatyar believed the decision to let the king’s doctor
treat their figurehead was ‘a very big mistake.’18 Although Abdul Rahim
had spent barely two years at the forefront of the movement, he would
always be remembered as a pioneer of political Islam in Afghanistan.
‘We did not endorse and appoint him as our leader, God appointed
him and chose him to lead us,’ said Hekmatyar.19
Abdul Rahim had been central to the Muslim Youth’s growing
stature and sense of direction. In his absence, the Islamists suddenly
found themselves rudderless and facing huge odds, having debated,
fought and preached but so far failed to stem the rise of communism.
The summer of 1971 was marked by weeks of mourning and self-doubt
within the movement. Then, some three months after Abdul Rahim’s
death, the Muslim Youth convened a meeting at the main mosque
on the grounds of Kabul Polytechnic. Between 150 and 260 people
participated, sitting cross legged on the floor, shoes neatly lined up at
the entrance. They agreed to establish a new executive council to instil
order into the ranks. Based on a show of hands, Habib-ur-Rahman,
Hekmatyar and Nasratyar were elected onto the five-man board.
The organisation led by Abdul Rahim had been a grassroots protest
movement. Members used to gather in voluntary training circles to
discuss the Sunnah and Hadith and prepare the answers they would
use in debates with their communist opponents. After Abdul Rahim’s
death and the subsequent formation of the executive council, the
Muslim Youth changed. It would soon become a highly disciplined
secret society: convinced the government was out to crush them and
may have even killed Abdul Rahim, the young Islamists established
small five-man cells nationwide, which were given responsibility for
recruitment. These reported to a second set of cells higher up in the
chain of command, whose heads came together to meet in groups
known as circles. These were then connected to bodies representing
distinct provinces or districts, which reported to the leadership. The
new executive council was determined to purge the country—and
Kabul in particular—of its sins.20
***
55
 NIGHT LETTERS

Afghanistan’s capital had been transformed by the king’s 1964

constitution, ushering in an era that tore at its centuries-old social
fabric. Instead of becoming a beacon of democracy in the region, by
the early 1970s Kabul had turned into a violent and fractured city.
Expatriates regarded it as a Paris of the East—an even more exotic
version of Beirut. Beneath the glittering surface, however, lay a seedy
underbelly. The wife of a Filipino diplomat working in Pakistan was
arrested at Kabul airport with thirty kilograms of hashish stuffed in
plastic bags inside her luggage. On summer nights a striptease was
held regularly at the Blue Club in Ansari Square, a restaurant-cum-
bar popular with the foreign elite. Tickets cost $2 per person, dinner
included. Across town, tourists and wealthy Afghans lounged around
the outdoor swimming pool at the Intercontinental Hotel, basking
happily in the sun. As they did so, a drought ravaged the countryside,
devastating farmland and livestock. Wheat and flour prices soared;
malnourished villagers ate grass to survive; and thousands of people
fled their homes in search of food as corrupt officials in the capital
deliberately let humanitarian aid supplies rot. Meanwhile, Coca-Cola
and Fanta opened a new bottling plant in the city with the slogan ‘It
tastes so good, it is fun to be thirsty.’21
The Muslim Youth saw the drought as divine punishment, finding
parallels between Kabul in the early 1970s and Arabia at the birth of
Islam. When the Prophet Mohammed first received revelations from
God, Mecca—like the Afghan capital—was split between rich and
poor, young and old. Drought and famine gripped the land. Two great
superpowers, the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires, were locked in
an interminable conflict to dominate the Middle East and the wider
region. Mohammed had expected the elders of his tribe and clan
to rally around him but instead it was the young and the weakest in
society who joined his cause.22 So it was with the Muslim Y
  outh.
In the late 1960s Hekmatyar went to the eastern town of Gardez,
near Pakistan, where he preached that the country was in the grip
of immorality. Addressing new recruits to his cause, he criticised
people for having sex outside marriage and denounced the popular
pastimes of bird and dog fights as haram, forbidden in Islam. Afghans
could openly go to the cinema, he said, but were made to feel ashamed
if they went to the mosque.23 Since that trip, his rage had only
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intensified. One Friday, on a visit to his family in Imam Sahib, Kunduz,

Hekmatyar went to a local mosque and addressed the villagers, who
had assembled there for a few moments of prayer and quiet reflection.
He venomously denounced the king. Listening in, the imam informed
police that Hekmatyar had declared Afghanistan dar al-harb, an Islamic
term denoting a territory or state at war against Muslims. This meant
the monarchy could be legitimately overthrown and the king killed.
Hekmatyar was detained by police and escorted to the centre of
Kunduz, where he was released with a caution.24
Hekmatyar thrived on confrontation and was fast earning a
reputation for displays of bravery that bordered on the reckless. In
1971, when leftwing students were caught storing food and planning to
violate the fast in Ramadan, Muslim Youth activists tried to intervene,
only for communists carrying clubs to encircle them inside the mosque
at Kabul Polytechnic.The siege was broken by Hekmatyar, who charged
in with a team of reinforcements, throwing stones.25 While many
young, impressionable Afghans found his courage inspiring, others
caught glimpses of a sinister edge to Hekmatyar’s behaviour. ‘He was
a very good leader and a very smart man,’ recalled a fellow activist.
‘The main problem was that he was very, very extreme.’26 At around
this time a savage new tactic emerged on Kabul’s streets: mysterious
young religious fanatics started throwing acid at women, targeting
those who wore mini-skirts and other forms of revealing clothing.
Several of the culprits were arrested and sentenced to long prison
terms but Hekmatyar was widely believed to be the mastermind of the
attacks. The Muslim Youth always denied responsibility, and under the
executive council system Hekmatyar would not have had the ability to
authorise the acid attacks alone.27 Nonetheless, the accusations stuck.
***
The Muslim Youth’s notoriety was growing beyond their control. Even
the Brotherhood in Egypt, which pioneered political Islam in modern
times, stressed the primacy of scholarship and Islamic learning. The
Muslim Youth were students of Islam, to be sure; but they favoured
radical action over debate, and victory at all costs over compromise.
They were a new breed of Islamists who vehemently opposed not only
communists and liberals, but their more educated Muslim elders. A
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majority of clerics and Islamic organisations in Afghanistan remained

wary of them. After years of study at staid religious establishments,
schooled in apolitical Islam, these older hands did not trust the callow
young revolutionaries who spoke with the conviction of learned
seers. Many of the more prominent Muslim Youth activists, including
Hekmatyar, Habib-ur-Rahman and Nasratyar, lacked any formal
Islamic qualifications. By standing up in public and challenging the
government, they were threatening to overturn a religious orthodoxy
that had existed in Afghanistan for hundreds of years and which was
deeply rooted in the Islamic world.
The name ‘Muslim Youth’ was never formally adopted by the
movement. After the young Islamists used it on the first night letter
they delivered, the term was bestowed on them by onlookers wanting
to identify the zealous students roaming Kabul’s streets with knives,
knuckle dusters and sticks, demanding the creation of an Islamic state.
Muslim Youth activists appropriated the name as their own but their
leaders saw no reason to officially endorse it while political parties
were still illegal. This only added to the Muslim Youth’s estrangement
from other Islamic groups, which refused to recognise the movement
as a legitimate organisation with a clear membership structure and
realistic agenda. The more moderate organisations had a paternal
attitude towards the young reactionaries, sympathising with them
but fearing the damage their burning sense of injustice could cause if
left unchecked.
Among those watching on warily was Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, a
cantankerous scholar from a noted family of Sufi clerics, who studied at
Al-Azhar University in Egypt in the late 1940s and early 1950s. There,
he had met regularly with the Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna,
without ever being convinced by his political and religious philosophy.
On his return home, he was jailed from 1959–1964 for opposing
Soviet interference in Afghanistan, before being freed on the condition
that he live in exile for another year. Mojaddedi also happened to be
Layeq’s estranged brother-in-law—their mutual Pashtun ancestry
initially bringing the two families together when Layeq was still a
child, before their divergent ideologies tore them apart.
He expected his pedigree as a defender of Islamic values to impress
the Muslim Youth, but times had changed and the new generation
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 THE ANCIENT ENEMY

of activists treated him as a stooge for the king. He had tried and
failed to persuade Professor Niazi and Abdul Rahim to fix what he
described as the ‘disconnect’ between the Brotherhood’s policies and
Afghanistan, where tribalism and some of the more spiritual aspects
of religion played an integral role in life.28 Mojaddedi attempted to
reason with them again when he attended Abdul Rahim’s memorial
ceremony and sought to offer a few words of condolence, only for a
Muslim Youth executive council member to tell him to sit down and
be quiet.29
Mojaddedi was among a cluster of elders and scholars who met
Hekmatyar in a concerted effort to form a united, more moderate
front of Islamic opposition to the left. Showing little of the customary
deference Afghans usually display to their elders and more educated
peers, Hekmatyar told them to openly announce their support for the
Muslim Youth and ‘consider the struggle against the government as
serious as that with the communists.’ Mojaddedi swallowed his pride
and accepted the first condition, but declined the second because he
believed they would need the government’s help to combat the spread
of Marxism. The meeting ended without agreement.30
Mojaddedi was not the only potential ally of the MuslimYouth to be
tarred by the accusation of appeasement. Another Islamic movement
known as Khuddam ul-Furqan (Servants of the Qur’an), was equally
reluctant to mount a serious challenge to the monarchy. A band of
clerics and scholars that grew out of a madrassa in Ghazni in the 1950s
and early 1960s, it initially stayed away from politics and concentrated
on missionary work. In the wake of the king’s reforms it became an
unofficial party and publicised its ideas in a weekly newspaper, Nida-yi
Haq. Khuddam ul-Furqan members were relatively liberal. Proud of
their willingness to read Arabic translations of Aristotle and Socrates,
they took it upon themselves to promote the virtues of science and
Islam.31 Their desire for gradual social and political change, rather than
revolution, meant that the young Islamists around Hekmatyar regarded
them with thinly disguised contempt. ‘The Muslim Youth were very
strong, zealous and emotional, unwilling to compromise with the
government,’ one Khuddam ul-Furqan member later recalled. In
contrast, his movement adhered to ‘the kind of Sharia that has existed
in this country for more than 1000 years.’32
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The one Islamic movement to express solidarity with the Muslim

Youth was based around the Gahiz newspaper, yet another weekly
published in Kabul. Run by a council of intellectuals and scholars, the
readers of Gahiz were often from the same disenfranchised generation
as the Muslim Youth and the ties between the two groups grew ever
closer. Through Gahiz, Hekmatyar and his colleagues established a
foothold in Kandahar, the king’s ancestral home and a centre of political
power in the country. It was a watershed moment, heralding the arrival
of a radical new brand of Islam in a place famous for a shrine that housed
a cloak said to have once been worn by the Prophet Mohammed.
The Muslim Youth’s infiltration of Kandahar began in the autumn
of 1970, when leftwing activists felt they had free rein over the
city’s educational institutions. Brimming with confidence and armed
with makeshift weapons, the communists confronted anyone who
opposed them. In a fight at the city’s teacher training institute, they
stabbed a number of students—shocking a town still unaccustomed
to bloodshed. Fearing that the situation was spiralling out of control,
a young madrassa student working for the newspaper telephoned its
founding editor, Minhajuddin Gahiz, in Kabul. Minhajuddin was a
naturally rebellious but friendly figure in his late forties and he was
eager to help. He invited the madrassa student, an imam’s son, to the
capital and took him to the university one night, where the two of them
asked to see Hekmatyar, who was a regular contributor of articles to the
newspaper. A few minutes later Hekmatyar arrived at the gates, clean
shaven and with a dormitory blanket wrapped around his thin frame
to keep out the cold. Minhajuddin hurriedly described the stabbings in
Kandahar and Hekmatyar said he would be in touch. Soon afterwards,
he and Minhajuddin arranged for a delegation to visit Kandahar.33
Minhajuddin was one of the few prominent elders willing to
openly support the Muslim Youth. He liked the gusto of the ‘boys,’
as he referred to them, and in conversations he repeatedly identified
Hekmatyar as the most capable of all the activists. Mainstream scholars
were often reluctant to help Minhajuddin because they were scared of
his radical stance against the monarchy and the Soviets; as a result, he
saw something of himself in the young Islamists. Their inability to win
over the religious establishment mirrored his own difficulties, and he
admired their defiant attitude in the face of seemingly insurmountable
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 THE ANCIENT ENEMY

odds. Minhajuddin was adamant that it required rare qualities to be a

mujahid—an Islamic warrior—once noting that ‘fearful people, people
too in love with their children and people who love money cannot
struggle.’ It was a creed by which he lived and died. On 7 September
1972, he was gunned down at his home in Kabul. Rumours quickly
spread that the car carrying his assassins had been seen travelling from
the Soviet embassy.34
***
Hekmatyar was convinced that Minhajuddin was killed for supporting
the Muslim Youth; Abdul Rahim Niazi had also died in what were
considered to be suspicious circumstances, struck down by sudden
illness just as he was rising to prominence as an activist. The deaths
fuelled a slow-burning, creeping sense of paranoia in Kabul. The
Islamists were unsure of exactly how much support the Marxists had
and to what length they were prepared to go.They were equally unclear
about the Soviets’ plans for Afghanistan and the level of influence the
superpower sought over their country. The fog of intrigue had also
enveloped the communists who, split into factions, saw plots almost
everywhere. The man they had chosen to lead them at their founding
meeting in 1965, Noor Mohammed Taraki, was at the heart of their
neurosis. Now fronting Khalq, one of two blocs named after their old
newspapers, he remained unable to shake speculation that he was a
Soviet agent. For his part, Taraki suspected his erstwhile deputy and
head of the rival Parcham faction, Babrak Karmal, might be working
for Afghan counter-intelligence.35 Layeq also found himself the subject
of troubling speculation: in 1970 he had opened a mill in Baghlan that
processed rice and produced cooking oil—an unusual line of work
for a journalist who regarded himself as a poet and intellectual. He
portrayed it as a small family business that occasionally donated funds to
Parcham, but within a few years there was talk in American diplomatic
circles that the mill laundered Soviet money for the communists. Layeq
denied the allegation.36
The Soviet Union was not the only superpower working in the
shadows. Afghanistan’s communists made the reasonable assumption
that wherever Moscow’s agents were operating, so were their
American counterparts. Senior Parcham activists were convinced
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that a rising star in Khalq, Hafizullah Amin, had been recruited by the
CIA while studying at Columbia University in the US.Well-educated,
gregarious and utterly ruthless, he was a teacher by trade, who had
been elected to parliament in 1969. It was Amin’s nephew, years
earlier, who had helped to radicalise Hekmatyar in Kunduz, when
they argued together about the existence of God. Some communists
were increasingly convinced that Amin was a US agent planted to
discredit their cause.
Afghanistan had long been a battleground in the Cold War, but the
street-fighting and internecine confrontations marked a bloody new
stage in the struggle for strategic influence between Washington and
Moscow. Kabul was further shaken when, in 1971, the region erupted
with the conflict that led to the creation of Bangladesh. Sponsored
by Islamabad, militias rampaged through East Pakistan as part of a
desperate effort to brutally subdue a movement for self-determination.
India was sucked into the violence and millions of people were killed
or displaced by the end of the year. The carnage was tacitly supported
by the US, which resented Delhi’s close ties to the Soviet Union and
needed Pakistan’s help to improve its own relationship with China.
Watching from across the border, it was impossible for Afghans not to
be affected by the sheer scale of the devastation. The war energised the
Muslim Youth, reaffirming their belief that they were part of a cause
much bigger than themselves.
In protest over Bangladesh’s creation, Habib-ur-Rahman delivered
an extraordinary speech in Zarnigar Park on 25 February 1972. Urging
his followers to ‘fight for Islam using your property and bodies,’ he
told the crowd, ‘The day we can live with dignity will be achieved
when the flag of jihad is flying.’ Speaking with eloquence and passion,
he asked the audience to think beyond the confines of the domestic
political scene: ‘Millions and millions of Muslims all over the world,
particularly in Afghanistan, are living in pain; they are living in hardship
and poverty; they are being invaded and attacked.’
The engineering student denounced all forms of nationalism,
warning that the issue of Pashtunistan and the similar cause of
Balochistan were being manipulated by colonial powers. ‘Islam does
not recognise borders. Islam does not trust in nations. Islam is not tied
to anything apart from theology,’ he said. ‘When it came, it demolished
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all nations and said no nation is better than another. Muslims only
trust in the words “There is no God but God and Mohammed is the
messenger of God”.’ Ominously, he predicted the slaughter that would
soon lay waste to his homeland, accusing ‘slaves and mercenaries’ of
trying to betray the nation. ‘Once people rise up, it’s obvious that
this country will be painted with the blood of these sell-outs. It’s
impossible that part of our land, part of our theology, be in the hands
of the invaders,’ he said.
He declared that both the Soviet Union and the US were adversaries
of Islam, describing America as ‘the ancient enemy of Muslims.’
Together, the two superpowers were trying to foment conflicts
within Islamic countries: ‘From one side Muslims have to accept
their leadership and falsity, from another side they are worried that
an Islamic movement should rise up in a corner of the Islamic world
and form an Islamic state,’ he said. ‘In truth, an Islamic state means
freedom for human beings from oppression and dictatorship. In truth,
the formation of an Islamic state means the removal of dictatorship
and oppression in the world. And in truth, the formation of an Islamic
state will demolish all oppressive work built on the blood of millions
of human beings.’37
***
The apathy of Afghanistan’s clerical order had allowed the communists
to rise up and, with few vocal religious role models close at hand, the
Muslim Youth looked elsewhere for inspiration. By the time Habib-ur-
Rahman delivered his speech in Zarnigar Park, he and his friends were
convinced jihad was an obligation, not a choice. For them, the concept
was not primarily an internal struggle for self-improvement, as more
liberal Muslims maintained, but an external revolutionary process.
It was nothing less than ‘armed struggle’ without end, according to
Hekmatyar.38 In the same way that individuals had a duty to constantly
improve their knowledge and practice of Islam, they must also do
everything in their power to reform society and the world—through
force if necessary.
The Brotherhood was just one of the Muslim Youth’s influences,
with the writings of Sunni and Shia intellectuals from across the Islamic
world pushing them ever closer to waging war for their ideals. A few
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select authors in particular ‘were like oxygen to the youth,’ recalled

one Islamist activist.39 They obsessively read the work of Abul-A’la
Maududi, a sometime journalist and philosopher from British-ruled
India.The son of a devout lawyer, Maududi believed that Muslims were
either in thrall to the West or stuck in the past, desperately clinging to
their heritage and unwilling to adapt to a changing world. Untethered
from its moral bearings and drifting ever further from God, civilisation
was on the brink of collapse. Only an Islamic reformation could
save mankind.
Maududi wrote that history consisted of a perpetual struggle
between Islam and a state of ignorance, jahiliyah, which he applied to
all ideas and systems that denied God’s supreme authority. An Islamic
revival was needed at both an intellectual level and a practical level.
Crucially for the Muslim Youth, Maududi believed that a core of highly
dedicated, educated men would be the vanguard of this movement,
driving the wider population towards gradual change. His writing was
sold in Kabul’s bazaars and brought to the capital via Afghans studying
in Pakistan. The political party he established in 1941, Jamaat-e Islami,
was heavily involved in the butchery in East Pakistan that inspired
Habib-ur-Rahman’s 25 February 1972 speech, when it mercilessly
targeted pro-Bangladesh students and scholars.
The other major intellectual and spiritual force for the Muslim
Youth was Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian author born in 1906.40 Qutb
shared some of the same characteristics that came to be associated with
Hekmatyar: they were disciplined and prolific writers, more extreme
than any of their contemporaries; neither of them were formally trained
scholars, yet they relished challenging those more classically educated
than themselves. Qutb opposed the British occupation of his country
in the first half of the twentieth century and condemned western
civilisation as being ‘without heart and conscience.’41 His book Social
Justice in Islam was dedicated to a new generation that would strive in
the way of God, ‘killing and being killed.’42 Qutb’s criticism that ‘the
state does nothing to protect the interests of the majority’43 was easily
applicable in Afghanistan, where the Muslim Youth were disillusioned
with life under the king. Qutb actively supported the overthrow of
the Egyptian government and achieved his wish in 1952, before the
new regime under the Free Officers movement turned on him and the
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Brotherhood. Arrested, he worked on his two most famous books in

prison, In the Shade of the Qur’an and Milestones.
For Qutb, it was ‘a vulgar joke’ to think that implementing God’s
laws was simply a matter of jurisprudence;44 his revolutionary theory
was that governments and populations of the modern Muslim world
functioned outside the realm of Islam. Expanding on the ideas of
Maududi, he warned that it was not enough for Muslims to obey the
basic tenets of the faith if their lives were not based on ‘submission
to God alone.’45 Failure to submit meant that they were in a state of
ignorance and could not be considered Muslims; this was a highly
controversial judgement that, ordinarily, Islamic law held to be
pronounceable only by the best trained scholars. Building on this
doctrine of excommunication, which derived from an ancient concept
known as takfir, Qutb argued that a new vanguard of ‘professional
revolutionaries’ was needed to awaken the people.46 Preaching would
be an essential part of their work but ultimately action would be
required to defeat ‘those who had usurped the authority of God.’47
Qutb was hanged by the Egyptian state on 29 August 1966. Less than
five years later his name was legendary among the Muslim Youth. In
their eyes, his life—which ended when he refused an offer of clemency
from the government in Cairo—had all the qualities of a parable.
In the dormitories at Kabul University, Nasratyar began to tell other
students, ‘If the communists have Lenin and Stalin, we have Sayyid
Qutb and Maududi.’ Moderate elements of the Islamic opposition
were so alarmed that they dispatched an emissary to the university in
an attempt to calm him down.48 Their concern did nothing to dampen
the Muslim Youth’s enthusiasm. Around this time, Hekmatyar went to
the eastern city of Jalalabad on International Workers’ Day, 1 May, with
Nasratyar. Standing on a table and speaking through a loudhailer, they
addressed hundreds of supporters at Pashtunistan Square, explaining
to the crowd the rights Islam gives workers. Hekmatyar was wearing a
white hat and smoking cigarettes—a habit he would later shun as sinful.
The next night they stayed at a house in the surrounding countryside,
where they shared dinner with a small group of men who had walked
one and a half hours for the opportunity.49
Hekmatyar’s puritanical lectures were exactly what many young,
alienated, Afghans wanted to hear.Yet those ideas were so at odds with
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prevailing mainstream liberal attitudes in Kabul that the US embassy

failed to take him and the Muslim Youth seriously. In the boom years
of the king’s democratic project, Afghans had taken out exorbitant
loans to buy up property in the capital, hoping to get a return on their
investments by renting the buildings to expatriates. By the early 1970s
many houses in the upscale neighbourhood of Shar-e Naw lay empty,
the US diplomats who inhabited them having transferred to Vietnam.50
The possibility of conflict breaking out in Afghanistan was the last
thing on the minds of the American officials who remained. Instead,
they watched Kabul quietly unravel.
The US had been in the Muslim Youth’s cross hairs for some time,
primarily due to its support for Israel and corrupt authoritarian
regimes throughout the Middle East. Habib-ur-Rahman’s description
of America as ‘the ancient enemy of Muslims’ was matched by
Nasratyar, who called Washington the ‘leader of imperialism in the
world.’ Speaking in Zarnigar Park, he derided its development projects
in Afghanistan as useless, saying not a single plane had landed at the US-
built Kandahar airport in three years. ‘America has invaded us for our
resources,’ he announced. ‘They have stained our identity.’51 This was
more than just idle talk. As far as the Muslim Youth were concerned,
the king, the communists and the democrats would have to be defeated
first, before a final, inevitable showdown with Washington. They were
convinced Islam could never prosper until American cultural, political,
economic and military influence was wiped clean from Muslim lands.
US officials, however, ignored or underestimated their radicalism.
On 29 May 1972, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, Robert
G. Neumann, put the finishing touches to a three-page report by one of
his aides. In a brief introductory airgram to the US State Department,
he explained that he had prioritised the report over other embassy
paperwork, ‘because of the unusual content of the conversations’ it
described. He then sealed and sent the document, which arrived in
Washington at 8.27am on 13 June. Labelled confidential, it detailed
a series of meetings that an embassy political officer had been having
with a young man who called himself a ‘leader of the Muslim Youth’.
Named in the report as Merajuddin Zaheb, the young man had first
telephoned the political officer in January that year, asking if they could
meet. The officer, Arnold Paul Schifferdecker, had invited him for tea
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at his house the following evening and the Islamist accepted. When
they met, the nervous Zaheb explained that an Afghan employee at
the embassy had given him Schifferdecker’s name. He described ‘in
some detail the anti-communist activities of his group’ and asked if the
US would ‘consider financing a printing press’ for the Muslim Youth,
who ‘normally were confined to distributing typed or mimeographed
leaflets.’ Schifferdecker wrote that Zaheb had concluded by saying
‘that the US should cooperate with his group, since both true Muslims
and Americans had a common interest in fighting an ideology so
diametrically opposed to our way of life.’ In an attempt to keep in
touch, Schifferdecker said he needed a few days to consider the request.
As Zaheb was leaving the house, he told the officer that the Muslim
Youth had weapons with which ‘to fight the Russians.’ He pulled out a
loaded automatic pistol, smiled, waved it around and boasted that they
had many more guns at their disposal.
Zaheb returned a week later, by which time the embassy had
checked his background and established he was a member of the
MuslimYouth but ‘not the leader of the group.’ Zaheb brought along a
1 February 1970 article from Gahiz newspaper and an 11 March 1970
declaration by Islamist university students. Schifferdecker explained
that the US would be unable to provide financial assistance, but tried
to reassure Zaheb that it was intent on strengthening the country’s
independence through economic development. ‘Merjauddin said he
was disappointed with our decision,’ wrote the officer. ‘He said he
felt that communism could never be accommodated in Afghanistan
without a decisive struggle in which Islam or communism would
triumph.’ Further visits ensued, with their last recorded meeting in
early April 1972, when Zaheb and Schifferdecker lunched together.
In the report, the officer showed little regard for the Muslim Youth,
writing that none of them ‘are particularly outstanding orators
or charismatic.’52
It remains unclear exactly who Zaheb was and whether he was acting
alone or on the instructions of others in the Muslim Youth. The officer
wrote that the Islamist’s real name was Farouq. It is quite possible that
he was a senior member of the movement who, using a pseudonym,
went to test Schifferdecker. While controversial, approaching the
US for assistance did not necessarily contradict the anti-American
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statements of Habib-ur-Rahman and Nasratyar. After all, even the

Prophet Mohammed had entered into temporary partnerships with his
enemies when he felt these alliances could help achieve his long-term
goals. Afghanistan’s Islamists wanted to first vanquish the communists;
they could then turn their attention to the Americans.
***
In June 1972, days after Ambassador Neumann sent Schifferdecker’s
report to Washington, there was a killing at Kabul University—
the first for which the Muslim Youth were clearly and undeniably
responsible. Hekmatyar was addressing students at a time of high
tension: strike action had been crippling the campus for months and
a new recruit to the Islamist movement had just been assaulted in the
Faculty of Education. As Hekmatyar gave his speech there, a group of
Maoists gathered among some trees close to the dormitories, armed
with wooden sticks. Hekmatyar finished speaking inside the faculty
and strode to a fountain near the cafeteria, where he urged Muslim
Youth loyalists to join him. Word spread and soon Muslim Youth
members were emptying out of schools across Kabul and rushing
to the university. One Islamist burst through the yard outside the
cafeteria and shouted at Hekmatyar for wasting time while the Maoist
thugs were preparing to fight. Hekmatyar told him to be patient; he
instructed his supporters to collect their own sticks to use as clubs and
tie cloth around their arms so they could identify each other in the
chaos of battle. ‘If they are planning to destroy our meeting or attack
us, you should prevent them,’ he ordered. As the Muslim Youth made
a line of defence, the Maoists advanced. It was mid-morning when the
fight began. At one point the Islamists were forced to retreat onto a
football field, where they were pelted with stones; Hekmatyar told
them to pull back and counter-attack from either side. When the fight
finally ended, a young Maoist poet, Saydal Sokhandan, lay dead on the
floor, fatally stabbed.
By the time the police arrived, the Islamists had retreated to the
university dormitories. That evening, Hekmatyar was a prime suspect
in Sokhandan’s murder and rather than continue to hide, or try to run,
he turned himself in. Habib-ur-Rahman, Nasratyar and Mohammed
Omar, a revered Islamist from Badakhshan, were also arrested and
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held alongside him at Atfaya jail in the centre of Kabul. Five additional
Muslim Youth members were detained elsewhere in the city, but the
real culprit, a literature student from Kandahar named Mohammed
Karim, was never apprehended.53 As they were led away, Hekmatyar
and Habib-ur-Rahman looked more like scrawny juveniles responsible
for a petty crime than committed revolutionaries who had just
inspired their first murder. The regime hoped that the shock of prison
would deter the Muslim Youth from further violence. In fact it had the
opposite effect, turning the movement’s leaders into living martyrs.
Hekmatyar received so many visitors in jail that fruit given to him
by his guests piled up in the corner of his cell. Prominent activists
and new recruits dropped by for advice, talking politics with him for
twenty or twenty-five minutes at a time. Hekmatyar was more defiant
than ever: ‘Some friends and relatives are coming here and telling me
to go soft and be patient in our struggle against the communists,’ he
complained.54 Having played no direct role in the fatal clash at the
university, Habib-ur-Rahman and Nasratyar were released after
six months. Hekmatyar and Mohammed Omar were subjected to a
perfunctory trial and sentenced to one-and-a-half years in prison;
they were then transferred to Qala-e Jadid, the main city jail. Insects
crawled up the walls of its dark cells and guards kept close watch of the
inmates. Hekmatyar was unrepentant.55

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 4

THE INSURRECTION

The violence and unrest climaxed a year after the murder at the
university. In the early hours of 17 July 1973, gunshots punctured
the air, startling Sulaiman Layeq’s wife at their house in the Kart-e
Parwan neighbourhood of Kabul. She woke her husband, who
immediately tried to reassure her; he calmly said that a coup was
probably unfolding.1 Layeq had spent the best part of a decade making
powerful friends and dangerous enemies across Afghanistan’s political
landscape. His arrogance, eloquence and deep understanding of Islam
were crucial components in the communists’ struggle to generate
support among a sceptical and conservative public. Now, thanks to the
help of his comrades in Parcham, he knew the monarchy was on the
brink of collapse.
Years of economic decline and mounting unrest in the streets had
damaged the state beyond repair when the king, Zahir Shah, travelled
to Rome via London in late June. Although the communists were not
yet strong enough to stage their own revolution, they had a valuable if
inadvertent ally in the monarch’s cousin and brother-in-law, Mohammed
Daoud Khan, who could get them a step closer to power. As prime
minister under the king in the 1950s and early 1960s, Daoud had
seemed to modernise the country through sheer force of personality
alone. He allowed the women in his family to appear unveiled in
public, shocking the religious establishment, and was the first official
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to prioritise strengthening ties with the Soviet Union. However,

after laying the foundations for a new era of democracy he resigned
before the 1964 constitution was drawn up, infuriated with the king
for blocking the military raids he had been launching into Pakistan’s
Pashtun territory. His mood deteriorated further when new legislation
banned the monarchy from holding senior posts in the government—a
reform he was convinced had been deliberately designed to end any
hopes he might have of making a political comeback.
Schooled in the slow-burning nature of Afghan vendettas, Daoud
waited patiently for revenge. In the summer of 1973, with the king
overseas seeking medical treatment for an eye injury, he finally made
his move. The gunshots that woke Layeq’s wife, Mahera, were part
of an operation Daoud described as ‘a bloodless coup,’ carried out
with the help of Soviet-educated leftwing army officers allied to
the Parcham faction of the communist party. The rebels faced only
token resistance and at 7.15am that morning Daoud declared a First
Republic. In a speech delivered over the radio station at which Layeq
used to work, he denounced the king for creating a ‘false democracy’
based on ‘private and class interests,’ and told listeners that the last
decade had been a sham: ‘Democracy or the government of the
people was changed into anarchy and the constitutional monarchy
to a despotic regime.’ Daoud announced that Afghanistan would
remain neutral on the world stage but wanted a permanent solution
to the border dispute with Pakistan. In his closing remarks, he tacitly
acknowledged the last few years of trouble at the university, where he
knew the young Islamists would be outraged by his grab for power.
‘All the people of the country, especially the youth’ should cooperate
with the new regime, he said. The next day, 18 July, Daoud appointed
himself president, prime minister, minister of defence and minister
of foreign affairs.2 Within forty-eight hours the Soviet Union,
Czechoslovakia, India and East Germany formally recognised the
new socialist government, and on 23 July the US followed suit.3 Two
months earlier, American officials had privately described the ‘Afghan
Left’ as ‘small and fragmented,’ with probably ‘more nuisance value
than anything else’.4 Caught by surprise, they were now predicting
that the change in regime ‘could even prove to be a net loss to Moscow
if it results in instability and disorder.’5
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 THE INSURRECTION

The coup was not carried out at the communists’ behest and
Parcham played no major role in the planning of the operation,
but it was happy to ensure that the transition progressed smoothly.
Although Daoud was never particularly close to Layeq, he was friendly
with a number of senior Parcham members and he rewarded their
allies with government posts at a district and national level, most
notably the positions of minister of interior and minister of frontier
affairs, appointments that only exacerbated the rivalry between the
communists’ warring factions. Many in Khalq envied Parcham’s
influence but disdained the unbridled opportunism their comrades
showed in choosing to work with Daoud, whom they still distrusted as
a member of the royal establishment. The president, though, was very
much his own man: a mixture of progressive patriot and authoritarian
soldier, he had no interest in sharing power with anyone. In an effort
to secure the loyalty of his security forces, just weeks after the coup
he issued sweeping promotions to high-ranking army personnel. He
also dissolved parliament and arrested dozens of political opponents.
Mohammed Hashim Maiwandwal, the former prime minister turned
critic of the king who had attracted followers at Zarnigar Park, was
swiftly detained. He was soon found dead in his prison cell, strangled
by his own tie and the cord of his dressing gown. The official verdict
was suicide.
***
The Muslim Youth saw both threat and opportunity in the aftermath of
the coup.With Hekmatyar still serving a prison sentence handed down
by the king, they knew their notoriety made them obvious targets for
Daoud and feared more members would be arrested. At the same time,
they were convinced that their activism precipitated the monarchy’s
demise, which invigorated them: the coup ‘happened just because of
our programmes,’ boasted one member.6
Professor Niazi, the founding father of Islamism in Afghanistan,
was worried about the risks involved in confronting the new regime
head on. Ever since he returned from Egypt in 1957, he had dedicated
himself with a furious intensity to spreading the Muslim Brotherhood’s
ideology. His political and religious project had become all-consuming;
the relentless pace with which he worked even alarmed his friends and
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family. He was affectionate with his wife but rarely showed any love to
his three sons, who were scared of his sudden bursts of anger. When he
was at home in the foothills of northern Kabul, Professor Niazi felt he
was wasting time away from his political work. He made regular trips
to his ancestral village in Ghazni to solve legal disputes among local
communities, dispensing with the suit he was required to wear at the
university and dressing in a shalwar kameez and tightly wound white
turban, giving him the distinctive appearance of an Egyptian sheikh. In
addition to these parochial responsibilities, he had decided to further
his education. In the early 1970s, before Daoud seized power, he spent
a year as a law student in Washington, following in the footsteps of
the Egyptian radical Sayyid Qutb, who studied in the US in the late
1940s. Professor Niazi also attended an Islamic conference in Moscow,
where he met Muslim delegates from the Tajik, Uzbek and Turkmen
Soviet Socialist Republics. Then, at the start of 1973, just months
before the coup, he went on a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, arriving
back in Kabul with a pledge from universities at Mecca and Medina to
grant scholarships to Afghans. By the time Daoud became president
Professor Niazi was unrecognisable from the apathetic teen who once
studied alongside Layeq. He had seen British colonialism up close in
Egypt and been converted to the Brotherhood’s radical ideology; he
had travelled deep into the enemy territories of the US and the Soviet
Union at the height of the Cold War; and he had visited the birthplace
of Islam. He was still barely forty-one years old.7
Daoud immediately recognised the danger posed by the quiet
teacher and demoted him from his position as dean of Islamic law.
Allowed to continue working at the university only under strict
supervision, Professor Niazi retreated further from frontline activism,
well aware that if he stepped out of line again he could lose all access
to his student foot soldiers.8 He had already begun to hand over
responsibility for mentoring the Muslim Youth to a colleague at the
university, Burhanuddin Rabbani, and the transition now picked up
pace. Professor Niazi sensed it was only a matter of time before he was
arrested. If that happened, he needed to know that all his hard work
would not go to waste.
From Badakhshan in northeast Afghanistan, Rabbani’s pedigree
was impressive. His grandfather had spent time studying theology in
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 THE INSURRECTION

Central Asia, until Russian Tsarists forced him to stop travelling to

the region. Reared on stories of Moscow’s ancient hostility to Islam,
Rabbani had resolved to continue the family’s scholarly legacy. After
completing high school, he moved to Kabul and went on to a win
a place at Al-Azhar University in Egypt, just like Professor Niazi; on
his return to Afghanistan he took a job teaching at Kabul University.9
Rabbani was clever, well-spoken and quietly impressive in his academic
work on campus, possessing the sort of outwardly calm temperament
that might be able to stop the Muslim Youth from rushing hastily into
action against Daoud. There was, however, also an abrasive side to his
personality. He was egotistical and shrewd, with a tendency to talk in
rambling monologues to less educated men than himself. Although he
adhered to the Brotherhood’s ideology, he was even more cautious than
Professor Niazi, once declining to issue a pronouncement on whether
music was forbidden in Islam, in case his verdict caused controversy.10
Rabbani too had refused to join the Muslim Youth as they fought and
protested against the communists,11 and they did not entirely trust
him. Hekmatyar in particular found him fickle and arrogant, but the
young Islamists swallowed their pride and gave him—and Professor
Niazi’s judgement—the benefit of the doubt. In 1972, a few months
before Daoud toppled the king, they joined forces with Rabbani and
a group of scholars under a new organisational name, Jamiat-e Islami
(the Islamic Society). Most Afghans would simply refer to it as Jamiat.
For Habib-ur-Rahman, Saifuddin Nasratyar and Hekmatyar, who
was still in jail, Jamiat’s formation was a semantic sleight of hand born
of bureaucratic necessity. After being dubbed the Muslim Youth by the
public and ‘Ikhwanis’ by the communists, they realised their movement
could only gain credibility under an agreed name, with support from
respected scholars. Based on these terms, they established what they
hoped would be an instantly recognisable alliance. For both sides it was
a relationship of convenience: Rabbani and his supporters knew that
the Muslim Youth appealed to young Afghans in ways they could not,
but they thought of Habib-ur-Rahman and the others as a disorganised
rabble in need of firm guidance.12 This discipline would be provided
by Jamiat, which they liked to say was Afghanistan’s first Islamist party
because it was based upon a clear organisational structure and internal
rules and procedures. Each member, no matter his fame or stature,
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 NIGHT LETTERS

would make a written commitment ‘to work for the supremacy of

God’ and ‘obey the orders of the leadership willingly, whether he liked
them or not,’ recalled one of Rabbani’s friends.13
Initially, the two factions put their differences aside and divided up
leadership responsibilities amicably. Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf, another
professor in the Sharia faculty, was appointed as Rabbani’s deputy;
Habib-ur-Rahman was hired as third in command; and Nasratyar
was given the job of heading Jamiat’s youth section. In absentia, the
imprisoned Hekmatyar was handed shared responsibility for political
affairs. The new structure worked fine under the relaxed governance
of the king, but the contrasting ambitions and personalities within the
movement rose to the surface after Daoud came to power. When the
new regime banned protests, cutting off one of the Muslim Youth’s
most effective means of communication, the cracks widened.
The old guard in Jamiat were scholars and aspiring politicians
who understood the nature of compromise and believed in peaceful
methods of change. The Muslim Youth were militants, prepared to do
anything to force their view on society but now lacking an outlet for
their anger. They saw themselves as the first Afghans to stand up to
defend their religion against the encroaching communist threat, and
they resented being ordered around by their elders. They expected to
be treated reverentially and rewarded for their sacrifices, not made
to live according to whims of Muslims they considered inferior. One
of Professor Niazi’s Islamic law students complained that the teachers
allied to Rabbani appeared to support the republic, while Habib-ur-
Rahman’s followers were still intent on creating an Islamic state, by
force if necessary. When the student received a sheaf of propaganda to
distribute on behalf of Jamiat, he left the paperwork in a cave instead,
unwilling to risk his life for a group of staid older men whose aims were
less grandiose than his own.14 The young were looking for inspiration,
not protection, and only the Muslim Youth’s leaders could provide it.
***
When Hekmatyar was released from prison, the summer of 1973 had
passed and autumn was falling. The leaves on the trees were yellow
and brown; a bitter cold would soon be upon Kabul. Had he wanted
to lie low and enjoy the taste of freedom for a while, Hekmatyar’s
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 THE INSURRECTION

fellow activists would have forgiven him, but jail had only hardened his
resolve. A convicted criminal, he knew he would forever be associated
with the fatal stabbing of another student, yet the thought did not
trouble him; he had made peace with the idea that people needed
to die if the Muslim Youth were to succeed. Always headstrong and
volatile, he was now fully prepared to kill and be killed in the name
of Islam. Hekmatyar had long harboured a suspicion that Daoud was
behind the establishment of the communist party and, in his opinion,
the coup proved him right. The regime’s decision to let him go was,
he felt, merely a ruse—part of its plan to destroy the Muslim Youth.
Immediately upon his release, Hekmatyar resumed his activism,
determined to fight back. That first night of freedom he stayed at the
home of a friend in the Jamal Mina area of Kabul, a neighbourhood
sandwiched between the prison and the university, and was welcomed
by a core group of Muslim Youth activists, including the four other
executive council members. After exchanging pleasantries, they
turned their attention to the struggle ahead. ‘Daoud will attack us,’
said Nasratyar. ‘Let’s have a plan for that.’15
The Muslim Youth had become a rogue militant outfit within
Jamiat, acting independently while paying lip service to Rabbani’s
seniority. Nasratyar informed Hekmatyar that they had chosen Habib-
ur-Rahman as both their leader and the chief strategist of a guerrilla
campaign they were planning to launch in the coming months. Their
aim was to carry out an armed coup that would install the Muslim
Youth in power just four years after their founding meeting. Were it to
succeed, the plan would send shockwaves through the Islamic world,
marking the first direct takeover of a government by a Brotherhood-
inspired revolutionary organisation. It would also be seen as a clear
threat across the region, from Afghanistan’s nuclear-armed neighbour,
the Soviet Union, to India, Bangladesh and the ruling royal family in
Iran. The ambition of the plan was all the more remarkable because of
Habib-ur-Rahman’s age. He was just twenty-two.
Aware of the potentially far-reaching consequences, the Muslim
Youth’s new leader was careful not to consult Rabbani and the other
elders in any meaningful detail; he knew, however, that he must seek
counsel from outside the narrow confines of his own fundamentalist
cabal in Kabul. In search of advice, he looked eastwards to Pakistan,
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where his inspiration, the Indian-born author Abul-A’la Maududi,

lived. It was Maududi’s call for an Islamic reformation that had so
appealed to the young Islamists under the king, and the writer’s
thoughts now seemed more apposite than ever. ‘All genuine Muslims,’
he once said, must endure ‘ordeals of fire and sword.’16 Maududi’s
party, Jamaat-e Islami, had established tentative links with the Muslim
Youth years previously, when a senior figure, Qazi Hussain Ahmad,
made at least two visits to Kabul while the monarchy was still in
power. On one of those visits he made a point of speaking for an
hour and a half at a mosque run by a member of the Muslim Youth’s
executive council.17
In the summer of 1973 Habib-ur-Rahman cemented the relationship
by travelling to Pakistan, where he held a face-to-face meeting with
Maududi in Lahore. He also met Qazi Hussain and asked him to consult
with scholars and members of the Pakistani political establishment
about the question foremost in his mind: ‘If we stage a coup against
Daoud, will Russia directly interfere in Afghanistan?’ The Muslim
Youth leader was wary of the government in Islamabad, and in the past
had even denounced it as ‘corrupt’ and ‘perverted.’18 Now, though, he
needed any help he could get. Habib-ur-Rahman would never disclose
the full itinerary of the trip, even to some of his most loyal lieutenants;
nonetheless, there is significant circumstantial evidence to suggest that
he received intelligence training from the Pakistani government. By
the time he returned to Afghanistan he had developed a newfound skill
in the art of espionage.
One of Habib-ur-Rahman’s closest friends was Abdul Basir, a
medical student. Classmates at primary school in Mazar-e Sharif, they
also attended the same high school in Kabul. The Muslim Youth leader
trusted Basir more than almost any other activist and he ordered him
to establish links with sympathetic soldiers and officers in the security
forces to prepare the ground for a coup. Just as it had been during
the king’s reign, military service was compulsory for young Afghan
men under Daoud, making it easy enough to meet soldiers; however,
Basir still had to be careful. He liaised with informants in clandestine
meetings in restaurants, coffee shops and quiet corners of Kabul
University—public places where they could give the appearance of
holding ordinary mundane conversations. On other occasions, the
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 THE INSURRECTION

rendezvous points were mosques or Basir would exchange furtive

messages with his contacts as they walked through Kabul’s busy
streets. Only in rare instances did he invite them to his family home
in rural Parwan, where they could talk more openly but ran the risk
of arousing suspicion from the local community. Several other hand-
picked Muslim Youth activists assumed similar roles, secretly meeting
military officials of various ranks and having to send progress reports
to Habib-ur-Rahman directly.19 For a brief period, Hekmatyar was
among them.
While the MuslimYouth were able to find a number of sympathisers
inside the security forces, it was already becoming clear that the
general public would be far harder to convince. Daoud had years of
experience as a statesman and a soldier, and came from a family with
a history of ruling Afghanistan. His patriotic brand of authoritarian
socialism united the people after many years of uncertainty under
the king. In contrast, the Muslim Youth were inexperienced young
students with a track record of gang violence; even some of their own
members wondered if they were out of their depth. The Brotherhood
in Egypt had spent decades building up a considerable grassroots
following when prominent figures in the army enlisted its help for
the 1952 coup that brought the Free Officers movement to power.
The challenge in Afghanistan was far greater. The comparatively raw
Muslim Youth—frightened, blinkered, over-enthusiastic—were too
impatient and rushed their work. The more ambitious among them
even drew up a potential cabinet: they earmarked the twenty-five-
year-old Hekmatyar as the country’s president and Professor Niazi
as prime minister; Habib-ur-Rahman was to be foreign minister,
Nasratyar interior minister and Rabbani education minister.20 Their
naivety proved disastrous, as Daoud, who had made a career out of
subterfuge, uncovered the plan with ease. In the autumn of 1973, just
months after the fall of the monarchy, dozens of Islamist conspirators
inside the state’s security apparatus were detained, including the
commander of an entire military division and a colonel in the air force.
Then, in November, Habib-ur-Rahman was arrested as he left his home
in Kart-e Parwan, near Layeq’s house. He was never seen again.21
***

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At the time, Daoud’s coup and the detention of Habib-ur-Rahman

seemed mere footnotes in a violent and tumultuous year that electrified
Islamists throughout the wider region. In October 1973 the Soviet-
backed governments of Egypt and Syria attacked Israel in an effort to
avenge their 1967 loss. Just as outright triumph seemed possible, the
US airlifted weapons and supplies to the Jewish state; Israel counter-
attacked, successfully holding on to the West Bank, Gaza and much of
the Golan Heights. The conflict had an impact far beyond the twenty
days it lasted. Following the death in 1970 of the Afghan communists’
hero, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the new Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had
adopted a less hostile attitude towards Islam. He named the military
offensive against Israel ‘Operation Badr,’ after one of the Prophet
Mohammed’s greatest victories, symbolising a tectonic shift in the
region’s political climate. After decades in which secular nationalism
had been the dominant force in Middle Eastern politics, Islam was on
the rise again. Led by the fundamentalist monarchy in Saudi Arabia,
Arab countries responded to America’s intervention with a crippling
five-month international oil embargo that sent fuel prices soaring in
the West. Riyadh’s economic, political and cultural influence grew as a
result, and radical Islam gradually emerged from the shadows.
The Arabs’ defeat in the October 1973 war coincided with a period
of intense reflection and desperation for the Muslim Youth. As soon
as he heard about Habib-ur-Rahman’s arrest, Hekmatyar fled Kabul,
fearing the government would come for him next. Despite being the
MuslimYouth’s de facto interim leader, he had still not graduated from
university; in the years since the movement’s formation, he had gone
from being an engineering student with aspirations to work in the
private sector to being a former convict wanted dead or alive by the
government. He hid out in Paktia, Khost and Paktika, on the frontier
with Pakistan in southeast Afghanistan. Unknown to most people in
the countryside, he craved the safety of anonymity. His dream of an
Islamic revolution was not dead but Habib-ur-Rahman’s arrest had
dealt it a near fatal blow. Hekmatyar needed to think. Constantly on
the move, he flitted between the homes of friends and acquaintances,
frantically trying to stay one step ahead of the government. The
local population consisted of Muslims who lived by the tribal rules
of Pashtunwali, an informal legal code based around ancient ideas of
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hospitality, justice, honour and revenge, and Hekmatyar relied on this

to keep him safe. Nothing was more important to the local people than
these idiosyncratic edicts, not even Islam.
Hekmatyar bedded down in a ramshackle hotel near a bus station
in Gomal, Paktika, that was the kind of restaurant-cum-flophouse
commonly inhabited by vagabonds and transients across Afghanistan.
There he waited, hoping for a moment of divine inspiration; his prayers
were answered when an activist tracked him down, bearing a message
saying that an old friend wanted to meet. Packing the few belongings
he had stashed on his hasty retreat from Kabul, Hekmatyar set off on
a 200-mile trip to north-west Pakistan to reunite with one of his most
fanatical peers and closest confidants. Together, they would plot their
revenge against the Daoud regime.22
The man Hekmatyar was going to see was called Habib-ur-Rahman,
but it was not the MuslimYouth’s infamous leader, who remained in jail
and out of reach. There was another Habib-ur-Rahman on the group’s
executive council and, to avoid confusion, the young Islamists had
given them their own distinct honorifics. Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman
was their imprisoned chief, so-called because of the subject he studied
at Kabul Polytechnic; the second Habib-ur-Rahman was known as
Mawlawi Sahib, a title bestowed upon religious scholars. There was no
mistaking their personalities or physical appearance. Mawlawi Sahib
was an ideological guide, not a hands on political and military strategist
like his namesake. Engineer Habib-ur Rahman had a neatly trimmed
moustache and wore his hair in a tidy, fashionable side parting, while
Mawlawi Sahib had a fist-length beard, dark eyes, angular cheekbones
and large protruding ears. Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman had grown
accustomed to the frenetic pace of life in Kabul; Mawlawi Sahib was
proudly out of step with the ever-changing city.
The son of a scholar, Mawlawi Sahib had been home-schooled
by his father in Laghman province until his late teens, when he left
to study at a madrassa in Nangarhar. In the mid-1960s he enrolled
at Kabul University, earning a degree in Islamic law; Professor Niazi
then hired him as a teacher in the Sharia faculty. Malwawi Sahib’s
background gave him the authoritative religious standing so many
of his colleagues lacked. He was a co-founder of the Muslim Youth
and soon became one of the movement’s most prominent activists.
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Hekmatyar first met him in the third floor dormitory mosque at the
university and was immediately impressed, finding him ‘trustworthy,
sensitive, serious and brave, and ready to make any sacrifice.’23 They
quickly became friends, with Mawlawi Sahib serving as Hekmatyar’s
initial link to Professor Niazi and the Sharia faculty. In contrast to other
teachers, including Professor Niazi, Mawlawi Sahib was not afraid to
participate in fights with the communists, injuring an eye in one clash.
Ignoring the wishes of his parents and risking opprobrium in the tight-
knit, traditional community of his home village, he refused to marry,
vowing instead to concentrate on his activism and missionary work.
He ran a mosque in Kabul and published his own magazine.24 Around
ten years younger than Professor Niazi and roughly six years older
than Hekmatyar, Mawlawi Sahib had been the pendulum at the centre
of Afghanistan’s increasingly divided Islamist scene. When Daoud took
power he sided with the young Islamists—convinced that they must
dedicate their entire lives to the Islamic revolution that would one day
sweep Afghanistan. ‘It might take two years or it might take four years,’
he told his fellow activists. ‘It might even take 30 years. I will not be
around then but the revolution will be completed by you.’25
Mawlawi Sahib was hiding out in Zmari China, an arid, mountainous
area in Pakistan, working as a preacher in a local mosque, when he sent
for Hekmatyar. The fugitives greeted each other warmly, then prayed
together. Unlike other activists, Mawlawi Sahib was not despondent
about their predicament, nor did he live in fear of being caught by the
Afghan government; instead, he knew they needed to stay calm and
think clearly. To Hekmatyar’s surprise, Rabbani, the leader of Jamiat,
was also living in the area, having fled Kabul when Daoud’s security
forces tried to arrest him on campus. Mawlawi Sahib had taught
alongside Rabbani at the university and regarded him cautiously, if
less disdainfully than Hekmatyar. The Muslim Youth leaders knew
they would be wasting their time worrying about Rabbani’s past
equivocations now; standing up to Daoud was more important than
feuding over matters of Islamic jurisprudence. All three men agreed
that they could not risk returning to Afghanistan, leaving them with
only one option: they were drawn deeper into Pakistan.26
***

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The nation of Pakistan was born amid the blood and trauma of Britain’s
dying empire. Created in 1947 as a homeland for Muslims caught up in
the ferocious sectarianism of post-colonial India, it was undergoing one
of the most tumultuous moments in its history when, some twenty-
seven years later, the Muslim Youth came calling. Having recently lost
vast swathes of territory to the new state of Bangladesh, the Pakistani
government faced a nationalist insurgency in southwest Balochistan
province, where it imposed martial law. Daoud actively supported
the rebellion, covertly funnelling arms to the militants while also
threatening to take back the Pashtun territory further north that he
and his communist allies claimed rightfully belonged to Afghanistan.
Sections of Pakistan’s political and military establishment already
feared the country’s very survival was at risk when India conducted
its first successful nuclear weapons test on 18 May 1974. Codenamed
the Smiling Buddha, the test terrified and humiliated Islamabad, whose
military strength paled in comparison. Faced with these mounting
crises, Pakistan felt surrounded by enemies and was looking for a way
to strike back. The Muslim Youth fit the bill as a proxy force it could
unleash against Kabul should the need arise. The relationship was far
from one-sided, however; both parties were out to exploit each other,
with little thought as to the consequences.
Through intermediaries including the prominent Jamaat-e Islami
member Qazi Hussain Ahmad, Pakistani officials had been quietly
monitoring the Afghan Islamists for years. Engineer Habib-ur-
Rahman’s trip to see Maududi had provided them with an opening,
while Hekmatyar’s arrival in the city of Peshawar gave them the last
piece of encouragement they needed. Pakistan’s military intelligence
service—the ISI—drew up a detailed list of Muslim Youth members
who could be smuggled across the border from Afghanistan and trained
as insurgents. Soon afterwards, the paramilitary Frontier Corps, a relic
of British colonialism, was given the task of teaching the new arrivals
how to fight.27
The exact number of Muslim Youth members who attended the
courses in guerrilla warfare, starting in the spring and summer of 1974,
was kept a closely guarded secret, but their ranks included several men
who ultimately rose to the top of Hizb-e Islami, founded two years
later. Among them was Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman’s school friend,
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Abdul Basir. One activist recalled being trained in a group of thirty or

thirty-five men near Attock, to the east of Peshawar, where he spent
around fifty days learning a variety of military techniques. Recruits
were instructed how to shoot, shown how to make bombs using
gunpowder and taught martial arts in case they were ever arrested and
needed to disarm their captors. Mawlawi Sahib was responsible for
their ideological training, indoctrinating them with stories of glorious
martyrdom;28 Hekmatyar also spurred them on, while Rabbani
remained detached from the military activities—offering his support
but keeping a prudent distance from the day-to-day practicalities. Up
to this point the Muslim Youth had only brawled with their communist
enemies. Now they were intent on waging all-out war.
That summer the vicious cycle of government oppression and
mounting Islamist extremism began to accelerate. On 29 May 1974,
regime forces raided Professor Niazi’s house in north Kabul. In a
society where personal privacy is regarded as sacrosanct and men are
expected to defend their family’s honour, the raid was an attack not
just on his liberty but his dignity. The forces ransacked his personal
library, tearing through the political and religious tracts he had
painstakingly collected during years of travel and research. Professor
Niazi’s books were confiscated and his family were not told where he
was being taken. At around the same time, Nasratyar, a member of
the Muslim Youth’s executive council, was captured in Herat, western
Afghanistan. Communists allied to Daoud linked Nasratyar’s arrest
to a plot to assassinate a leading figure in the Pashtun nationalist
movement, Khan Abdul Wali Khan, whose father was a contemporary
of Mahatma Gandhi.29 The Muslim Youth denied the allegation but
continued to prepare for war. One activist bought ten purpose-made
pistols in Darra Adem Khel, a Pakistani frontier town famous for its
bootleg arms manufacturers; the pistols were smuggled to Abdul
Shakoor, a senior Muslim Youth member, who ferried them to a safe
house in Kabul. But the building was under government surveillance
and Shakoor was arrested and tortured, sending more shockwaves
through the movement.30
The Daoud regime was on the offensive, lashing out at its Islamist
opponents just as the Nasser government in Egypt had done. In the
clearest warning yet to the Muslim Youth, it finally announced the
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fate of Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman after nine months of official

silence. On Monday 19 August 1974, the front page of The Kabul Times
carried a story about the Muslim Youth’s failed coup the previous
autumn: ‘The cases of a number of people who were caught red-
handed committing terrorism and espionage, were submitted after
completion to the Military Tribunal,’ the state-owned paper said. All
the suspects named in the article received jail terms, except Engineer
Habib-ur-Rahman, who had been sentenced to death.31 Daoud
declined repeated requests from the student revolutionary’s family to
be given his body for burial.32
While violence and intimidation were the government’s sole
methods of combating the Muslim Youth, the young Islamists refused
to be cowed. Daoud’s crackdown had turned them into outlaws and
desperadoes, cut adrift even from their own families. With little left to
lose, they took comfort in the thought that if they did not topple the
regime they would at least die as martyrs. One senior activist urged his
friends to draw inspiration from the ‘thousands and thousands of people’
who had lost their lives fighting for God throughout Islamic history.
They were not just fighting for Afghans but for Muslims everywhere.33
***
Now the Muslim Youth’s new permanent leader, Hekmatyar made
several clandestine trips to Kabul and the surrounding provinces
between mid-1974 and mid-1975. Travelling in disguise, he was
accompanied by a lone bodyguard: a young high school graduate
named Shakeeb. Careful to reveal his presence only to his most
trusted colleagues, Hekmatyar ghosted through the capital, passing
checkpoints and the ubiquitous portraits of Daoud that stared down
from street corners. Taking circuitous routes to ensure he wasn’t being
followed, he gauged the mood of the capital; it became clear that, for
the first time in its history, Kabul was the centre of a police state. The
Muslim Youth activists who remained in the city lived in permanent
fear of being exposed and accused of terrorism. Members still at the
university operated in highly secretive cells, with one circle of activists
per faculty. The heads of the circles came together every Thursday
at a house near the city’s huge Soviet-funded grain silo, where they
developed their own coded language to spread among disciples in
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town. Unable to openly approach each other in public, the young

Islamists knew they needed a safe way to identify colleagues. They
decided on a simple solution: if an activist suspected a passing stranger
was a fellow member, he should ask him a banal question, about the
current price of a kilogram of figs, for example. If the stranger replied
with an outlandish number it was confirmation that he was a member
of the Muslim Youth.
For the second time in less than a year, the Muslim Youth began to
formulate a plan to overthrow the government; only now Hekmatyar
was its architect. His design, drawn up in a series of secret meetings
in the neighbourhoods of Kart-e Parwan and Shahar-e Kohna, called
for several simultaneous uprisings across the country. These rebellions
would distract the government while sympathisers in the army staged
a coup in the capital. One of the command centres for the operation
was established in Pul-e Sokhta, a quiet suburb on Kabul’s western
outskirts, at the house of a former classmate of Hekmatyar’s. Three
activists had the task of smuggling handwritten coded instructions to
the provinces detailing the plan for each area, notifying the volunteer
guerrillas in the countryside about the coming insurrection a month
in advance. In case of capture, many of the participants adopted
pseudonyms for the duration of the operation. Some did not even
share their real identities with each other, including Hekmatyar, who
took the name Abdullah, Slave of God.34 The insurrection was timed
to coincide with a series of celebratory events marking the second
anniversary of Daoud’s coup, in the summer of 1975.
On the morning of 17 July, the president attended a military parade
in Kabul. Wearing a suit and tie, a lambskin hat and the trademark dark
glasses that made him look like a mafia don, Daoud was greeted by the
national anthem and a thirty-two-gun salute. That evening, he issued
a radio address describing his own coup as a ‘revolution of the social
conscience’ and proclaiming that the government was ‘endeavouring
to clean the minds of the people.’ He criticised his old foe, Pakistan,
insisting that ‘no provocation, subversion and even threat’ would
change his stance on Pashtunistan, and highlighted government
achievements in increasing rice and fruit production. He pledged
to nationalise banks, expand health services across the country and
improve the conditions of ‘small and poor farmers.‘35
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As the anniversary celebrations unfolded, the Islamic insurrection

began. The Muslim Youth’s first target was the Panjshir valley, a
picturesque spot at the foot of the Hindu Kush, eighty miles north
of Kabul.  After cutting the local telephone lines, they launched their
attack before sunrise on 22 July, using logs to form a makeshift barrier
on the one main road running through the area. Armed with sub-
machine guns and explosives, they then split up into small raiding
parties. The rebels appeared to have chosen their target well; Panjshir
was close enough to Kabul to alarm the government but far enough
from the capital for the Muslim Youth to dig in before the army
could send reinforcements. At the valley’s entrance, to the right of
the road, a river moved cool and fast, tumbling over boulders and
rocks. Mountains rose sharply on either side of the water, before
the landscape broadened out into a vista of wheat fields, mulberry
trees and shallow pools. Surrounded by these natural fortifications
the Muslim Youth hoped they could buy themselves enough time to
win over the population. But for all their careful planning, they had
not taken into account the feelings of the local people; Panjshir was
not Kabul University and its illiterate farmhands and landowners had
no appetite for revolutionary change. Rather than awaken residents
from their political slumber, the uprising shattered generations of
contented calm.
While local government offices fell without much of a fight,
residents’ anger at the Muslim Youth’s conduct rose as the hours
passed. By the afternoon a taxi lay hastily abandoned in the road, its
charred carcass riddled with bullet holes. The body of a dead Afghan
officer was sprawled in the dirt nearby, one arm reaching out and the
other twisted at his side. When the Muslim Youth blew open the safe
of a state-owned bank, hoping to steal money in aid of the revolution,
they seemed more like common criminals than religious saviours.
Villagers turned on the rebels, denouncing them as bandits and
thieves. Government reinforcements, led by an elite commando unit,
thundered into the valley. Rather than stay and fight, the Muslim Youth
ran for their lives, and many of them were killed as they did so. One
wounded activist was detained by government soldiers who dragged
him for half a mile before summarily executing him. They then set fire
to his beard and threw his body from a mountain.36
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It was a similar story in Laghman province, where Mawlawi Sahib

Habib-ur-Rahman led the operation. For the purpose of the mission
he adopted the pseudonym Saif-ur-Rahman, Sword of the Merciful.
After crossing from Pakistan, Mawlawi Sahib and his twenty-six men
set up camp on a mountain and waited for darkness. They descended
into the provincial capital, Mehtar Lam, in the dead of night, roaming
the streets in packs. Armed with Sten guns, one squad raided the
local bank just as their colleagues in Panjshir had done, while another
captured the governor’s office. They held on for several hours,
convinced Hekmatyar’s grand plan was working. Then, as the sun rose
and residents woke to the news that their town had been overrun by
insurgents, Mawlawi Sahib began to realise that something was wrong.
Like their counterparts in Panjshir, the Muslim Youth in Laghman had
cut the local phone lines in advance of their attack, but they had acted
too early: the government fixed the lines before the insurrection even
began, allowing police to call for reinforcements. As troops sped into
town, Mawlawi Sahib ordered his men to retreat. He fled with one
of his fighters to the nearby village of Chardahi, hoping that people
would protect them. It was yet another misreading of local sentiment.
The Muslim Youth’s raid, and the prospect of government reprisals,
had alienated residents, and someone informed the authorities of their
whereabouts. Police rushed to the village and opened fire, wounding
Mawlawi Sahib’s colleague. Rather than leave him behind and make
a break for the mountains, Mawlawi Sahib stayed at his side. They
surrendered together.37
Elsewhere in eastern Afghanistan, the insurrection unfolded like
a chain of explosions, each uprising designed to magnify the impact
of the last until the cumulative effect destroyed the government. In
Nangarhar, fighters commanded by a famously tempestuous activist
named Adam Khan raided a local prison; uprisings also took place in
Kunar and Paktia. It quickly became obvious, however, that the regime
was far stronger than the Muslim Youth imagined. As the rebellions in
Laghman and Panjshir crumbled, activists in neighbouring Kapisa hastily
cancelled their operation to seize control of the district of Kohistan.38
Near Kabul, a squad of young Islamists who planned to shut down the
capital’s electricity supply by sabotaging a Soviet-built dam called off
the mission when they realised that the wider insurrection had failed.
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Had all these uprisings succeeded, the Muslim Youth may well have
weakened the government sufficiently for sympathisers in the security
forces to stage a coup, as Hekmatyar hoped. But Afghanistan was not
yet ready for a radical Islamic state and the entire operation was ill-
judged. The last, decisive blow came when government troops carried
out a series of raids across Kabul, arresting many of the army and air
force officers tasked with moving against the regime.39
Daoud’s satisfaction at thwarting the insurrection was tempered
by his embarrassment that the young Islamists had managed to stage
a high-profile guerrilla operation even after two years of relentless
harassment by the state’s security services. The Muslim Youth were
supposed to have been broken; instead, Hekmatyar’s fledgling army
had proved resilient, if not tactically astute or ideologically aligned
with popular opinion. As far afield as Nimroz province, in a remote
corner of southwest Afghanistan, the authorities in Kabul sent a coded
telephone message to the governor warning him that parts of the
country were under attack.40 In the days that followed the insurrection
outlandish rumours gripped Kabul. There was wild speculation that
tens of thousands of fighters had been involved and absurd claims that
the American and British ambassadors had been taken hostage.41
Daoud worried that his reputation had been badly damaged. He
exploited the Muslim Youth’s defeat for propaganda purposes but
withheld the true nature of the plot from the public, fearing that it
exposed the flaws of his authoritarian rule. Rather than crush the
young Islamists, his government had pushed them to new extremes.
They were no longer student activists but militant revolutionaries
prepared to fight and die for their beliefs. The Muslim Youth were now
mujahideen, the vanguard once envisioned by Sayyid Qutb: killing and
being killed for God alone.
Five days after the uprisings The Kabul Times ran a two-column,
140-word front page story under the headline, ‘Saboteurs incited
by Pakistan subdued.’ The article described the rebels in Panjshir as
‘a group of reactionary traitors’ who had ‘resorted to robbery and
sabotage.’ The majority of them had been arrested and the others were
‘either wounded or punished for their acts,’ while further investigations
were ongoing.42 An editorial on page two claimed that the incident
illustrated Pakistan’s ‘desperate moves against Afghanistan,’ accusing
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the guerrillas of being misled and encouraged to take up arms against

their own government. ‘Treachery and political schemings do not
pay in this age,’ the newspaper warned. No mention was made of the
rebellions in other provinces.43
While Hekmatyar remained convinced that his plan had come
close to succeeding, rank and file Muslim Youth members were left
dangerously exposed by its failure. They had been given no advance
warning of the operation and were as stunned as the general public
as its impact reverberated around the country. Fearing arrest, a
schoolmate of one of the militants killed in Panjshir fled from his home
in Kapisa to Chitral in Pakistan, staying there for a month until he
thought it was safe to return. A Muslim Youth activist in Nangarhar
was jailed for three days after villagers wrongly informed police that
he had explosives inside his house.44 A profound sense of shock rippled
through the clerical establishment and the more moderate Islamic
groups trying to co-exist with the Daoud regime. ‘It was against our
national interest and against our Islamic teachings and they called it
jihad,’ recalled a member of the relatively liberal Khuddam ul-Furqan
movement. Horrified by the news of the insurrection, he watched as
panic gripped clerics and scholars all over the country.45

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Bloodied and bruised by the failed insurrection, Hekmatyar’s

mujahideen hid out in Peshawar. Over the last year they had come to see
the Pakistani city as their headquarters and they fled there in droves to
escape Daoud’s vengeful security forces. The old frontier town felt like
a natural refuge for a group of young idealists with fantastical dreams
of bringing down the Soviet and American empires. For centuries it
had been fought over, invaded and contested by imperial powers and
feuding clans, yet it had never been fully tamed. Legends of these
ancient wars and injustices were immortalised in poems and songs that
reduced even hardened tribesmen to tears. Peshawar had been part of
Afghanistan until the British redrew the border in 1893, and it still
held a unique place in the hearts of millions of Afghans.
For the Muslim Youth, who regarded all nation states as man-made
impositions against God’s will, the city was a symbol and a safe haven.
It put them out of Daoud’s reach while giving them easy access to their
patrons in Pakistan and their supporters back home. The streets were a
maze of fortress-like houses and cramped mosques perfect for evading
prying eyes and plotting the next stage in their long revolution. But
Hekmatyar’s student army still had to be careful; throughout its 2000-
year history Peshawar had been a vibrant mix of cultures and faiths,
and Islamic extremism had never really taken root. Pashtuns were
the dominant ethnic group and they did not appreciate being told
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that their tribal codes were incompatible with their religious beliefs.
For the Muslim Youth to prosper in Peshawar, they would need to lie
low or risk turning it into another battleground. Already there were
worrying signs that they had brought their conflict with them.
***
As the sheer scale of their defeat began to dawn, the exiled Islamists
turned on each other. Arguments broke out between the movement’s
different factions, with students and teachers, moderates and radicals
clashing over whether to pursue a strategy of violent armed insurrection
or peaceful political change. For the first time since Abdul Rahim
Niazi’s death, they questioned themselves—shocked by the opposition
inside Afghanistan to their nascent guerrilla war. ‘People were calling
us tribal men,’ recalled one Muslim Youth member. ‘Some were saying
we were from Pakistan and some were saying we were British, so this
became a reason for our differences. The debates were on two issues:
should we conduct an armed struggle or a cultural struggle?’1
The moderates were in a distinct minority, numbering as few as
nine men. They were fronted by Burhanuddin Rabbani, the former
professor at Kabul University and head of Jamiat, the movement that
had tried to subsume and pacify the Muslim Youth in the final year
of the monarchy. The radicals numbered around 150 men and were
grouped around Hekmatyar.2 A bitter new rivalry was developing
between the two would-be leaders, whose contrasting personalities
and political philosophies were increasingly incompatible. Hekmatyar
was in his late twenties, volatile, uncompromising and militant;
Rabbani was in his mid thirties, calm, calculating and naturally inclined
towards dialogue rather than direct action. They were both intelligent,
stubborn and highly ambitious.
The insurrection had scarred each of them in different ways. Rabbani
was dismayed with the way the rebellion unfolded, fearing that it had
irrevocably damaged the Islamists’ cause and blaming Hekmatyar for
this. Always wary of taking up arms against Daoud, in private Rabbani
maintained that he had not spoken out earlier against the militarisation
of the movement because of pressure from Pakistan and the more
extreme elements within the Muslim Youth. Hekmatyar accepted
responsibility for the insurrection but was convinced that it had failed
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because of treachery within the Islamists’ ranks, not because it was

ill-planned and poorly executed. His disciples were incensed with
Rabbani’s attitude and thought he was being cynically opportunistic.
Had the revolt succeeded, they believed he would happily have
reaped the benefits; now he was exploiting the martyrdom of their
friends to sideline Hekmatyar and enhance his own power. Hekmatyar
complained that Rabbani and a small number of activists ‘did not
morally agree with armed struggle’ from the start.3
The rival factions eventually formed a five-man delegation of
clerics from eastern Afghanistan to resolve their dispute. When the
clerics met Rabbani, he griped that Hekmatyar was behaving like the
leader of a movement, even though no one had appointed him to that
position. In turn, Hekmatyar told them he had acted in good faith, by
voluntarily stepping into the shoes of the executed Engineer Habib-ur-
Rahman. The clerics persuaded both sides to hold a meeting where a
leader could be decisively elected. Rabbani agreed to attend but failed
to turn up; in his absence, Hekmatyar won by a landslide.
The vote was meaningless. In the summer of 1976 the clerical
delegation convened a second round of talks, holding a gathering at
a safe house in the neighbourhood of Nishtarabad in Peshawar. To the
agreement of both factions, they proposed that a neutral candidate
should lead a unified movement. In response, Rabbani stood up,
announcing that he no longer considered himself to be the Islamists’
leader.Then Hekmatyar rose. ‘I was chosen by your votes to be emir of
the movement, but now I am quitting,’ he said. This was an emotional
moment for the mujahideen. All the activists in the room had lost
friends in the struggle against the Daoud government and many had
lost relatives. Physically and psychologically, those who survived were
shattered—cut off from family and homes, the trauma of war made
worse by the mistrust and betrayal that lingered in its aftermath.
Shouting and crying filled the room. Adam Khan, the tempestuous
Muslim Youth activist who had helped launch the insurrection in
Nangarhar, got to his feet, pulled out a pistol and threatened to shoot
anyone who rejected the clerics’ decision.
The man they chose to unite the two factions as their leader, or emir,
and head of a new executive council was Mohammed Amin Weqad,
a former Islamic law student at Kabul University. During the king’s
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reign, Weqad had been responsible for ensuring the smooth running
of the Muslim Youth’s network in a swathe of eastern Afghanistan. An
old student of Rabbani’s and a friend of Hekmatyar’s, he played no
part in the insurrection and had not been damaged by the fallout. At
the Nishtarabad meeting, Weqad struck a conciliatory tone, giving a
magnanimous and gracious acceptance speech. Hekmatyar was his
right hand and Rabbani was his left, he said. He assured the room he
would act with the advice and guidance of everyone.
For a few brief months, Afghanistan’s Islamists were united. They
formally named the new movement Hizb-e Islami that same summer,
when senior party members again met in Nishtarabad on 13 June 1976.
Several names were considered, including Jamaat-e Islami and the
Muslim Brotherhood, in homage to the Pakistani and Egyptian parties
that been central to the Muslim Youth’s development. Another name
put forward was the Party of Abu Hanifa, after the founder of the Hanafi
school of Islamic jurisprudence. Party of God was also suggested but
there was a movement in Iran already called that. Members still liked
the sound of the name, though, so they decided to drop the word ‘God’
and replace it with the word ‘Islam’. They finally adopted the name
under which they would make history, Hizb-e Islami Afghanistan, the
Islamic Party of Afghanistan. Most of their fellow countrymen would
end up shortening the name to Hizb.4
***
While the mujahideen tried to settle their differences, back in Kabul
the men who once led and inspired the MuslimYouth planned an escape
from the same insect-infested jail that previously held Hekmatyar.
Professor Niazi had been detained there since the raid on his home
in May 1974; imprisoned alongside him were Mawlawi Sahib Habib-
ur-Rahman and Saifuddin Nasratyar. The jail, in the neighbourhood of
Deh Mazang, backed onto a rocky mountain covered by a smattering
of houses. Immediately in front of it was an office for traffic police and
a roundabout where three roads converged.To the rear was a cemetery
and to the left a collection of low-slung shops.
In a bakery situated amid the houses and stores, a small cadre of
mujahideen still on the loose in Kabul set to work digging a tunnel.
Climbing into the kiln at night, once the naan bread had been cooked
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and sold each day, they used picks and chisels to hack at the earth
below, piling the soil and dirt into sacks while others kept watch. As
the tunnel grew in length, they ran an electricity line down into the
darkness so they could dig with the aid of lamplight. From inside the
prison, the inmates—who had devised the plan and shared it with their
fellow conspirators during visiting hours—also began to burrow. Ever-
fearful of being uncovered, they took turns, with one man chipping at
the rock while another sat over the deepening hole to stop their work
being noticed by the guards. The idea was for the tunnels to link up,
saving time and allowing the prisoners to crawl to the bakery where
they could escape to freedom. During a week-and-a-half of back-
breaking labour the two groups dug a combined length of 110 metres,
only to be left distraught when they realised that the tunnels did not
align. Prison guards discovered the plan before it could be redrawn
and the mujahideen working at the bakery ran for their lives. Professor
Niazi, Mawlawi Sahib and Nasratyar had lost their chance of escape;
Hizb would have to move on without them.5
At around this time the party leadership in Peshawar decided to
contact the Daoud regime. Senior members including Hekmatyar,
Rabbani and Weqad had come to the conclusion that the government
could not be toppled in the short-term, but they sensed an opportunity
to isolate their most important enemy, the communists. Daoud’s
autocratic instincts had recently seen him establish his own party, ban
all other political movements and begin to purge the Marxists from
his administration. In a house in central Peshawar, a prominent Hizbi,
Qarib-ur-Rahman Saeed, composed a letter to the Afghan president
using a typewriter given to the party by its allies in Pakistan’s Jamaat-e
Islami. Hekmatyar sat beside him as he typed. The letter betrayed
none of the self-doubt the mujahideen felt. Instead, it offered to form
a joint front with the Daoud government in a decisive move against
the left: ‘If you take your arms from around the communists, our
men will work with you as soldiers,’ the letter said. As an appeal to
Daoud’s pragmatism rather than a realistic offer of compromise, it was
written more in hope than expectation. A Hizb intelligence operative
smuggled the message into Afghanistan, where he handed it to a
relative of Daoud’s who worked at Kabul Polytechnic. Nothing came
of the offer.6
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Undeterred, Hizb returned to a war-footing—the stance Hekmatyar

had always favoured. Even as a student, he had shown a propensity
for violence and he had since developed a pathological hatred for
Daoud. The question of why the Muslim Youth’s insurrection failed
in the summer of 1975 continued to trouble Hekmatyar; he and his
supporters could not shake off the feeling that they had been betrayed
by someone deep inside the Islamic movement. Their suspicions were
heightened when the Daoud regime arrested three mujahideen sent
into Afghanistan on an undercover operation. The men were caught
smuggling Hizb night letters inside a five litre oil can. Having reached
the city of Jalalabad and bedded down in a mosque for the night, they
were detained at a bus stop in town the next morning, then transferred
to the jail at Deh Mazang. Much to the surprise of the other inmates,
one of them, a man named Hafiz, was swiftly released and allowed to
return to Peshawar. The other two, who were nephews of a prominent
Hizbi, Jamil-ur-Rahman, continued to be held by the Afghan
authorities. Not long afterwards, a letter from Nasratyar arrived in the
frontier city, addressed to the Hizb leadership. It had been smuggled
out of jail and claimed that Hafiz had been freed because he was a
government agent; Nasratyar’s allegation was soon supported by a
similar message authored by the two mujahideen arrested with Hafiz.
Hizb detained Hafiz and, under questioning, he disclosed the identity
of another mole, a minor figure called Noor Mohammed. Brought in
for interrogation, Noor Mohammed quickly confessed. He was, he
said, just one link in a long trail of deceit that led to a spy working at
the very heart of the movement.7
***
The ringleader’s name was Jan Mohammed, Hizb’s financial officer
and one of its most revered figures. A Pahstun from the Safi tribe
that populates a large part of north-eastern Afghanistan, he had a
reputation for integrity second to none. He was born in the village of
Goro in Kunar’s Pech Valley, a remote corner of the country shaded
from the outside world by pine and cedar trees. Rhesus monkeys,
leopards, vipers and camel spiders stalked the local mountains, which
merged with the snow-capped Pakistan frontier. While Kabul had
changed significantly under the king, Kunar was trapped in time: its
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people were parochial, resilient and insular. Jan Mohammed was a rare
exception. The third of five sons, he decided to pursue his education
in the Afghan capital and graduated from Khushal Khan Baba High
School before enrolling at Kabul Polytechnic, just as the Muslim Youth
were emerging on the city’s streets. He was among the first wave of
recruits. Even in the ferment of revolutionary Kabul, with armed gangs
of Islamists and communists fighting in the streets, he was a steady
and gentle presence. During one confrontation he was assaulted by
a Marxist, who threw sand in his eyes; his friends caught the attacker
but Jan Mohammed refused to have him punished. While some of his
colleagues denounced the communists as unbelievers, Jan Mohammed
saw them as fellow Muslims who had unwittingly strayed from the
straight path of Islam. Renowned for his piety, he routinely woke in
the middle of the night for the tahajjud prayer—a ritual conducted by
the Prophet Mohammed that is above and beyond the five daily prayers
called for under Islamic custom.8
Well liked and able to reason with his most vociferous opponents,
Jan Mohammed rose through the Muslim Youth’s ranks and became
close friends with the movement’s leaders. He accompanied Engineer
Habib-ur-Rahman on his secretive trip to meet Abul-A’la Maududi in
Lahore, setting in motion the Muslim Youth’s fateful relationship with
the Pakistani government. There were even whispers that Engineer
Habib-ur-Rahman had wanted Jan Mohammed to succeed him as
leader of the movement. When Hizb was officially formed in the
summer of 1976, Jan Mohammed was put in charge of the party’s
financial affairs—a pivotal position that spoke of the high respect in
which he was held. At this early stage, the small amount of funding
that kept Hizb afloat came from sympathetic donors among the Afghan
public and, crucially, the Pakistani government. Jan Mohammed was
entrusted with the money; he was, as far as friends and colleagues in
the Muslim Youth were concerned, the best of them: ‘No one walked
as far or made as much effort on behalf of the movement,’ one Hizbi
later recalled. When Hizb began to send agents back into Afghanistan
with its night letters following the failed insurrection, Jan Mohammed
was central to the tightly-regulated operations. Only once individual
mujahideen went to him and explained the precise details of their
missions would he allocate them money to carry out their work. With
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the dispute between Hekmatyar and Rabbani still raw—the men

loathed each other and competed for resources—Jan Mohammed was
the force holding them together. They had their own favourite recruits
and ideas for missions, but he urged them to cooperate.9
Despite this impeccable background, Jan Mohammed was now
suspected of betraying the mujahideen and spying for Daoud. Hizb
detained him and Weqad began an inquiry into his conduct. Nasrullah
Mansour and Jalaluddin Haqqani, religious scholars who served on the
party’s executive council, were appointed to a judicial board tasked
with leading the investigation, assisted by long-standing Muslim Youth
activist Jan Baz Sarfaraz. The Hizb leadership knew that the detention
of Jan Mohammed would come as a shock to the exiled mujahideen and
sought advice from Pakistani officials before the arrest—a sign of how
much influence Pakistan already had over them. The officials described
it as an ‘internal issue’ for the party but said they would be willing to
support the investigation. Jan Mohammed was subsequently held at
the Bala Hissar fort, near Peshawar’s Old City neighbourhood, before
being transferred to a Pakistani military base in the garrison town of
Nowshera, twenty-four miles to the east. Imprisoned for more than a
month, he was routinely tortured; his Pakistani interrogators stuffed
him, bent double, into a large grain sack, then threw a feral cat into
the bag and tied it up, leaving the animal to claw and bite at his skin as
it tried to escape; they also beat him and left him to dehydrate in a cell
that magnified the scorching summer temperatures.10 While Sarfaraz
and Nasrullah Mansour participated in the questioning, they left the
torture to the Pakistanis. Eventually, Jan Mohammed cracked. In a
lengthy confession taped on several audio cassettes, he told Mansour
that he had betrayed Hizb and the Muslim Youth, giving the Afghan
government vital information about the movement’s inner-workings
and disclosing the plans for the failed 1973 Islamist coup, as well as the
1975 insurrection. He also admitted to aiding the arrest of Engineer
Habib-ur-Rahman.
When word of his confession hit the streets of Peshawar there was
outrage. As a young activist, Jan Mohammed had been responsible for
spreading the MuslimYouth’s ideology to Kunar, and fellow mujahideen
from the province were apoplectic that one of their most exalted
brethren was being publicly named as a traitor. Around fifty of them
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accosted the investigator Sarfaraz, demanding an explanation. ‘He will

be fine,’ Sarfaraz assured them. ‘Let us carry out justice.’ Unsatisfied,
the Kunar fighters refused to back down and received permission to
talk to Hafiz, the illiterate young man whose early release by the Daoud
regime triggered the unravelling of the entire informant network.
Hafiz told them the allegations were true: he and Jan Mohammed had
been working for the Afghan government. Still in denial, the Kunar
fighters demanded that the Hizb leadership let them talk directly to Jan
Mohammed. After further negotiations, three prominent mujahideen
were allowed to meet him at the Pakistani military base in Nowshera.
Struggling to hold back tears, they asked him for an explanation. Jan
Mohammed was not shackled for their visit and, after everything he
had been through, he seemed resigned to death. He spoke calmly as he
told them to forget about his case: ‘Don’t try to free me from here,’ he
said. ‘My life and what has been done to me will be accounted for on
Judgement Day. Only God knows the truth.’11
Jan Mohammed’s slim chances of survival all but ended on 5 July
1977, when a military coup toppled the government in Pakistan. The
new regime of General Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq, which would go on
to encourage the growth of radical Islam across the region, relayed
a message to Hizb that it was not willing to hold him. On the very
same day as the coup, the Daoud regime in Afghanistan announced
more reprisals against the Muslim Youth. The Kabul Times reported that
Mawlawi Sahib Habib-ur-Rahman, ‘leader of the Laghman province
subversive elements,’ had been executed. Killed with him were Khwaja
Mahfouz Mansour, ‘leader of the subversive elements’ in Panjshir, and
Mohammed Omar, the high-ranking activist who had once been jailed
with Hekmatyar. Nasratyar was among twenty-four inmates sentenced
to life imprisonment.12
Hekmatyar was particularly enraged by the loss of Mawlawi Sahib.
When word of his death reached Peshawar, he gave a fiery speech
reflecting on the insurrection and its poisonous aftermath, declaring
that the Qur’an denounces ‘hypocrites and those who hate fighting
for the sake of God.’ The Muslim Youth needed to show Daoud that
they were capable of ‘armed struggle,’ he added, imploring the party
to fight on: ‘The truth shows Muslims that peace between you and
the enemy of Islam, the enemy of your religion, and with the infidels,
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is not possible. If you leave your principles, put your feet on them,
then the infidels will deal with you.’ In an oblique reference to the
Jan Mohammed case, he said ‘Puppets and pro-infidel elements in
this movement are trying to do a deal.’ Though he did not identify
anyone, his feelings on the matter were clear: ‘For the sake of their
own lives and interests, they are surrendering to the infidels. They are
surrendering and bowing their heads to them. How shameless is this?’
He then turned his attention to the conditions of Muslims throughout
the world. ‘They have lost the morale of jihad, they have lost their
resolve to fight,’ he proclaimed; as a result, God was punishing them.
He reminded his followers that the Prophet Mohammed had warned of
a day when Muslims would be strong in number but weak in ideology,
quoting him as saying, ‘Your condemnation, your defeat and the reason
for your oppression will be that at that time fear will exist in your
heart.’ Fear, he pronounced, was defined as a love for life and a hatred
of death.13
At the root of Hekmatyar’s fury was his rivalry with Rabbani,
which had not abated even after they supposedly united under the
banner of Hizb-e Islami. Following the failed July 1975 insurrection,
Jan Mohammed had been in the small group of mujahideen who
sided with Rabbani; their faction was quite open in its assessment that
military action had been a mistake. Hekmatyar resented their opinion
and complained that they did not even consider the fighters killed in
battle as martyrs.14 After months of quietly seething, he used the spy
ring case to strengthen his position within Hizb. As well as confessing
to being a government spy, Jan Mohammed claimed his contacts
with the Daoud regime were sanctioned by Rabbani, which enraged
Hekmatyar. Until that point, he had regarded his leadership rival as
cowardly and duplicitous but stopped short of calling him a traitor;
now he was convinced that Rabbani was letting Jan Mohammed and
the other members of the spy ring take the blame for his dirty work.15
Weqad, who had been appointed as Hizb’s leader to resolve the
differences between the two rivals, concurred, insisting that Rabbani’s
‘hands were involved.’16 It was too late for the torturers to extract
another confession: just as Hizb prepared to question Rabbani, he left
Peshawar on a pre-arranged trip to Saudi Arabia.17 In his absence, the
recriminations continued.
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Rabbani had always been the more pragmatic face of Afghanistan’s

Islamist scene. Hizb now wondered if his moderate approach extended
to talking to Daoud, and the story that emerged after Jan Mohammed’s
arrest suggested it had. Qazi Hedayat, a senior government judge, had
helped facilitate the contacts between Rabbani and the regime;Wafiullah
Sami, a former teacher at Kabul University’s Sharia faculty, who served
as minister of justice under Daoud, was another link in the chain. Yet
there was still uncertainty about Rabbani’s motives. The moderate
minority faction of Hizb maintained that he and Jan Mohammed
had been trying to kickstart a backchannel peace process: ‘Rabbani
believed Daoud was not a communist himself but was misguided by the
communists, and it was possible to persuade him to choose the right
path,’ recalled one of his allies. Hekmatyar and the radical majority
inside Hizb were convinced that the contacts were nefarious; the
moderates had sold out key Muslim Youth members in exchange for
some kind of private deal with Daoud. Decades later, Rabbani’s family
would only say he had been ‘pro-negotiations’ before the insurrection
and exchanged messages with the Afghan government.18
The case was made more contentious because even prior to the
spy ring revelations Hizb had made an overt offer to join forces with
Daoud against the communists in the typewritten letter. That was
done in full knowledge of the entire leadership, including Weqad,
Hekmatyar and Rabbani, and the two judges in the Jan Mohammed
case, Nasrullah Mansour and Jalaluddin Haqqani. However, it was now
apparent that Rabbani had been working independently of the party,
secretly exploiting his own backchannels to the regime. Hekmatyar
refused to believe the explanation of Rabbani’s supporters.
In this febrile atmosphere, with Hizb on the brink of war with
itself, the judicial board headed by Mansour and Haqqani passed its
judgement, sentencing Jan Mohammed to death. The investigating
judges knew how popular he was and how much their decision might
hurt the party, but the treachery for which they found him responsible
had led to the arrests and deaths of countless mujahideen. As far as
they were concerned, spying on fellow Muslims to help a disbeliever
was tantamount to apostasy. Mansour, an unstable and sadistic man,
assumed the role of executioner.19 Showing little of the conflicting
emotions felt by many of his colleagues, he took Jan Mohammed up to
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the British-made frontier, near North Waziristan, shot him and buried
his body in an unmarked grave. The execution remained a secret.
In the weeks that followed, Jan Mohammed’s father, Haji Gul Baz,
wandered all over Peshawar, asking the mujahideen for news of his
son. ‘Should I sit in my house or continue to search for my son? Can
you at least tell me this?’ he asked Weqad. The Hizb leader showed a
brief flicker of remorse. ‘Sit back in your house,’ he said. ‘Your son
does not exist anymore.’20
For his part in the alleged treachery, Noor Mohammed—the
suspect who gave up the name of Jan Mohammed during his own
interrogation—was also executed. Only Hafiz, the first link in the
chain, was forgiven; uneducated and the brother of a respected
Muslim Youth member, Hizb took pity on him. The party decided to
send him to a madrassa in the port city of Karachi, southern Pakistan,
where it hoped he could learn to read and write. It even paid for
his train ticket and gave him an additional $50 in Pakistani rupees
for his anticipated living expenses. Hafiz didn’t arrive. Instead he
disembarked from the train early and headed west, sneaking over the
border to Kabul. Hizb soon received reports that he had resumed
spying for the government.21
***
The controversy surrounding Jan Mohammed’s execution was a wound
that would never heal. The party leadership knew that they would
need solid evidence of his testimony to build a convincing case against
him and, for that reason, had recorded his confession; nonetheless,
inquisitive Hizb members continued to ask about the case for years.
Hekmatyar always defended his role and sought to distance himself
from the execution decision. He had been on an ‘important mission’
in Kabul at the time of Jan Mohammed’s arrest, he said, and was only
consulted about it upon his return. After visiting Jan Mohammed
and the other men in custody, he ‘told those in charge they had been
tortured and their confession had no validity according to Sharia.’22
Hekmatyar often cried when speaking about the abuse Jan Mohammed
endured.23 One winter night after the execution, around forty Hizb
members came together at the Khyber Intercontinental Hotel in
Peshawar to go over the details of the case yet again. Those present
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included Weqad and Hekmatyar, as well as the two judges who issued
the death sentence, Mansour and Haqqani, and Jamil-ur-Rahman,
whose nephews had been arrested by the Afghan government in the
original incident that sparked the investigation. They all sat transfixed,
listening to the recording of Jan Mohammed, broken and resigned
to death, admit to being an informant, but they upheld the party’s
judgement. Many of the mujahideen were in tears.24 Behind closed
doors, the Hizb leadership offered a more nuanced assessment of
events than merely calling Jan Mohammed a traitor. Weqad described
him as ‘a good man, a Muslim’ who committed a ‘very big’ mistake that
‘destroyed our people.’ Ultimately, though, he blamed Jan Mohammed
for fracturing the Islamist movement beyond repair: ‘The differences
between us were all in his hands,’ he said.25
Rabbani was not the only rebel exposed by the taped confession.
Jan Mohammed identified another mujahid as being in secret contact
with the Daoud regime, a man who would go on to find fame as the
most potent guerrilla commander in the nation’s history, feted by the
West as a hero who stood up to Islamic extremism.The spying case and
Jan Mohammed’s allegation would put him permanently at odds with
Hizb and Hekmatyar, with terrible consequences for Afghanistan. That
man was Ahmad Shah Massoud.
An ethnic Tajik from the Panjshir valley, north of Kabul, Massoud
was the second son of his father’s second wife. He spent much of his
childhood in the Afghan capital and enrolled as an engineering student
at the polytechnic in the early 1970s. In later years, when his legend
had grown and his picture adorned buildings across Kabul, some of
his supporters would claim that his charisma and leadership qualities
had been visible from an early age; to those who knew him best,
though, there was nothing special about the young Massoud. He was
attracted to the Muslim Youth’s ultra-conservative brand of Islam for
the same reasons as most activists: the rise of communism and the
liberalisation of Kabul society worried him. When Massoud debated
with Marxist students, he felt inadequate—unable to match their well-
honed arguments about economics and religion. In the Muslim Youth
he found companionship and a source of confidence. Like Hekmatyar,
he had a burning desire for action, even if he could not yet articulate
his long-term vision for Afghanistan.
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Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman recruited Massoud at the polytechnic

and occasionally visited his house. On winter days they would sit
around a coal-fired heater with their legs tucked under a blanket to
keep warm, as they drank tea and talked politics. They were, however,
acquaintances rather than close friends. A relative latecomer to student
activism, Massoud was a minor figure when the Muslim Youth was a
protest and missionary movement. He did not join in the speeches
at Zarnigar Park, earn a reputation as a gifted orator or stand out as
a fearsome street fighter. He was shy, handsome and a quick learner,
without being obviously magnetic or brave; nevertheless, as the son
of a colonel in the army Massoud inherited an interest in warfare
that would serve him well. His life as a totemic guerrilla leader truly
began to take shape when he attended one of the Muslim Youth’s
training camps in Pakistan, emerging from the month-long course as a
promising foot soldier still several levels below the leadership. His first
real taste of combat was the 1975 insurrection.
Massoud’s exact operational role on the ground during the
rebellion would be the matter of considerable dispute once his fame
took hold. His supporters claimed he was the main commander in
charge of the uprising in Panjshir. Many in Hizb disputed this, insisting
he had been working under the tutelage of a Muslim Youth activist,
Khwaja Mahfouz Mansour, who had been executed by the Daoud
regime for his part in the mission.26 Whatever Massoud’s precise role,
he risked his life to fight in the uprising. On realising the rebellion
had failed, he and several fighters briefly escaped into the adjoining
Andarab valley in Baghlan, before returning to the Panjshir mountains.
Massoud eventually slipped back to his home village of Bazarak, where
he waited out the storm. Twelve of his colleagues had been killed in
Panjshir—a third of the thirty-six fighters involved there. Militarily, it
was a disaster. Angry and disillusioned, Massoud blamed Hekmatyar
for their deaths.27
Like so many of the Muslim Youth, Massoud fled to Pakistan after
the insurrection. There, he settled in a house in the Gulbahar Colony
neighbourhood of eastern Peshawar with Rabbani, Jan Mohammed
and another mujahid who would be named in the spying case,
Engineer Ayoub. The apparent bond between the four men quickly
caused resentment in the more radical circles—though not at that
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stage any suspicion. Compared to other exiles, the small group

around Rabbani were living in relative comfort. One day a rumour
spread that they even had roast chicken to eat, while fourteen other
mujahideen were sheltering in a farmhouse nearby, surviving only on
watery soup mixed with beans and lumps of bread. When this group
heard about the chicken, they couldn’t contain their envy. Adam
Khan, the Muslim Youth member with the notorious hair-trigger
temper, again pulled out his pistol; muttering obscenities, he vowed
to confront Rabbani.28  The tension reached breaking point when Jan
Mohammed was arrested.
With the investigation underway, a senior local government official
in Peshawar summoned Massoud to his office for questioning. At
Massoud’s request, the official brought Jan Mohammed along. ‘What
did you say?’ Massoud asked his friend, referring to the cassette
recordings. But Jan Mohammed was afraid to discuss the details of the
case, replying, ‘You know what I have done in life and I have nothing
more to add.’ Massoud was allowed to leave but knew he too was
now in danger. Some time later a Hizb search party was sent to track
him down, yet when they found him, Massoud refused to surrender.
Whipping out two pistols, he threatened to open fire and the search
party fled. Convinced Hekmatyar wanted him dead, Massoud hid at
the house of a sympathetic Pashtun tribal leader, while Hizb’s men
scoured the streets of Peshawar looking for him.29
***
As fratricide tore at Hizb, the communists wrestled with problems
of their own. Daoud’s coup had proven to be a false dawn for the
Marxist plotters allied to both the Parcham leader Babrak Karmal and
the rival Khalq faction of Noor Mohammed Taraki. Their proximity
to power had given rise to new jealousies and disappointments.
Parcham initially benefited from the coup when Daoud rewarded its
members with influential positions throughout his regime. Hoping
their appointments would allow them to push a programme of gradual
social and economic change, Parchamis tried to temper the demands of
their erstwhile comrades in Khalq, who mistrusted Daoud and wanted
the government to rush through a more radical agenda. Ferocious
arguments ensued even as Moscow stressed the need for unity. A top
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secret decree from the secretariat of the Central Committee of the

Communist Party of the Soviet Union expressed ‘deep alarm’ about the
continued infighting, fearing that it would only benefit ‘the domestic
[and] foreign enemies of the Republic of Afghanistan.’30 After Daoud
visited Moscow in June 1974, the Soviets relayed another, more urgent
message which called on Taraki and Karmal to ‘unite both groups in a
single party, and concentrate their combined efforts on comprehensive
support of the republican regime in the country.’31
When the Afghan communists continued to fight among themselves,
Daoud lost patience and sought to bolster his own position. Determined
to weaken the Soviet hold on his regime, he drastically cut the number
of Russian military advisers working in Afghanistan; he also sought to
reduce Kabul’s long-standing economic dependence on Moscow. In a
measure of his desperation for new trading partners, he even put aside
his open hostility towards Pakistan. On 7 June 1976, just as Hizb was
being established in Peshawar, Pakistan’s prime minister, Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto, arrived in Afghanistan on a groundbreaking four-day visit. For
a deeply proud Pashtun nationalist who had once come close to starting
a war over the disputed border when serving as prime minister under
the king, Daoud’s climbdown was astonishing. A year later, Bhutto was
overthrown by his own army, but relations between the two countries
continued to thaw.
Sulaiman Layeq, the leftwing provocateur, refused to give up hope
of a communist comeback. His determination only hardened when
Parcham’s central committee uncovered an electronic bugging device
at one of their regular meetings in Kabul, proving that Daoud was
monitoring their every move. Like the Soviets, Layeq believed that
the two communist factions needed to unite, and in 1977 he joined a
number of his exasperated comrades in demanding that Karmal and
Taraki resolve their differences. The two factional leaders reluctantly
agreed. At a meeting in Taraki’s house in Kart-e Char, west Kabul, they
talked amicably for the first time in years. Soon afterwards a formal
agreement on the nationwide distribution of party power was drawn
up; senior figures on both sides signed the document, which endorsed
Taraki as undisputed leader of the communist movement, now known
as the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. In an attempt to
prevent old rivalries from reemerging, there was a consensus that he
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would have no deputy. Instead, Karmal was appointed to the politburo

of the newly united party. Layeq joined him on the board.32
With their differences seemingly resolved, the communists were
edging towards launching a coup against Daoud. Under the auspices
of the suspected CIA agent, Hafizullah Amin, Khalq had established
secret Marxist cells inside the armed forces. Amin was keen to press
ahead with military action but Taraki urged caution, saying they needed
more time.33 Then, on 17 November 1977, one of their comrades
took matters into his own hands and assassinated Daoud’s minister
of planning, Ali Ahmad Khurram. The murder, in Hekmatyar’s
home province of Kunduz, shocked Taraki. Panicked, he sent Layeq
and another senior communist to Kunduz to conduct an internal
investigation. They eventually concluded that Hizb had recruited
Mohammed Marjan, a drug addict and low-ranking Khalqi, to take
Khurram hostage, only for the plan to go awry. Marjan then killed the
minister. ‘This was the first attack of the Gulbuddin group,’ Layeq
told Taraki.34
***
Hizb denied any role in the minister’s assassination, but the party was
militarily active inside Afghanistan in late 1977. Around that time, a
close colleague of Hekmatyar’s had been dispatched from Peshawar
to organise the mujahideen still living undercover in Kabul. He
arrived in the city with the task of rebuilding links with prisoners in
state-run jails and recruiting new members inside the government’s
training centres.35 Two more Hizbis were deployed on secret missions,
the details of which were shared among a select few. Nicknamed
‘Short Samad’ on account of his diminutive stature, Abdul Samad
Mujahid smuggled weapons to sleeper cells inside Afghanistan. He
was inseparable from his friend, Dr Latif, a good-looking, intelligent
and jovial fighter from the northern province of Takhar. Together they
worked in partnership as assassins, sent to murder prominent figures
in the newly-united communist movement.36
By early 1978 Hizb was ready to launch the next phase in its guerrilla
war. Less than a year had passed since the torture and execution of Jan
Mohammed, and the furore surrounding the case had given way to an
uneasy truce among the mujahideen factions. Rabbani had returned
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to Peshawar from Saudi Arabia and left Hizb-e Islami, establishing a

separate party under the old name of Jamiat. His trip abroad had been an
unqualified success; at a time when the mujahideen were still virtually
unknown outside Afghanistan, Rabbani had made powerful friends in
the Middle East. If Hizb wanted the jihad to succeed, it could no longer
afford to interrogate him about his backchannel contacts with Daoud.
For their part, Hekmatyar and his disciples had even begun to reassess
the legacy of the 1975 insurrection, deciding that perhaps it had not
been such a failure after all. Just as they viewed the king’s overthrow as
a product of their student activism, they came to believe that they were
responsible for pressuring Daoud—whom Hekmatyar nicknamed ‘The
Executioner’37—into breaking with the left. As evidence, they pointed
to trips the president had made to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey, all
countries of immense significance to Islam.38 Now they wanted to
add to the pressure on the communists by killing some of their key
members. First on their hit list was Layeq’s brother-in-law, Mir Akbar
Khyber, a quietly impressive ideologue and thorn in the side of the
Afghan political establishment for the previous thirty years.
Khyber’s rise to the top of the Afghan communist movement had
been slow, and beset by personal tragedy. A highly principled man who
never sought fame or power for his own self-interest, he garnered
widespread respect among leftists for suffering for his beliefs and
cleaning up the mistakes of his less gifted comrades.As a young graduate
from the Military University in Kabul, he had spent seven years in
jail for involvement in a nationalist plot to overthrow the monarchy.
During that time his wife mysteriously disappeared; a few months
later, one of his brothers also vanished; more heartbreak followed
when his mother collapsed and died while searching for her jailed son,
whose whereabouts had been kept a secret by the king. Unknown to
her, Khyber was spending his days memorising the Qur’an while being
held in solitary confinement at the governor’s compound in Kabul—a
skill he later used to refute the arguments of the Muslim Youth. At
night he stretched out diagonally across his tiny cell, the only way he
could hope to sleep. After his release he met Layeq for the first time
by chance at a coffee shop in Kabul. Their friendship blossomed and
when Khyber mentioned that he wanted to remarry, Layeq arranged
the match with one of his three sisters.
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Although not at the founding meeting of the communist party,

Khyber was a central figure in the movement, particularly when it
came to infiltrating the security forces. On completing his jail term
in the early 1950s he got a job at the Kabul police academy, where
he was in charge of educating recruits and teaching them English.
There, he restarted his political activities, converting members of the
police and army to the communist cause that he had come to embrace
over nationalism. At one stage he had sixteen senior members of the
military secretly working for him.
An avid reader and talented linguist, Khyber was fluent in Pashto,
Dari, Urdu, English,Turkish and Russian. He was closest to the Parcham
wing of the communist party, having made friends with Karmal when
they were in prison together on separate charges. Both of them were
members of the editorial board of Layeq’s newspaper when it published
the incendiary pro-Lenin poem in 1970. Khyber, however, tried to
remain neutral when it came to the communists’ internal disputes.
As an autodidact from a village in Logar province, south of Kabul, he
worried that the kind of socialism prevalent in Eastern Europe would
take time to implement in Afghanistan due to the country’s lack of
mechanised industry and organised urban workforce. The revolution
must not be rushed, he maintained. During a conversation in early
1978 with a young communist activist he warned against hurrying the
process. ‘Look, if I make a call I can take power—we have friends in
government—but keeping power is very difficult,’ he said, picking up
a phone to illustrate his point. ‘Taraki and Karmal want to enter the
palace one day. If all of Afghanistan dies, it doesn’t matter to them.’39
These words would prove a fitting epitaph.
That spring, in 1978, Khyber spent his evenings walking through
the city, pacing for several miles before dusk each day. Kabul was at its
best in the twilight, when the sky was coloured with pastel shades and
swallows dove among the houses. As the sun began to set on 17 April
he was just minutes from his apartment when a car carrying three
people pulled up. Before he could react, someone inside the vehicle
opened fire; Khyber collapsed into the gutter, five bullet holes in his
chest. Crumpled on the roadside, a few metres from the government
printing press that had reproduced the pro-Lenin poem eight years
earlier, he died. A crimson pool of blood bleached the dirt.
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Layeq was at home, across town in Kart-e Parwan, when the police
phoned him with the news. Distraught but fearing that the government
was luring him into a trap, he called some comrades who told him it was
too dangerous to attend the scene. Layeq decided to send his eldest son
Gharzai in his place, knowing that he would go unrecognised. Arriving
by taxi, Gharzai saw Khyber’s corpse slumped and ashen; his legs were
in the gutter, propping up his head and torso, which lay in the road.
The police took Khyber’s body to Aliabad Hospital, where the Muslim
Youth leader Abdul Rahim Niazi had once been treated. No longer
concerned for his own safety, Layeq arrived at the hospital morgue,
where Khyber was laid out naked, his groin covered for modesty. Dead
at the age of fifty-four, he left behind five children.
While a serious blow to the communists, the party leadership
realised that his death was an opportunity they could exploit. Two
days later, on 19 April, Khyber’s body was displayed in front of his
apartment, where a huge mass of people gathered. Najib, the feisty
street brawler loved by Layeq, was in charge of organising the crowd.
Khyber’s coffin was loaded into a car, with Layeq, Taraki and Karmal
climbing aboard to sit alongside their dead comrade. Thousands of
mourners trailed the cortege as it made its way past the US embassy,
Pashtunistan Square, the presidential palace and Pul-e Khishti mosque,
all landmarks that symbolised the communists’ struggle. Khyber was
finally laid to rest in the Shahada Salaheen cemetery, in the shadow of
a fort formerly used as a base by British soldiers. An eclectic mix of
people from all walks of Kabul life watched in tears as the body was
lowered into the earth. Unusually for Afghanistan, no Islamic scripture
was written on his headstone. Taraki, Karmal and Layeq all said
eulogies, paying tribute to their murdered comrade with passionate
critiques of Daoud and the US designed to stoke public support for the
very revolution Khyber had warned against.40
Hizb took credit for the assassination, with Hekmatyar boasting
of how the mujahideen had sent Khyber to hell.41 In party circles,
‘Short Samad’—Abdul Samad Mujahid—was named as the gunman.
There was even talk among some Hizbis that a wider plan to attack the
funeral and massacre the rest of the communist leadership had been
seriously considered.42 Layeq, however, was sceptical; he suspected
that his brother-in-law had in fact been betrayed and killed by
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members of his own fractious party. Prior to the assassination, Taraki

had wanted to promote Khyber in an effort to permanently heal the
rifts within the communists’ ranks. He asked Karmal to convey the
offer to Khyber but, fearing the promotion would undermine his own
authority, Karmal sent a communist ally, Noor Ahmad Noor, to deliver
a different message. At an explosive meeting in Khyber’s apartment,
Noor—a ruthless operator who belonged to a communist cell charged
with infiltrating the army—threatened Khyber and told him not to
strike a deal with Taraki. The two men yelled at each other and nearly
came to blows. As he left the apartment, Noor had a parting message
for Khyber: ‘If you try something, your life will be over.’43

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PART TWO

JIHAD
1978–1991
 6

THE REVOLUTION

The dust had barely settled over Mir Akbar Khyber’s remains when
the revolution began. Unnerved by the huge turnout at the funeral,
the government detained the communist leader Noor Mohammed
Taraki a week later. The next morning, 25 April 1978, Hafizullah
Amin, the Marxist activist rumoured to have links with the CIA, was
placed under house arrest. It was just the excuse he needed. Fearing
that this was the start of a sustained crackdown, Amin decided the
time had come to storm the palace and take control of Afghanistan.
The Daoud regime and its erstwhile allies were now at war. Police
stood guard outside Amin’s home as he set his plan in motion,
summoning his brother-in-law to bring an old friend to see him. If
the revolution was to succeed, he needed someone he could trust
who would be able to hand out instructions to communist agents
without arousing suspicion. The friend he had in mind, a former
bank clerk named Faqir Mohammed Faqir, was the perfect man for
the job.
Faqir was the sort of person strangers immediately warmed to.
Now working at Kabul municipality, his baritone voice and knack for
storytelling gave him a disarmingly jovial air. The police would think
he was harmless, but Amin knew better. Far from being just another
steady bureaucrat on the government payroll, Faqir was a loyal
communist apparatchik once employed as a mid-ranking intelligence
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operative by the Daoud regime. He lived in awe of the ambitious, cut-

throat Amin, his former high school physics teacher.
Each morning before work the overweight Faqir exercised in a park
on the other side of town. He was there, pacing back and forth, when
the brother-in-law finally found him. It was 7.50am. They climbed
into a taxi and headed to Amin’s house, near the Soviet-built grain silo
in west Kabul. The brother-in-law got out just before they arrived,
so he could run more errands for Amin without the police noticing
his absence. Faqir used his natural bonhomie to talk his way past the
guards and knocked on the front gate. Amin answered and ushered him
into the garage, where a carpet and cushions were laid out to form
a makeshift guest room. While Faqir waited, Amin disappeared to
collect paper and a pen. He returned moments later and announced:
‘Write down the orders of the revolution.’
Faqir was sufficiently well-versed in Marxist dogma to doubt
that Afghanistan—hardly an industrialised economy with a seething
working class—was ready for revolt. As Amin issued his instructions,
he grew alarmed at the plan to force massive change on an unprepared
country. Rather than listen carefully to Amin’s words, Faqir’s mind
wandered, conjuring an apocalyptic vision of the near future; imaginary
explosions sounded in his head: Boom, boom, boom. Amin lost his cool
when he realised that Faqir was not paying attention: ‘Goddamn it,
are you scared?’ he said. Faqir lied and responded that he was not,
but Amin was disgusted. Snatching the pen back, he wrote down the
twenty-one names of his chosen revolutionary commanders. He then
issued Faqir with detailed instructions to give to the military officers
he had so carefully recruited, making it clear as he did so that the
final decision to stage the coup was his. In the event of failure, anyone
captured by the state should blame him. ‘We are sacrificing ourselves
for the revolution,’ he said.
As Faqir left the house, stunned but intent on obeying orders,
the police guards asked him some cursory questions then let him go
on his way. He spent the next few hours travelling around Kabul;
putting his old trade craft into practice, he made sure he threw off
any government surveillance by switching his modes of transport—
from rickshaws to buses and taxis—as he distributed the plans for
the revolution. At dawn the following day, 26 April, he travelled to
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Deh Mazang and, near the jail in which Hekmatyar had once been
imprisoned, gave four senior party members their instructions while
they all took what appeared to be a casual morning stroll. Amin’s
strategy was clear and concise: Afghan communist soldiers would seize
the city airport, followed by the Soviet-built air base at Bagram, north
of the capital. The headquarters of the national radio station would be
captured. Anti-aircraft units in and around Kabul would block off pro-
regime forces, while planes bombed the main palace and commandos
closed in on Daoud. The president and his family would be asked to
surrender. If they refused, they would be killed.1
***
At 9am on 27 April, two days after Amin met Faqir at his house,
communist sympathisers in the army moved their tanks into position.
The coup had begun. Rain hung in the air as news of a major attack
spread through Kabul and government forces searched frantically for
anyone who might be involved in the plot. Certain he would be arrested
sooner or later, Sulaiman Layeq decided to hand himself in while he
still had the chance to protest his innocence. If the coup was successful,
he knew he would not be in prison for long. Out in town that morning,
he returned home to Kart-e Parwan and found the neighbourhood
swarming with police. Much to his amusement, they didn’t recognise
him at first: ‘I hope to God even your dog isn’t similar to that man,’
said one officer, when Layeq introduced himself. ‘You’re not him - he’s
a traitor.’ Layeq kept trying and eventually convinced the police that he
was telling the truth. Although he denied any prior knowledge of the
coup, he was arrested and transported to the governor’s jail in central
Kabul, where Taraki, Amin, and Babrak Karmal were now being held.
The city was in lockdown.
Outside the prison walls gunfire and explosions sounded. Less than
a mile away plumes of smoke merged with the grey sky around Zarnigar
Park. Layeq was held alone in a tiny cell, his hands shackled. Late that
afternoon, through a small window in his door, he watched police
running and yelling in the corridor. He noticed two young soldiers
wielding brand new Kalashnikovs and sporting the distinctive floppy-
eared helmets of one of the tank crews involved in the coup.‘Where are
our friends?’ they shouted as they looked for the communist leaders.
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At that moment a policeman—who had done little but swear at Layeq

while he was in prison—unlocked his cell. He too had decided to
defect, fearing for his life. ‘The government can’t function anymore,’
he told Layeq. ‘Fuck them. You can run the government.’ Layeq left
his cell and approached the tank crew, who were now rounding up the
police as if to execute them. Another burst of gunfire sounded, this
time closer. A guard tumbled from a watch tower, shot in the head.
Layeq told the tank crew to stop what they were doing; when they
ignored him, he grew angry. ‘Go and release Mr. Taraki,’ he ordered.
Freed from their cells, the communist leaders stood in the prison
yard, wondering what to do next.The extraordinary nature of the day’s
events was beginning to sink in. At the founding meeting of their party
thirteen years earlier they had embarked on a strategy to take control of
Afghanistan. Now that dream was on the brink of being realised. They
stood, frozen in time; one by one, they shook themselves from their
reverie and climbed aboard a tank to drive the few hundred metres
to the Ministry of Interior. There, they switched to an eight-wheeled
armoured vehicle and headed towards Layeq’s old radio station, now
established as the command headquarters for the revolution. As the
vehicle gouged through the burning streets, Amin stood stiff and tall
out of the armoured car’s turret, surveying the collapsing city with
unabashed pride.
At the radio station Layeq was given responsibility for broadcasting
news of the coup. Amin wanted it announced immediately but Layeq
persuaded Taraki to wait, in case the news provoked Washington.
He filled the airwaves with a monotonous loop of patriotic military
songs until, just before 7pm, Amin’s patience snapped.2  The music
stopped and a carefully prepared statement was read out in Pashto by
the commander of the air force and in Dari by the commander of the
army, both of whom had been secretly working for the communists.
They took credit for the coup on behalf of the ‘Revolutionary Council
of the Armed Forces.’ Sounding much like Daoud five years earlier,
they declared that ‘the last remnants of monarchy, tyranny, despotism
and power’ had been erased and the state was now ‘in the hands of
the people.’3
While Amin was euphoric, the rest of the communist leadership
were wracked with paranoia. Even Layeq, who normally kept cool in
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a crisis, began to worry that American jets would soon fly in from the
Gulf and bomb the radio station. Together with Taraki and Karmal, he
hurried aboard a military bus and sped the three miles north to the
airport. Along the way they picked up their comrade Najib, who had
continued to rise through the communist ranks since his days brawling
with the Muslim Youth. Only Amin and Faqir remained behind to
oversee the last phase of the revolution.4
Kabul darkened and the rain grew heavier. At the palace Daoud
fought for his life. The commandos sent by Amin to capture or kill him
were now inside the vast complex, closing in on their quarry. Daoud
shot at them with a pistol; his guards also opened fire. One commando
was hit in the leg and another in the arm, but the communists were
too strong. They broke through in the early hours of 28 April, shooting
Daoud several times until they were sure he was dead. Members of
his family were rounded up and taken away, the first Afghans to be
forcefully disappeared under communist rule.5 Thirty years later
their remains were discovered alongside Daoud’s in a mass grave on
the outskirts of town. Daoud was identified via his teeth and a small
golden Qur’an given to him by the king of Saudi Arabia. Buried with
him were his wife, three sons, three daughters and four grandchildren,
one of whom was only eighteen months old.6
***
At 3pm on 30 April the new regime issued its first decree, announcing
Taraki as chairman of the Revolutionary Council and head of state.
Martial law would remain in force across the country ‘until further
notice.’ The second decree, a day later, unveiled the new cabinet:
Layeq was announced as minister of radio and television; joining
him was the author of the infamous pro-Lenin poem, Hassan Bareq
Shafiee, as minister of information and culture; Noor Ahmad Noor,
one of the main suspects in the killing of Layeq’s brother-in-law, Mir
Akbar Khyber, was the new minister of interior; Karmal shared the
position of deputy prime minister with Amin, who was also minister
of foreign affairs.7
The coup surprised Russian officials in Kabul, with bullets striking
their embassy as fighting erupted in the city. It was unclear if the
Kremlin or the KGB were any better informed.8 Daoud may have
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 NIGHT LETTERS

become less dependent on the Soviet Union in recent years, but he

had still been a useful ally in a vital region. In comparison, the feuding
Afghan communists were a source of incessant frustration for their
Soviet patrons. Ultimately, Moscow had little choice other than to
give diplomatic recognition to the new regime. After years competing
with the US for strategic influence in Afghanistan it dared not risk
undoing all its hard work. Washington followed suit on 6 May,9 a
delaying tactic that at least gave it some leverage over Kabul while
senior White House officials scrambled to make sense of events. On
11 May, US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski received
an internal memo warning him that Moscow would interfere further
in Afghanistan, ‘possibly as a diversion from the growing nationalism
of their mushrooming Central Asian Muslim populations.’ The memo
said the communist coup was a ‘large potential gain for the Soviets’ and
predicted that Pakistan would ask the US for help.10
In the days after the coup Afghanistan’s communist regime only
hinted at its radical leftwing agenda, portraying itself instead as patriotic,
democratic and progressive. One of the first foreign dignitaries Taraki
hosted was the Pashtun nationalist leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan,
who lived across the frontier in Pakistan.11 It was Ghaffar Khan’s son,
Wali Khan, whom the communists claimed had once been the target
of a Muslim Youth assassination plot. By choosing to meet him in the
first week of May, Taraki was showing his determination to reignite the
dispute over the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
On 9 May, Taraki addressed the nation for the first time in a speech
delivered over the radio. Beginning with the opening lines of the Qur’an,
he denounced Daoud’s ‘fascist’ tendencies and accused him of the
murder of Mir Akbar Khyber, ‘one of the best’ and ‘most hardworking
sons of the people.’ In contrast to his predecessor, Taraki vowed to
respect ‘the holy Islamic religion.’ He listed thirty aims for the regime,
ranging from land reform and the ‘abolition of old feudal and pre-
feudal’ systems to ensuring that women had full equality with men in
all spheres of public life. Primary education for boys and girls would be
‘compulsory and free’ and the ‘heroic army’ would be strengthened. On
foreign policy, he vowed that the government would support ‘national
liberation movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America,’ including the
struggle to end Apartheid. He also called for the establishment of an
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independent Palestinian state. ‘Long live the Democratic Republic of

Afghanistan,’ he said. ‘Long live the people of Afghanistan.’12
***
The coup happened on aThursday.At 10pm that same night Mohammed
Amin Weqad, Hekmatyar and the rest of the Hizb-e Islami leadership
summoned thirty mujahideen to plan their response. They met in
Hizb’s headquarters behind the Dar-ul-Uloom Sarhad madrassa on the
southern edge of Peshawar’s Old City.13 Burhanuddin Rabbani and other
representatives of the more moderate Jamiat attended, but the Hizbis
outnumbered them two to one. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, they
outlined three possible responses to the communist takeover. First,
they considered contacting the new regime in an attempt to reach some
kind of mutual understanding; after all, Daoud had killed and arrested
their friends and they did not mourn his ousting. To the majority of the
Islamists, however, the communists were still infidels and that made
compromise inconceivable. Another option was to wait and see how
the Afghan people and the international community responded to
the coup. The mujahideen knew a guerrilla campaign would be very
difficult without popular support and they were wary of repeating
the mistakes of the Muslim Youth’s insurrection against Daoud. But
after some dispute they agreed that the issue was too important to
leave to the public; jihad was a matter of principle, they reminded each
other, answerable to a higher power than political expediency. Their
logic led them to a fateful conclusion: they were obliged to fight the
communists. Weqad said they would ‘face them down’ whatever the
consequences. The meeting ended at 1am.14
Jalaluddin Haqqani, one of the clerics tasked with judging the Jan
Mohammed case, was selected to carry out Hizb’s first operation
against the Taraki regime, accompanied by another mujahid named Aziz
Khan. Their target was Ziruk, a sub-district in Paktika, southeastern
Afghanistan. Haqqani and Aziz both came from that part of the country,
spoke with local accents and knew the terrain well. If anyone could
convince the people to rise up and fight the government, they could.
On the afternoon of 5 May, the two Hizbis rose to their feet in
a packed mosque in the centre of Ziruk. In front of them was a sea
of prematurely aged faces framed by yellow turbans and beards dyed
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red with henna. It was Friday and the men of the area were gathered
for the Jumu’ah prayer, the most important prayer of the week for
Muslims. The mujahids introduced themselves and said the time had
come for action, not words; infidels now ruled the country and Afghans
who believed in God were not safe. There were murmurs from the
worshippers, then shouts of mutual indignation. Baying for blood, they
soon got to their feet and surged out of the mosque, with Haqqani
and Aziz at their side, marching towards town. The mob attacked the
local government headquarters, killing the highest ranking official
and disarming the soldiers. Hizb had seized its first piece of territory
inside Afghanistan.15
Building on this success, the party mobilised its troops elsewhere.
Waheedullah Sabawoon, a member of an underground cell in Kabul,
travelled to Peshawar to meet Weqad and Hekmatyar and report on
conditions in the capital since the coup. Fearing a major crackdown
by the communist regime, they instructed him to evacuate key Hizb
personnel from across Afghanistan into Pakistan. From late April to
mid-May, Sabawoon helped smuggle 560 men—students, teachers and
workers—out of the country, to regroup and reorganise. With that
done, he headed to his home province of Kunar, where mujahideen
from north-eastern Afghanistan had agreed to convene for a strategy
meeting. Waiting there for him was a man who would go on to
become Hekmatyar’s chief lieutenant and the most important military
commander in Hizb’s history.16
***
Fazel Rahman Rahmatyar was a straight-talking Pashtun whose natural
diffidence concealed an inner determination few other mujahideen
could match. Better known by his nom de guerre Kashmir Khan, he came
from a family of landowners who saw evidence of God’s beneficence
all around them. Few places on earth were as beautiful as Shaygal, the
remote corner of Kunar in which they lived: mountains encircled their
village like an amphitheatre; terraced fields of corn ran down to a river
that snaked its way gently over pebble and rock; comets burned across
the crystalline night sky.
Kashmir Khan was the eldest of two boys and studied at a local
primary school until the end of sixth grade, when he moved to Kabul
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in 1968 at the age of about thirteen, and enrolled at Ibn Sina High
School. His dormitory room was opposite Kabul University, the
centre of Afghanistan’s own emerging counter-culture. From there
he watched as communists demonstrated in the streets, eventually
marching alongside them as they demanded greater rights for workers
and denounced America’s involvement in Vietnam. It was some time
later that he noticed a group of fifteen counter-protestors outside
Ibn Sina’s front gate, holding a handmade white flag with a black
inscription written in ink. Quoting the Qur’an, it urged Muslims to
remain united: ‘Hold fast to God’s rope all together; do not split into
factions.’17 The counter-protestors were university students from the
newly formed Muslim Youth.
Curious, Kashmir Khan went to a rally at Zarnigar Park and
listened to speeches by Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman and Hekmatyar.
At one point, they urged everyone at the park to stop what they were
doing and pray; struck by their piety, which was deeply unfashionable
in 1960s Kabul, Kashmir Khan switched sides. He told his school
friends about his new allegiance to the Muslim Youth and mocked
them for following the communists, who ‘only talk about labourers
and farmers.’ He boasted that instead he had found ‘real men who care
about the Qur’an and Islam.’ His friends told him he had fallen under
the spell of the Satanic Brotherhood, a play on words of the Muslim
Brotherhood, but Kashmir Khan didn’t care. On graduating high school
he was appointed as the MuslimYouth’s head of recruitment for Kunar.
During the 1975 insurrection against the Daoud regime, Kashmir
Khan was sent to assassinate a group of pro-government Marxists in
Shaygal. The operation he led was amateurish but exciting, and gave
him a taste for combat that he would never lose. On the night after
the Panjshir uprising, he found his targets asleep near an irrigation
canal and a few shops. His small band of rebels frantically debated
how best to kill them; they agreed that shooting them would wake
the village, and besides, they might miss. Instead, they decided to
stab them to death using army-issue knives. Just as they were about
to strike, they were disturbed by a shopkeeper; they began shooting
from across the irrigation canal. The Marxists woke and returned
fire, with a bullet grazing a scarf tied around Kashmir Khan’s waist.
He later claimed that the scarf had saved his life by deflecting the
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gunshot, an incident he saw as evidence of divine intervention. When

Hizb arrested Jan Mohammed after the failed insurrection, Kashmir
Khan was in the delegation of mujahideen from Kunar who went to
see him in custody. He was upset over his friend’s treatment but let
the matter lie, deciding that the cause of jihad was more important
than the fate of one man.18
Unlike Hekmatyar, Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman and Saifuddin
Nasratyar, Kashmir Khan was not particularly eloquent or articulate;
he was calm and matter-of-fact when he talked about politics and
religion, and seemed less comfortable in the relatively cosmopolitan
surroundings of Kabul. His real talent was in soldiering, and now that
the communists were in power he had the chance to show these skills
to the full.
On the evening of 22 May 1978, less than a month after the
communist coup, Kashmir Khan sat on the second floor of his family
home in the village of Derai, discussing the Marxists’ takeover with
a group of Hizbis. A tree-lined brook replenished from a mountain
spring ran alongside the stone-walled house; their excited talk of
war seemed at odds with the peaceful setting, but they knew the
communist takeover had changed their lives forever. An elderly
cleric, Abdul Ghani, who served as Hizb’s leader in Shaygal, chaired
the gathering. The underground activist Waheedullah Sabawoon and
fourteen other mujahideen from eastern Afghanistan were also there.
Everyone agreed that Ghani was too old to continue in his role as
local leader. With the communists now in government, they needed
younger blood capable of waging a long and painful guerrilla war. They
decided to elect a new leader, with each man writing down the name
of their preferred candidate. The vote was a formality: Kashmir Khan
was already popular locally and had just returned from Peshawar with
strict instructions from Hekmatyar to oversee the conflict in Kunar.
He won the vote with ease.
They moved on to their next order of business: sifting through a
heap of paperwork Hekmatyar had sent them. Among the documents
were night letters for distribution to tribal elders and clerics reminding
them of their obligation to wage jihad, and copies of the second edition
of Shahadat, a newspaper Hizb had just started publishing in Peshawar.
After organising the paperwork, most of them stretched out on the
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meeting room floor to sleep in the soft light of an oil lamp. Four of
them went to sleep outside under the brilliant night sky.
As the mujahideen rested, communist troops quietly surrounded
the village, led by a sergeant armed with one of the Soviet-made
Kalashnikov assault rifles newly issued to government forces. He
moved past the Hizbis resting outside and entered the house; climbing
the stairs, the sergeant burst into the room where the others still slept,
finger on the trigger. ‘Surrender! Surrender!’ he yelled. ‘Don’t move!’
Kashmir Khan had heard him coming and was already on the far side
of the room, trying to stuff the newspapers and documents into a
cupboard. He knelt down and raised his hands. ‘Okay, I surrender,’
he said. As the sergeant kept watch over the disorientated, half-asleep
Hizbis, Kashmir Khan inched towards him on his knees, with his hands
behind his head. ‘I surrender, I surrender,’ he repeated over and over,
as he edged closer, hoping to get within striking distance. Another
soldier peered in, saw what he was trying to do and shouted at him to
stop. Kashmir Khan jumped up and attempted to grab the Kalashnikov
from the sergeant’s hands; bullets hammered into the ceiling as they
grappled for the weapon. The room was plunged into darkness as
one mujahid extinguished the oil lamp and shooting erupted outside.
Kashmir Khan kneed the sergeant in the groin, sending him crumpling
to the ground, and snatched up the Kalashnikov, which he tried in vain
to fire, not realising the safety catch had been engaged. The sergeant
darted from the room, fleeing into the mountains with the other
troops. Kashmir Khan raced after them, only to be stopped by one
of his terrified relatives, who confused him for a soldier. The relative
blocked Kashmir Khan’s way and began to hit him, fighting desperately
for the Kalashnikov. By the time he realised his mistake, the soldiers
were gone.
As the shocked mujahideen gathered themselves they noticed the
bloodied corpses of their four friends, who had chosen to sleep under
the night sky rather than in the house.19 The dead included an uncle
of Kashmir Khan’s. The Hizbis realised that the soldiers had not come
to make arrests, but to kill everyone; without even pausing to put on
their shoes, they fled into the darkness.
Kashmir Khan returned home the next morning. At 8am a group
of elders arrived and, on behalf of the government, asked him to hand
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over the captured Kalashnikov. Even as they talked, the dead men from
the previous night’s raid were being buried in simple graves of shingle
and mud. Kashmir Khan picked up the assault rifle and demanded to
know why he should hand it over: ‘Look, this is a Russian gun,’ he said.
‘It was used to try and kill me inside my house. Why was a Russian
gun being used to try and kill me? For what reason?’ As they argued,
more soldiers approached the village on a follow-up raid. Kashmir
Khan hurried to organise a defence. One of his men grabbed an old
hunting rifle and prepared to shoot at the advancing troops, before
unleashing what came to be remembered as the first shot fired against
the communists in Kunar.20
Over the next two hours the Hizbis fought hard, killing four of
the soldiers and forcing the troops to withdraw. Victorious, but
certain the communists would be out for revenge, Kashmir Khan
gathered his family together and left the village for the sanctuary of
the mountains. The following day Afghan government aircraft bombed
Derai and a number of other local villages; troops again moved in, this
time burning down the houses and killing the livestock. The Hizbis
retreated to Peshawar while their families moved to the Pech Valley—
Jan Mohammed’s birthplace—with government forces in pursuit.
There, the troops set fire to more houses, forcing the mujahideen’s
families to flee once again. This time they headed north to Kamdesh
in Nuristan.
Kashmir Khan had lived to fight another day. Still only around
twenty-three years old, he had become the first mujahid in Afghanistan
to capture an AK-47 Kalashnikov assault rifle—the one weapon above
all others that symbolised the communist war machine. He would
soon turn it into a talisman for the resistance.21

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DEVILS

The mujahideen’s acts of resistance were small at first: brush fires

in a land not yet ready for a conflagration. Lone men took it upon
themselves to fight or joined local groups of lightly armed partisans.
Hekmatyar was imbued with a mythical aura by these insurgents, a name
to accompany them into battle, carried on the wind.1 Hizb-e Islami’s
dramatic start to the war in Paktika and Kunar was followed in far less
spectacular fashion by sporadic raids elsewhere in the country; pitched
against a mixture of diehard communists and conscript soldiers, the
skirmishes veered from the brutally violent to the tragically farcical.
Some of the attacks were directed by the mujahideen’s leadership
in Peshawar but many arose spontaneously from pockets of fighters
who attached themselves to Hizb’s cause. The party was still not a
mainstream movement or even a large guerrilla organisation; it was an
extremist group that continued to appeal primarily to young Afghans,
driven to take up arms by the coup. Only gradually did the rank and
file begin to swell.
The jihad gained a tentative foothold in Logar province, south of
Kabul, in the spring of 1978, through a former low-ranking Muslim
Youth activist just starting his career as a high school teacher. Agha
Mir left his home in a village near the provincial capital soon after the
communists seized power, and headed east on foot towards Pakistan
with three friends. He had never met Hekmatyar and the friends
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had only a vague sense of where they were going; with no map or
compass, they trusted that God and sympathetic strangers would
help them find Hizb’s mujahideen. For five days they hiked through
copses and wheat fields, narrow defiles, wind-swept plateaus and
arid plains. When they came across strangers they did not trust, they
pretended they were teachers newly hired in nearby schools, or ill
and infirm travellers on a pilgrimage to a distant shrine. Eventually
they reached an isolated valley in Zadran, near the Pakistan frontier.
There they found other young rebels gathered under the command
of Jalaluddin Haqqani, the leader of Hizb’s first operation against
the communist regime, and Nasrullah Mansour, the sadistic cleric
who executed Jan Mohammed. The friends joined this band of more
than two hundred militants, whom local villagers had sheltered in
mosques and houses.
It was a transformative moment for Agha Mir, who later took the
nom de guerre Haji Abubakr in tribute to the first Muslim caliph and
one of the Prophet Mohammed’s closest companions. Aged twenty-
two, he had heard many stories about the mujahideen, but nothing
could prepare him for meeting them face-to-face. Haqqani seemed
to encapsulate the romance of their struggle; he looked healthy and
strong, with a long, luxuriant beard and a red bandolier strung across
his torso. Still a lay preacher more than a battle-hardened military
commander, there was not much he could teach the young friends
about serious combat. He gave them basic shooting lessons and
explosives training before issuing them with weapons: Sten guns,
200 bullets, two grenades, and three sets of explosives, each the size
of a bar of soap. Duly equipped, Abubakr and his friends were told
to return to Logar and capture the province. Two of Haqqani’s allies
would go with them.
This small band of novice fighters were being asked to outwit the
Soviet-backed army of the new communist government and seize
control of a vast area on Kabul’s outskirts. It was an impossible mission,
yet they did not question their instructions. As the young recruits
walked back through the harsh terrain, their feet blistered and they
survived off scraps of bread given to them by passing nomads. They
hid their submachine guns beneath the baggy fabric of their clothing,
the barrels pointing down into their trousers and the thin metal stocks
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held tightly to their stomachs. Stens had a tendency to jam, and were
not as effective as the Kalashnikov that was now the prize possession
of Kashmir Khan, but they were still an upgrade from the old hunting
rifles carried by most of the mujahideen. Designed by the British and
widely used by Commonwealth forces during the Second World War,
Stens were durable, easy to fire and ideal for close combat.
On arriving in Logar, Abubakr quickly realised that there was
scant local support for a guerrilla campaign. The communist regime
was new and not yet avowedly Marxist, so people were waiting to
see how it would govern. He and his friends abandoned the idea of
launching raids on government installations and hid at the home of a
local cleric as they tried to figure out their next move. The time for
resistance would come, the cleric said, but they needed to let the
communists make mistakes that would compel people to rally to their
cause. Realising that he was right, the friends decided to return to
Pakistan. They continued to hide in the house while Abubakr’s father
contacted an elder who knew the mountain trails well and could lead
them to safety.With the aid of their new guide, they left their weapons
behind and again journeyed east, this time crossing into Nangarhar.
There, they were picked up by a car and transported to Jalalabad,
before travelling on to Pakistan. Determined to return to Afghanistan
in future, when the population was ready for jihad, Abubakr went
straight to Hizb’s headquarters in Peshawar and formally offered
his services to the party. Impressed by Haqqani and Mansour and
already aware of Hekmatyar’s reputation as a formidable leader of
the Muslim Y   outh, he did not consider joining the rival mujahideen
group of Jamiat.
Since the interrogation, torture and murder of Jan Mohammed the
two Islamist parties continued to co-exist under the terms of a fragile
and unspoken truce. Ahmad Shah Massoud, one of the co-conspirators
in the spying case, had emerged from hiding and was, temporarily at
least, able to live in Peshawar without fear of Hizb hunting him down.
A confrontation between him and Hekmatyar still felt inevitable to
those who knew them, though precisely when and where they would
settle their differences no one could tell. Soon after his arrival in
Peshawar, Abubakr bumped into Massoud. He found him polite but
quiet to the point of being meek, with a sallow complexion and a thin,
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wispy beard—a far cry from the famous commander he would later
pit his wits against on Hekmatyar’s behalf.2
***
Throughout 1978 former Muslim Youth members and new recruits
to Hizb’s cause made similar journeys to Abubakr, using the safety
of lonely mountain trails and the light of the moon to hike east into
Pakistan. Viewed from above, the dirt pathways they trod resembled
the veins of a leaf, stretching out into a never-ending wilderness of
beige and ochre. The men, most of whom were in their early or mid
twenties, walked the paths in sandals or shoes more suitable for office
work, with little else but the clothes on their backs. They called this
exodus hijrah, the Arabic word for migration and a term that evoked
the birth of Islam in the seventh century, when the first Muslims had
sought refuge among strangers after fleeing from the pagans of Mecca.
For the Prophet Mohammed and his followers, it was an unprecedented
and deeply traumatic move that confirmed their determination to stay
true to the faith, regardless of the effect on their friends and family.
The young Hizbis believed that they were following in their footsteps.
Hekmatyar and Mohammed Amin Weqad were often on hand
to welcome the new arrivals. Conditions at Hizb’s two-storey
headquarters in the neighbourhood of Beriskian were sparse, with no
mattresses or blankets available even during winter. No one seemed
to mind, however; the tired and bedraggled Afghans who turned up
there were energised by their sense of purpose and a naive confidence
in their own invincibility. After a few days’ rest they were assigned
tasks to prepare for the war ahead. At a safe house in Firdous, central
Peshawar, a group of eighty recruits spent a month learning how
to activate land mines and wire battery-powered explosive devices.
In rented houses elsewhere in and around the city, new arrivals
were taught how to strip, clean and reassemble their rifles, before
taking them out for target practice in the countryside. Other Hizbis
with engineering backgrounds and a grasp of the Russian language
were put to work fixing Soviet-made military radios seized from
communist soldiers.3
Although Hizb was under strict instructions from the Pakistani
government to keep a low profile in Peshawar, that task became
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increasingly difficult as the number of emigrants grew and their military

training developed. Rather than shelter them all in the city, where it
was hard to maintain secrecy and accommodation was expensive, the
party decided to send a large number of unmarried recruits nineteen
miles north, where they settled near a dam in the area of Warsak.
The huge concrete structure had been completed in 1960 as part of
a joint Pakistani-Canadian project to irrigate Peshawar valley, and it
would go on to become a vital staging post in Hizb’s jihad. Around 250
mujahideen were housed in accommodation there, four or five men to
a room.4 Excited and nervous, they waited impatiently for the chance
to return to Afghanistan and fight.
***
The communist policies that were to ignite the insurgency took time
to unfold. Prior to the coup, the leftist Khalq and Parcham factions
had discussed the possibility of the Islamists beating them to power if
they did not rush through their own revolution.5 Now they sought to
reassure the public that the new regime would work in accordance with
the teachings of the Qur’an. On the afternoon of  Thursday 8  June,
Sulaiman Layeq returned to his old school, the Abu Hanifa madrassa,
where he had studied alongside the Muslim Youth’s mentor, Professor
Niazi. The premises had long been moved from Paghman to a site on
Kabul’s eastern outskirts, but the visit still felt like something of a
vindication for the brash and provocative Layeq. Having been expelled
from the madrassa for encouraging strike action as a young leftwing
activist, he was now a government minister who had made a promising
career out of his controversial political beliefs.
Standing behind a lectern in the seminary’s garden, dressed in a
smart short-sleeved shirt and slacks, Layeq spoke to the students. He
assured them that their rights would be protected by the new regime
and expressed hope that some of them would grow up to become great
philosophers or scholars working towards ‘building a prosperous and
proud Afghanistan.’ They should, however, keep in mind the country’s
history of resisting imperial plots and continue to ‘fight against the
negative propaganda of the enemies of unity.’6 A week later Noor
Mohammed Taraki also sought to allay fears that the new regime was
un-Islamic. Accompanied by Layeq, the president met elders from
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across Afghanistan at the king’s old palace in Kabul. ‘We are the sons of
Muslims and respect the principles of the holy religion of Islam,’ Taraki
pledged to his guests.7 Privately, he was more forthcoming, telling a
fact-finding delegation from the KGB that all the country’s mosques
would be empty within a year.8
The communist government was intent on implementing an ultra-
radical reform programme, regardless of the consequences. Every
Afghan, it warned, was obliged to defend ‘the accomplishments of
the great Saur Revolution.’9 Following through on his earlier pledge,
Taraki granted women equal rights, limited the payment of dowries
and outlawed marriage for girls under the age of sixteen and men
under eighteen. These measures could be justified according to
Islamic teaching, but in Afghanistan’s patriarchal society—where the
boundaries of tribal customs and religious law were often blurred—
they were an unprecedented interference into the private lives of
millions of families.Two agrarian reforms were similarly controversial,
with the debts of smallholders reduced or cancelled and the state
encouraged to confiscate and redistribute large tracts of private land
while offering no compensation in return. Many Afghans interpreted
this reshaping of the rural economy as a violation of the right to
inherit property as enshrined in the Qur’an and a deliberate attack on
traditional village life.
The parochial concerns of the public did not matter to a regime
increasingly wedded to a radical interpretation of Marxism. Once
motivated by Pashtun nationalism more than the social and economic
theories of the left, the communists now bragged of waging class
warfare on behalf of the workers of the world.10 Their political vision
ignored the realities of rural Afghan society and looked instead to
the Soviet-dominated industrial landscapes of eastern Europe for
inspiration, just as Layeq’s murdered brother-in-law Mir Akbar Khyber
had feared. Their contempt for the country’s religious and cultural
heritage was embodied in a new red and gold national flag that lacked
any trace of green, a colour with historical resonance in Islam and a
common feature of past designs.
Confronted with these alien laws and an institutionalised scorn for
their faith, previously docile communities started to revolt across the
country. Men enlisted the help of their wives, sisters and daughters who
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sheltered, fed and nursed them, and occasionally even joined them in
taking up arms. One of the first major rebellions occurred in Nuristan,
near Kashmir Khan’s stronghold in Kunar. Motivated more by tribal
bonds than religious fervour, Afghans there rose up in July 1978—
before some of the reforms were even announced—after members of
the local community vanished at the hands of the regime.11
A small group of aspiring Hizbis in Professor Niazi’s home
province of Ghazni were typical in viewing the communist’s aggressive
modernisation drive as an opportunity to stir up rebellion. The five
young men hid in a local mosque to plan their attack, which they timed
to coincide with a visit by the provincial governor to the district of
Qarabagh. As the official spoke to a packed crowd of elders, one of the
attackers tossed a grenade at him. In his anxiety, however, he threw
the bomb too early, so that rather than explode on impact, it hit the
stage and lay dormant as the fuse continued to burn. A quick-thinking
soldier picked up the grenade and hurled it back in the direction of
the rebel, killing one of them while the others fled. The next morning
the surviving young militants tried and failed to murder the principal
of a local high school. They then cycled south-east towards Pakistan,
stopping first in the district of Giro. This time they had more success.
When they came across a local government prosecutor cycling
between villages, they pretended they needed his help and rode on
together with him. After a short distance they demanded he recite the
shahada, the Islamic profession of faith: ‘There is no God but God and
Mohammed is the messenger of God.’ The prosecutor refused. ‘Say
it,’ they demanded. He again refused, accusing them of being heirs to
Afghanistan’s old enemy, the British. Tired of arguing, the rebels shot
him where he stood.12
***
The US watched the smouldering conflict with interest. A telegram
from the American embassy in Kabul to the State Department in
Washington described ‘considerable apprehension’ among the Afghan
public to the communist government, but warned that the opposition
was ‘fragmented and leaderless and, hence, poses no immediate threat
to the regime. Whether it can coalesce around a leader in the months
ahead remains to be seen.’13 The mujahideen had reached much the
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same conclusion: two years after their previous attempt at uniting,

the radical members of Hizb and the more moderate supporters
of Jamiat again tried to reconcile in Peshawar. In September 1978
representatives from both parties, including Weqad, Hekmatyar and
Burhannudin Rabbani, assembled at a mosque in the city to announce
the formation of a new umbrella organisation. This time, their leader
would be Mohammed Nabi Mohammedi, a scholar and former MP.
Everyone agreed that the new alliance should be called Harakat-e
Inqilab Islami (The Islamic Revolutionary Movement).
The deal collapsed almost as soon as it was struck. Jamiat members
believed that Mohammedi was biased towards Hizb and accused
Hekmatyar of misappropriating funds donated to the alliance by Arab
benefactors friendly with Rabbani.14 Meanwhile, both sides harboured
abiding grudges from the Jan Mohammed spying case. The younger,
more militant mujahideen around Hekmatyar and Weqad did not take
Harakat seriously, and doubted that Mohammedi had good enough
relations with the Pakistani government to thrive.15 Harakat became
a party in its own right under Mohammedi, while Rabbani went on to
join forces with Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, the cantankerous scholar who
had once refused Hekmatyar’s demand to follow the MuslimYouth and
stand against the king. Together they established Jabha-ye Nejat-e Mili
(the National Liberation Front), only for their union to collapse and
for them to resume leadership of their own parties.
Hizb treated the failure of the reconciliation plan as an opportune
moment to reorganise. Many senior members felt the party was
living in the past with Weqad still in charge. He had been given the
leadership in 1976, when everyone was smarting from the failure
of the Muslim Youth’s insurrection and the mujahideen needed a
compromise figurehead whom Rabbani and Hekmatyar could both
accept. That old structure was no longer necessary, and so, keen to
capitalise on the weakness of its rivals, Hizb made a collective decision
to hold an election for a new emir, or party leader. A thirty-six-
member mujahideen council was organised to arrange the vote. The
election was held over a month-long period, with members scattered
across Pakistan writing their preferred candidate on scraps of paper;
there was no shortlist and they had an entirely open field from which
to choose. In Peshawar alone, 1236 people cast a ballot. Hekmatyar
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won some ninety per cent of the total votes and Weqad came a distant
second. Support for other candidates was negligible.16
The result confirmed Hekmatyar’s dominance of the party. To
the majority of Hizbis he had been its torchbearer since the death
of Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman, his charisma and track record as a
frontline activist outweighing Weqad’s superior knowledge of Islamic
jurisprudence. Hekmatyar was officially anointed as emir by Hizb’s
highest decision-making body, the central council. He promptly
picked his shadow cabinet—known as the executive council—from
the members of the central council. These appointees were put in
charge of committees with specific responsibilities such as cultural,
political and financial affairs. In deference to his two-year service as
leader, Weqad was given the prestigious job of running the military
committee while more capable candidates with combat experience
waited in the wings. Hekmatyar also appointed provincial emirs to
oversee the war in different parts of Afghanistan. Shaking the new
leader’s hand and signing an oath of commitment, members at each of
these leadership levels swore personal allegiance to Hekmatyar, giving
him supreme authority over their actions and decisions.
***
An extreme sense of loyalty was not exclusive to Hizb’s guerrilla
army. In Kabul the Khalq faction of the communist party was
dependent on the fanaticism of its members to turn Afghanistan
into an authoritarian state. Faqir Mohammed Faqir, the heavyset
bureaucrat who helped Hafizullah Amin carry out the coup, remained
faithful to the new regime despite his earlier misgivings. He had been
appointed to the key post of chairman of the Revolutionary Council,
a body of some 200 senior officials who convened every fifteen days
to discuss the most pressing issues facing the regime. In this role, he
looked after President Taraki’s finances, arranged all his meetings and
sent messages to allied states on his behalf, via the foreign ministry.
Faqir had known Taraki since 1960 and had come to admire him as a
wise, humble figure. His greatest affection, though, was reserved for
the foreign minister Amin; he had long regarded his former teacher
with nothing short of wonder, convinced that his intellect was second
to none.17
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Faqir’s unquestioning admiration of the regime’s two most powerful

men bore all the hallmarks of the personality cults developing around
them both. In government propaganda Taraki was routinely referred
to as the ‘Great Leader’ and pictures of him adorned Kabul’s streets.
Yet beneath his genial exterior was a viciousness that reared its head
in vile and bellicose rhetoric; he lambasted the mujahideen as a
‘cancerous tumour’18 and manipulated the language of Islam to further
the communists’ cause, declaring his own jihad against the insurgents.
Taraki identified the regime’s ‘number one enemies’ as the ‘Ikhwanis’
of Hizb and Jamiat, and proclaimed that ‘they should be eliminated
wherever they may be.’19 Amin, meanwhile, was a self-confessed
admirer of Joseph Stalin, even keeping a picture of him in his office.20
The regime’s ruthlessness extended to its treatment of fellow
communists. Intent on hoarding power for themselves, in the summer of
1978  Taraki and Amin began to purge the party of potential dissidents.
They posted Parcham’s head and joint deputy prime minister, Babrak
Karmal, to Prague as ambassador—a neat and efficient way of sending
him into exile—and used the same tactic to sideline Najib, the thuggish
former medical student who had brawled with the Muslim Youth in
Zarnigar Park. He was appointed as ambassador to Iran. Noor Ahmad
Noor, one of the main suspects in the killing of Mir Akbar Khyber,
was made ambassador to Washington. The crackdown escalated that
autumn, when rumours surfaced of an internal plot to topple the regime.
Hundreds of Parchamis were arrested and condemned as traitors.
Although Layeq was more intelligent than Faqir and did not share
his obsequiousness towards Taraki and Amin, he continued to believe
in the communist project even as it set about destroying the lives of his
comrades. Throughout the government’s first eight months in office he
played an integral role in promoting the socially progressive, politically
authoritarian agenda that was central to the communist cause. His
value to the regime went far beyond his formal work as a member
of the Afghan Politburo and minister for radio and television. Layeq
often served as a mediator in the government’s attempts to co-opt the
powerful tribes of southern and eastern Afghanistan, accompanying
Taraki to meetings with village elders in the hope that his status as
the son of a proud Pashtun warrior would ensure that the president
received a fair hearing.21
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Layeq also drew on his experience as a journalist to act in an unofficial

capacity as the regime’s master of propaganda. In October 1978 he
elaborated on Taraki’s vision of an evil and malignant mujahideen by
authoring a potted history of the Muslim Brotherhood. Serialised
in The Kabul Times, Layeq’s writing used stark imagery and insulting
language to demonise Afghanistan’s insurgents; the aim of his work, he
told readers, was to ‘let the pseudo-Islamic masks fall off the faces of
these sons or brothers of Satan.’ Layeq described the Brotherhood as a
‘terrorist gang’ that enjoyed killing, looting and conducting sabotage
‘just to satisfy their sick minds.’ They ‘were in fact nothing but a bunch
of devils in the guise of human beings, fond of sex, power and serving
the cause of colonialism.’22 Layeq possessed one of the regime’s
finest intellects and knew that by offering a caricatured portrayal of
the Brotherhood he could dehumanise the movement’s ideological
brethren, Hizb-e Islami. His work provided cover for a communist
regime that had embarked on a campaign of mass imprisonment,
systematic torture and routine executions.
***
Fourteen miles from central Kabul, amid a desolate landscape of dust
plains, factories, warehouses and bare rock, the dream harboured by
Afghanistan’s king of creating a liberal, democratic society had turned
into a nightmare. There, in the suburb of Pul-e Charkhi, a prison the
exiled monarch once hoped would serve as a pioneering centre of
rehabilitation and reform was now a killing ground for anyone who
dared oppose the regime.
The decision to build a new central jail on Kabul’s outskirts had been
one of the last big ideas in the king’s decade of enlightenment.When the
project was announced in February 1973, the prison was intended to
accommodate 1500 inmates. The facility was needed, explained a police
official at the time, because the Qala-e Jadid jail at Deh Mazang, where
Hekmatyar had been held, was too small to allow criminals to receive
vocational training while serving their sentences. The new prison would
give them enough space to learn rug weaving, carpentry, tailoring and
masonry, so that they could give something positive back to society.23
Construction work on the jail had still not been finished when
the communists seized power, but they began to fill its cells almost
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immediately, paying no heed to the king’s outdated liberal agenda.

Labourers, clerics, teachers, farmers, physicians, lumber merchants,
high school students and academics were all sent there in the months
after the coup, accused of plotting against the regime.They were joined
by many of the Parcham members who had been purged from the
government as well as hundreds of Islamists with ties to the Muslim
Youth and Hizb. The sheer scale of the arrests alarmed Moscow to
such an extent that one Soviet official warned Taraki and Amin that
the reprisals ‘had reached a mass-like character’ and ‘were carried out
without complying with the law.’ He told them that the crackdown on
opposition ‘undermined the prestige of the revolutionary leadership
and would lead to the weakening of the new system.’24 His concerns
went unheeded.
The prison was an intimidating concrete structure made up of
eight blocks laid out in the shape of a bicycle wheel, surrounded by
a high wall and guard towers. Cells designed to hold 20 people now
held 120. As the number of inmates grew into the thousands, some
were ordered to sleep in the corridors because there was no space
for them elsewhere. The floors were bare concrete and water was
in short supply, with pipes yet to be connected and prisoners only
allowed to use the toilets two or three times a day.25 Death could strike
at any time: inmates had the life kicked and punched out of them in
unprovoked assaults meted out by the guards; one man was drowned
in a cesspool for owning a contraband ballpoint pen.26
The savagery and claustrophobia within Pul-e Charkhi’s walls
proved to be the perfect breeding ground for Hizb’s jihad, each act of
injustice seeming to confirm the righteousness of Hekmatyar’s cause.
Throughout history, Islamic revolutionaries and thinkers had been
imprisoned and brutalised for their beliefs, from Imam Abu Hanifa,
the founder of the Hanafi school of jurisprudence, to the Egyptian
writer Sayyid Qutb who had so inspired the Muslim Youth. Hizb drew
on this long tradition of martyrdom to rally more recruits to its cause.
The communists’ techniques were self-destructing.
Layeq was sent to Pul-e Charkhi in December 1978, when he became
another victim of the factional rivalries within the government. He was
held with other political prisoners in Block One, alongside Islamists he
knew from his days stirring up trouble on Kabul’s streets under the
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king. Now they were all too preoccupied with their own misery to
argue about matters of ideology; he even began to pity the Muslim
radicals. Among those jailed with Layeq were Saifuddin Nasratyar, who
co-authored the threatening letter to his father in 1969, and Professor
Niazi, his former schoolmate.
Professor Niazi had already been in prison for almost four years
when the communists seized power. He had only recently been
transferred to Pul-e Charkhi from the far smaller jail at Deh Mazang,
where he had tried to condition himself to become accustomed to
solitude and a lack of freedom. Even when officials allowed him to
receive visitors there every Thursday, he had only ever been willing to
see male relatives and, on one occasion, his sister Zanaka. He declined
to meet his wife and three daughters in case they were harassed by the
guards for wearing hijabs. The family members who did manage to
talk to him in Deh Mazang were struck by his demeanour; despite the
questionable conduct of his jailers, he seemed strangely content—even
happy—and had grown a short white beard to signify the hardening
of his resolve. Inside his cell he had a metal bed, a small collection of
books, a radio and a prayer mat: enough comforts to help the days pass.
In Pul-e Charkhi, however, he found it far harder to stay positive.
Stuck in the overcrowded confines of the new jail, he could hear
inmates being executed outside as he tried to sleep at night. Worried
that the situation across Afghanistan was deteriorating and fearful that
his dream of an Islamic state was being crushed, he smuggled out
a letter urging his entire extended family to flee the country. They
left for Pakistan soon afterwards, the men travelling on foot and the
women riding donkeys.27
Neither Professor Niazi nor Layeq expected to survive their time in
Pul-e Charkhi. The months of abuse reached a peak on 29 May 1979,
when a large group of Islamists were scheduled to be set free. Layeq
was housed in a ground floor cell with a small window and he stood
on a pile of his belongings to get a better view as the prisoners began
to disembark from a bus outside. They were due to sign their release
papers before being taken to freedom; they had even submitted clothes
for washing that morning, hoping to look respectable for their waiting
families. But as soon as the first prisoner left the bus they realised their
mistake. The lead inmate was blindfolded and grabbed by a guard, who
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tried to shackle him, causing him to hit out and alert the others. ‘Look
my friends, they are killing us! Instead of releasing us they are killing
us!’ he yelled. A cry of ‘God is greatest’ went up from the men on the
bus as they appealed to the rest of the jail for help. ‘Oh Muslims, come
down!’ they urged, but the entire prison remained silent except for
one lone shout of solidarity which echoed through the cells. Transfixed
by the scene, Layeq watched as the guards blocked the exit gates and
opened fire on the bus. The prisoners screamed and continued to call
out God’s name as bullets tore into the vehicle.28
Those murdered that day included Professor Niazi and Nasratyar,
two of the most influential figures in Hizb’s rise from a student
movement to a guerrilla army.29 In later years, Hekmatyar’s party
came to immortalise the carnage as a heroic sacrifice in the name of
jihad. Arab mujahideen who would go on to join Al-Qaeda and fight
for extremist groups across the Middle East were told of how the
prisoners died carrying out a planned rebellion against ‘the crimes of
the atheist communist regime.’ According to this romanticised version
of events, four of the inmates seized guns from the guards and managed
to kill a number of them, sparking a fierce battle in which 114 Islamists
died. Hizb likened their defiance in the face of certain death to that
of Sayyid Qutb, who refused an offer of clemency on his way to the
gallows in 1966.30
While the regime killed Afghans on an industrial scale, Faqir, the
loyal chairman of the Revolutionary Council, continued his daily
briefings with Taraki. He received regular reports from the interior
ministry about events at Pul-e Charkhi and passed them on to the
president. Despite having intimate knowledge of conditions at the
prison, he found no cause for alarm over the treatment of detainees:
‘We knew them, knew what they wanted and who they were,’ Faqir
remarked some years later. ‘We were very serious when dealing with
people who had sold themselves to other intelligence services.’ As far
as he was concerned, the government was acting in accordance with
an unwritten rule that had existed in Afghan society for generations.
‘Most Afghans think you should be clear with your enemy,’ he said. ‘If
you can face them, fine. Otherwise, finish them.’31
The real power in the state’s security apparatus lay with the
Organisation for the Defence of the Interests of Afghanistan, an
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intelligence service commonly known by its Pashto acronym, AGSA.

An offshoot of the interior ministry, it built on the lessons that the
Daoud regime had learned when rounding up the Muslim Youth.
Daoud had set up a secret police force modelled on the SAVAK, the
notorious domestic intelligence service of Iran’s royal family.32 As
the brainchild of the CIA and Mossad—Israel’s foreign intelligence
agency—the SAVAK was notorious for torturing and murdering
opponents of Tehran. Daoud embraced its methods in his campaign
against the young Islamist followers of Hekmatyar and Engineer
Habib-ur-Rahman; AGSA refined these skills and adopted even
harsher techniques, with the help of advisers from the Soviet and
East German governments.33  The police and army aided and abetted
AGSA’s crimes.
In Ghazni, Islamists were detained alongside apolitical civilians at
a prison located in the governor’s compound in the provincial capital.
While inmates were routinely taken away and shot, the prospect of
death often came as a relief from the daily abuse they endured. The
guards liked to take one psychiatrically disturbed detainee and swap
him between the packed cells, which had no easy access to toilet
facilities.This aggravated his fellow inmates and on at least one occasion
caused him to defecate himself.34 In Kabul, abuse was routine inside
the interior ministry itself. On the second floor of one building at the
compound, prisoners were held in solitary confinement in the Black
Room, named after the colour of its walls. A table and chair, and a mat
or thin carpet laid on the floor were the only furniture inside. A single
light illuminated the surroundings.
One former MuslimYouth member was held in the Black Room for
eight days in 1978. Aged in his mid twenties and the father of a young
child, he was arrested for his links to Hizb.Throughout his detention he
was tortured by members of AGSA. Wires were attached to his fingers
and toes, then rigged to a wind-up electricity generator; a flannel was
stuffed in his mouth to muffle his screams while one interrogator held
his feet, one held his stomach and two held his head to stop his body
convulsing with pain as the volts coursed through him. Eventually, the
prisoner broke down. He asked for a pen and paper and sat at the Black
Room’s table. ‘If anyone has told you I was trying to kill Taraki, I will
write that,’ he said. ‘Whatever the reason for my arrest, tell me and
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I will write it. It’s better that you kill me than I be tortured like this
every single day.’35
The regime made lists of the prisoners murdered in its custody,
recording the victims’ professions, the places from which they came,
and the names of their fathers. While no one was safe, men who once
moved in the same circles as the Muslim Youth were hunted down
and killed with particular vigour. Hizb’s initial attempt at igniting an
uprising in Logar may have failed dismally, but when the government
learned of the plan it went after Abubakr’s family, arresting his father,
Haji Jehangir, at home. He was never seen again.36 Hekmatyar’s family
in Kunduz was also targeted: his older brother, Akhtar Mohammed,
was arrested and executed in a local jail but his father Abdul Qader
Khan was denied the mercy of a quick death. Determined to make
an example of the family patriarch, the communists took him to the
Owdan desert, near the Soviet border. They tied him to the back of a
jeep, and dragged him through the scrubland, until he lay bloodied,
broken and lifeless in the dirt.37

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PROFESSIONS OF FAITH

Hekmatyar’s election as emir of Hizb-e Islami and the murder of

his father and brother added to his conviction that he was at the
centre of a pre-ordained struggle between good and evil. He was
developing a stoicism and strength that meant he could endure
personal tragedies and professional setbacks with unusual equanimity.
To his communist and Islamist opponents, he was a sociopath willing
to trade the suffering of his relatives, friends and countrymen for his
own ambition. Hekmatyar, on the other hand, regarded his ability to
compartmentalise his emotions as the trait of a great leader doing
God’s work. His fundamentalism manifested itself in myriad ways. He
would soon marry his murdered brother’s wife, adhering to an Islamic
injunction that allowed polygamy and mirroring the example of the
Prophet Mohammed, who wed the widows of men slain in conflict to
ensure they still had someone to provide for them. The couple would
eventually have four children, adding to the five Hekmatyar fathered
with his first wife. As far as the Hizb emir was concerned, all Afghans
were required to live according to a strict interpretation of Islam, both
personally and politically. To him, the home was God’s domain just as
much as the battlefield; his concepts of love and war were inseparable.
Even on the night of his first wedding as a teenager in Kunduz, when
he could have been forgiven for having more personal thoughts on his
mind, Hekmatyar had been troubled by a dream heavy with religious
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portent. The memory of it haunted him for years. He imagined himself

floating into the sky with his cousin. All around them, the stars moved
from east to west and turned into crown-like hats, before several men
appeared and took the hats to place on their heads. Just as Hekmatyar
did the same, he awoke. He initially thought the dream might be a
message that God would give him a number of sons who would fill him
with pride, but the memory of that night stayed with him into the jihad,
until he decided that the crowns symbolised turbans bestowed upon
the leaders of the mujahideen. The stars’ movements from east to west
were a sign of the trips the Afghan rebels would have to make across
mountains and rivers, valleys and fields, as they fought and died for their
cause.1 The Prophet Mohammed was asleep when he first saw a vision
of the Muslim conquest of Mecca, and Hekmatyar would never stop
trying to interpret his own dreams. Within them he found messages,
warnings and glimpses of the future in this world and the next.
There were other aspects to his increasingly messianic behaviour.
Hekmatyar was not a trained scholar or a graduate of Islamic law but
he was becoming exceptionally well-versed in some of the intricacies
and superstitions of his religion. After settling in Peshawar, he began to
study Arabic under the tutelage of a cleric from Pakistan’s tribal areas,
Abdul Rahim Chitrali, who ran a local madrassa. Muslims believe that
the full beauty and scope of the Qur’an can only be truly understood
through the language in which it was originally revealed. By learning
Arabic, Hekmatyar knew he would not only gain more respect from
his followers, but thought it would bring him closer to God. His
teacher, Chitrali, was a member of Jamaat-e Islami, the Pakistani party
of Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman’s old mentor, Abul-A’la Maududi.2
***
Hizb’s influence on anti-government unrest had grown steadily
under Hekmatyar and his predecessor as party leader, Mohammed
Amin Weqad, but the group still remained peripheral to much of
the resistance bursting forth spontaneously from communities who
were angry at the government’s oppression and radically progressive
reforms. In March 1979 the biggest uprising of the war occurred in
the western city of Herat with no significant input from Hizb. There,
an Afghan military division mutinied, joining forces with thousands
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of rioters and insurgents from surrounding districts. In the ensuing

chaos, Soviet advisers and their families were slaughtered and their
bodies paraded on pikes through the streets. The Afghan president,
Noor Mohammed Taraki, was so worried that he begged Moscow to
secretly send its own troops as back-up, suggesting that Red Army
soldiers from Central Asia would go unnoticed if they pretended to
be Afghans. The Soviets refused his request.3 By the time the rebellion
was crushed, thousands of people had been killed in air strikes and
bloody reprisals carried out by government forces.
On the other side of the country, meanwhile,Ahmad Shah Massoud’s
daring exploits since the terrible fallout of the Jan Mohammed case
were beginning to capture Hekmatyar’s attention. The Hizb emir was
wary that Jamiat was trying to outflank him and his old rival was a
central part of the problem. Massoud had left Peshawar for Nuristan,
in the northeast corner of Afghanistan, where he was taken under the
wing of an independent local commander. Shadowing his mentor’s
band of rebels, he attacked police stations and military outposts.
Massoud was a good student and Hekmatyar knew that it was only a
matter of time before he struck out on his own.
Hizb needed to stamp its authority on the insurgency. In early
April 1979 it sent a number of the fighters who had been living near
the dam at Warsak, north of Peshawar, into Afghanistan. Crossing the
Pakistan border into Nangarhar province, they were inducted into a
three-and-a-half week military training course held by former Muslim
Youth members who had fought in the 1975 insurrection. Several of the
young recruits had never even touched a gun before; now they were
being shown how to make grenades using gunpowder in preparation
for an offensive on local government positions. It was a thrilling and
poignant time for them, their excitement giving way to melancholy as
the date of their operation grew closer. Looking back on the turmoil
of recent years, they wondered what had happened to the lives they
once envisaged for themselves. Eleven of the fighters—all university
graduates—were sitting around talking as they assembled their
makeshift grenades, when one of them, a gifted student of history,
began to cry. His ten friends stopped what they were doing and asked
what was troubling him.‘We trained for the construction of Afghanistan
and now we are going to take part in its destruction,’ he said.
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Despite this lingering sadness, none of them doubted the

righteousness of their cause. Nor were they scared; if anything, they
felt immortal, convinced that God would guide their bullets on target
and shield them from the communists’ fire. On the night of 29 April, in
howling wind and rain, their belief was put to the test. The 120-strong
force of Hizbis attacked the district centre of Goshta, in northern
Nangarhar. Hurling gunpowder bombs in the darkness, they fought the
communists for seven hours before retreating. Although they failed in
their objective to capture the district headquarters, they killed eighty
of the government’s men.4
In the months that followed, Hizb made further efforts to ignite
the jihad in Nangarhar. Working undercover in the provincial capital
of Jalalabad, a mujahideen commander named Amanullah led a mutiny
inside the army. A career soldier, he had stayed in regular touch with
Hekmatyar since first meeting him years earlier, when the Hizb emir
was a young engineering student on the run from the Daoud regime.
On that occasion, he had been an impressionable military officer won
over by Hekmatyar’s proclamation that ‘human beings are the slaves of
other human beings’ in democratic and communist political systems.
Since then, he he had worked his way up through the army’s ranks
while secretly passing information to Hizb and recruiting other troops
to the party’s cause. He would become famous under the nom de
guerre Toran Amanullah, ‘Captain Amanullah.’ After that first meeting
with Hekmatyar he was determined to keep a promise he had made:
to do anything he could to establish an Islamic state. The mutiny in
Jalalabad failed but, with the regime still reeling from events in Herat,
the attempted uprising in Jalalabad was yet another blow to the
communists’ morale.5
At the same time as Toran Amanullah’s rebellion, the militants
who attacked Goshta teamed up with a local community leader, or
khan, who commanded the loyalty of thousands of fighters from the
Mohmand tribe. The khan showed no interest in party politics but
was happy to form a temporary alliance with Hizb. Together, they
had plotted to launch an assault on the district of Kama, just north of
Jalalabad, if the mutiny succeeded. Stung by its failure, on 4 June they
retreated into the mountains, hoping to find shelter while they waited
on standby for a new mission. They had barely begun their withdrawal
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when they were shot at by a local villager. Deciding to make an example

of the assailant lest any other residents try to halt their progress, they
killed him and set fire to his property. Further on, the Hizbis ran into
more trouble when a communist sergeant spotted them and opened
fire. They were still poorly armed in comparison to most government
soldiers, so they waited for his ammunition to run out before capturing
him and ordering him to say the Islamic profession of faith. ‘I have left
these words behind and I will not repeat them,’ he answered. A Hizbi
pleaded with him but the soldier stood firm. His obduracy cost him
his life; he was led away into the mountains and executed. Hekmatyar’s
men continued on, resting in the homes of sympathetic villagers who
slaughtered their livestock to feed them.6 The young mujahideen, who
fought so mercilessly in the name of Islam, were beginning to earn a
reputation for a new kind of extremism unlike anything Afghanistan
had seen before.
While Hizb made inroads in Nangarhar, it also exploited the rising
discontent sweeping through rural areas close to Kabul. Since late 1978
ethnic Hazaras in the rugged central region around Bamiyan had been
rising up against the government. The regime responded by forming
a Pashtun militia in neighbouring Wardak province to deploy against
the rebels. On 4 June 1979—as the communist sergeant was being
executed in Nangahrar—a delegation of Pashtuns drove to the district
centre of Chak to collect the government-issue weapons they were
meant to use against the Hazaras. With thousands of brand new rifles
in their possession, the Pashtuns then turned on the government. The
double cross had been hatched by a local council of scholars, elders,
farmers and labourers who did not claim fealty to any mujahideen
party. Later that summer, Hizb made the most of the rebellion, sending
one of its commanders to establish a unit of fighters inside Chak.
The commander had been living in Peshawar but was from Chak and
had known Hekmatyar for nearly a decade. Using the friendships he
already enjoyed within the community and the help of former Muslim
Youth members, he ensured that Hizb quickly picked up support in
and around the district.7
The events in Nangarahar and Wardak were proof that the party
was learning from past mistakes. Drawing on the Muslim Youth’s
experience of the disastrous 1975 insurrection and some of the naive
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earlier attempts at fighting the communist regime, Hizb was starting

to adopt more refined tactics. The leadership in Peshawar had come
to understand that their radical interpretation of Islam needed to
be introduced gradually if the party was to find support beyond its
traditional power base of urbanised, well-educated youth. Demanding
an immediate Muslim Brotherhood-style revolution, as Hekmatyar
had done in years gone by, would only arouse suspicion among Afghans
unused to an overtly political interpretation of Islam and already
battling the foreign ideology of communism. A more realistic approach
required working in tandem with tribal and religious leaders, who
had spent generations earning the trust of their communities. Once
Hizb had established a toehold in a village or a district, the party was
confident that it would be only a matter of time before people fell
under its spell.
The problems facing Hekmatyar’s men in Kabul were of a different
nature. Hizb already had a solid grassroots network in the capital
thanks to its historical ties to the university and polytechnic, but with
government informants everywhere and prisoners being tortured into
revealing information about the mujahideen, the party needed to stay
alert. In the past, Hizb had only thought it necessary to employ a single
head of intelligence for the entire country, a cleric from Wardak named
Mohammed Wali. He had lived in Kabul and blended seamlessly into
public life by giving the impression of being more interested in art and
culture than politics, revolution and religion. Now the party leadership
divided Afghanistan into four separate geographical zones and created
separate intelligence sections for each of them. Wali took charge of
the central zone around Kabul, where his operatives used taxis owned
by two mujahideen to travel undetected to weekly meetings in the
city. The gatherings were held in safe houses every Thursday, with
the taxis transporting the men individually rather than in groups to
avoid arousing suspicion. Wali’s son-in-law was given responsibility for
Afghanistan’s northern zone, where he began to establish links with
local maliks and khans disenfranchised by the regime’s reforms. He soon
gained enough of their trust to establish an insurgent outpost in a forest
near the northern city of Balkh—a strategic location relatively close
to the Soviet border.8 The work of the intelligence sections epitomised
the party’s growing sophistication and confidence, but Hizb still lacked
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the kind of defining victory that Hekmatyar craved. He would not have
long to wait.
***
The bodies of the thirty-seven men were spread out like slaughtered
cattle, the blood dry and matted on their skin. Several of them had
been beheaded, but not with the speed and precision Afghans expected
from principled warriors of God. Rather than kill them quickly by
cutting through their windpipes and the soft tissue of their throats,
the insurgents had hacked into the muscle and bone at the back of the
men’s necks, near the top of their spines. They died slow, agonising
deaths. Although no group claimed responsibility for the attack,
Hizb was the most probable culprit. The victims were members of a
government-sponsored network of militias tasked with encouraging
support for the regime’s reforms. It was May 1979 and the executions
were another sign that the jihad had reached Shinkay, a quiet corner of
Zabul, southern Afghanistan—the province from which Hekmatyar’s
paternal ancestors came.
Abdul Jamil, a government soldier, stood over the bodies. The
butchery disgusted him, but he refused to let it put him off a plan
he had been hatching for months. Jamil—soon to be known by the
nom de guerre General Muzaferuddin—intended to defect to Hizb.
The communist regime had briefly detained him earlier that year after
he refused to salute a Russian advisor. Seeming contrite, he had been
released and allowed to resume his duties; now he was determined
to rebel in a way that would send shockwaves through the military.
To prove his worth to Hekmatyar, he was going to kidnap dozens of
communist officials and hand them over to the mujahideen. He took the
beheadings as proof of just how much the government was despised. If
he did not act soon, he knew he might yet meet the same fate.
Six weeks later, on 5 July, General Muzaferuddin was almost
ready. Well regarded by his men, he had persuaded the soldiers
under his command to help and come up with a codename for the
operation: ‘Long Live Islam.’ All he needed was a pretext to get the
communist officials together in one room. He went to see the officials
that afternoon and told them that he had devised a way to detain the
Hizbis who were causing such havoc locally. Intrigued, they said they
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would discuss the issue with him over dinner. That evening, twenty-
five senior military and civilian officials gathered in a secluded part
of the base to hear General Muzaferuddin out. As they ate, he stood
guard at the room’s entrance, desperate to stop anyone else entering
in case they were caught in the bloodletting he was about to unleash.
At 8.30pm he brought the officials a dessert of fresh apricots. Much
to his horror, he suddenly noticed that they were not relaxing in an
office or guest room but in some kind of storage facility containing
ammunition, artillery shells and mortars. His plan, he realised, had
turned into a suicide mission. ‘Oh God, we are doing this just for
your sake,’ he muttered to himself. At that moment one of the co-
conspirators keeping watch outside fired a shot to signal the start of
the attack.
From the doorway of the room General Muzaferuddin ordered the
startled dignitaries to raise their hands. ‘If you are Muslims, surrender
to us,’ he said. A colonel reached for a pistol and shot at him, narrowly
missing. General Muzaferuddin opened fire with a Kalashnikov. The
entire room descended into mayhem as shooting filled the air and
the dignitaries fought for their lives. Prior to the attack, General
Muzaferuddin had instructed his men to throw a grenade into the
room if he was killed; assuming that he must be dead in all the chaos,
one of them did as instructed. The force of the blast threw General
Muzaferuddin into a wall in the corridor. Winded and bruised but
not seriously injured, he managed to change the magazine in his
Kalashnikov and direct another burst of gunfire into the room. In the
eerie stillness that followed, the only sounds he could hear were the
groans of the dying dignitaries and the ringing in his ears.
Staggering into the yard outside, General Muzaferuddin found the
rest of his troops shooting wildly at a communist soldier responsible for
radio communications on the base. He had wanted the soldier arrested,
but this part of his plan had also gone wrong. Like the dignitaries he
had hoped to detain rather than kill, the soldier now lay dead as smoke
and flames billowed from his jeep. General Muzaferuddin tried to
gather his thoughts, briefly overcome with the emotion of killing so
many people and the joy of still being alive. He steadied himself and,
raising his voice above the din, told his men to stop shooting. Confused
shouts went back and forth through the base before the guns fell silent.
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General Muzaferuddin ordered his men to secure the area and organise
the military equipment they had seized.
The next morning, he and his troops pressed on through the
southeast corner of Zabul, reassuring local elders as they went that
this was the start of an Islamic revolution. For several days their victory
went uncontested as the government reeled from the charnel house
scene in the ammunition room. Then, at last, the regime responded:
government jets streaked above them as their convoy sped across the
desert area of Darwazagai, near Kandahar. General Muzaferuddin told
his driver to put the red flag of the communists on the roof of their
vehicle to confuse the pilots.The driver scrambled for the flag and held
it aloft, but it was too late; as the banner fluttered in the wind, one of
the rebel soldiers shot at the departing jets with an anti-aircraft gun
loaded onto the back of a truck.Their cover had been blown. Everyone
knew it was only a matter of time before the planes returned.
With nowhere to hide, the convoy stopped and General Muzaferuddin
asked which of his men was responsible for the blunder. He was met
with embarrassed silence. ‘Whoever opened fire did the right thing,’ he
reassured them. ‘He is a good man and a Muslim.’ Encouraged, one of
the soldiers admitted that he was the shooter. General Muzaferuddin
told him that next time he should set up his gun properly and make sure
he hit the target. Twenty minutes passed before the jets reappeared in
the clear blue sky over the desert. It was 1.30pm on 8 July. The same
trigger-happy soldier took aim and opened fire with his anti-aircraft
gun, its twin barrels pounding back and forth as he swivelled on his
seat and tried to keep pace with the planes. The rest of the convoy
looked on in amazement as smoke spilled from one of the jets, sending
it spiralling towards the ground. The rebel soldiers were jubilant; it was
the first time anywhere in the country that a mujahid had shot down
a communist fighter jet. General Muzaferuddin’s convoy of stolen
armoured cars and tanks hurried on to their next destination, the men
convinced God was watching over them. They seized more territory in
the days that followed, culminating in the capture of Maruf, a district
in Kandahar province, where General Muzaferuddin established his
command headquarters at an outpost by the name of Al’a Jirga.
Over the next month he held several meetings there with
representatives from the various mujahideen parties, all of them keen
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to recruit him. Hekmatyar was the first to visit him, spending three
days in the area. General Muzaferuddin also went to Peshawar to assess
his options, but his heart was set on joining Hizb. As a teenager his
relatives had told him stories about the daring exploits of the Muslim
Youth. Now in his mid-twenties, he joined the illustrious ranks of his
heroes, allowing Hizb to bask in his glory and claim its most impressive
military victory to date. General Muzaferuddin would go on to serve
as one of the party’s most effective commanders, running what became
known as the Mubarez Division: a force of young, highly committed
fighters that carried out operations in the provinces of Kandahar,
Helmand, Uruzgan and Zabul.9
Weeks later Hizb had more success. This time fighters trained by
Kashmir Khan were sent to capture Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman’s
home district of Nijrab, in Kapisa. They killed the district governor,
taking his Kalashnikov and a cache of 900 other guns, and seizing two
Soviet-issue jeeps. Their biggest prize, however, came in the form of
several members of the murderous AGSA intelligence service, whom
they detained as they swept down from the mountains.The government
agents were subjected to a show trial in a makeshift Sharia court. Two
dates later, they were sentenced to death, taken away and shot. The
Hizbis’ thirst for revenge was further quenched as they sifted through
the government buildings searching for loot, and found $1190 in local
currency stored in the treasury department. They added the wads
of notes to $3490 given to them by sympathetic residents and sent
the money back to Peshawar, where it was used to aid exiled fighters
and  refugees.10
Although welcome, the cash was merely a fraction of the money Hizb
needed to fund the war. For all the bravery, tactical nous and popular
goodwill evident in guerrilla campaigns that summer, Afghanistan’s
rebel parties were still under-resourced and in desperate need of
assistance. Hizb was no exception, despite its continually-improving
relationship with Pakistan. The communist regime, supported by the
Soviets, was a formidable enemy that could withstand the short-term
impact of losses on the battlefield because it possessed far superior
resources and manpower than the insurgents. But most government
soldiers lacked the ideological drive of their Islamist counterparts,
which left both them and the state they were meant to be defending
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vulnerable to a sustained guerrilla campaign. With enough money and

weapons, the mujahideen clearly had the ability to damage Moscow’s
interests in Afghanistan and bleed Kabul dry.
***
For almost a year Washington had been a relatively passive participant
in the conflict. Initially unsure of the communist regime’s intentions,
it earmarked $15 million in humanitarian aid and a far smaller amount
in military aid for the Afghan government while it waited to see how
the war played out. Since then, events on the ground had taken on
a frightening new dimension. On 14 February 1979 the American
ambassador to Afghanistan, Adolph Dubs, had been kidnapped and
held hostage in a Kabul hotel, only to die in a bungled rescue attempt
by Afghan forces and their Soviet advisers later that day. Exactly who
planned the abduction was a mystery, but an ultra-radical Marxist fringe
group claimed responsibility. In exchange for Dubs, it demanded the
release of a prominent communist who had fallen foul of his erstwhile
comrades. The US blamed Moscow and the Taraki regime for failing
to keep its top diplomat safe, and cut its humanitarian aid package in
half; the $250,000 set aside for military aid was cancelled entirely.11
Ambassador Dubs’s death added to the growing unease felt by some
American officials, who feared that Washington’s inertia towards
Afghanistan was gifting it to the Soviets. A month later the CIA sent the
White House a classified proposal to provide undercover support to
the mujahideen. On 3 July, just two days before General Muzaferuddin
staged his bloody mutiny in Zabul, American President Jimmy Carter
approved the CIA’s plan, signing an official directive that said the
covert action would promote American national security. The CIA
was authorised to spend just over $500,000 on propaganda, medical
supplies, radio equipment, psychological operations and cash payments
for the rebels.12 The aid was not reserved for one particular faction.
US officials were unsure how long the communist regime could
survive but doubted that Moscow would directly intervene to save
its client state. Confidential documents from inside the Carter
administration warned that the mujahideen still lacked a clear leader
and were too preoccupied with arguing among themselves in Peshawar.
‘Groups with less than lofty goals’ including ‘bandits and other
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criminal elements’ were complicating matters further by trying to

hijack the insurgency, said an August 1979 communique from the US
embassy in Kabul. It nevertheless found reason for hope, specifically
praising Hekmatyar for presiding over successful guerrilla operations
in southeast Afghanistan, where Hizb had launched the jihad soon
after the communist coup. No mention was made of the killings in
Zabul.13 All the mujahideen factions would come to depend heavily
on American aid, with Hizb the chief benefactor as the flow of money
increased from a trickle to a flood. To the CIA, the group’s fanaticism
and brutality was part of its appeal; Hekmatyar would stop at nothing
to defeat the communists.
Although the US help was welcome, Hizb had already made
efforts to remain self-sufficient by establishing its own independent
backchannels to suppliers of military equipment. Months before
President Carter agreed to assist the rebels, the party made a bold move
into the murky world of international arms trading, with Afghanistan’s
old foe Britain the unlikely location of the group’s expansion. Two
Hizbis, accompanied by a retired Pakistani military officer known to
them only as ‘Mr Jamshid,’ travelled to the UK in late 1978, tasked with
buying a large cache of guns and a radio transmitter that could be used
to broadcast mujahideen propaganda. On arrival, the three-man team
split up, with Mr Jamshid heading into London, where he had contacts
in the criminal underworld, accompanied by one of the Hizbis. While
money for basic necessities was running low in Peshawar and many in
the party’s ranks were cold and hungry, the secret delegation in the
UK had no such problems. They handed over a cheque for $250,000
for the guns—money given to them by unidentified Saudi donors. The
weapons were shipped from Britain to Pakistan.
The second Hizbi, Abdul Qadeer Karyab, travelled to Reading, a
town of drab retail outlets and mundane office blocks forty-two miles
west of London. Karyab was a friend of Hekmatyar’s from their days
together in the engineering faculty at Kabul University. They were
both from Kunduz and even looked vaguely alike, sharing the same
stern, dark eyes and long aquiline nose. Karyab took to the alien
surroundings of Reading surprisingly well. He tried out a local sauna,
hoping the steam would cure him of a cold he had picked up on his
travels. Sitting there, far from home, he was amused to be in a room
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full of sweating, half-naked Englishmen while he carried out a secret

mission that would have far-reaching consequences for Afghanistan
and the world. Karyab stayed in Reading for fifteen days, spending
much of his time attending a course on how to assemble and operate a
radio transmitter. The lessons with a private company were organised
and paid for by an Afghan businessman living in the UK. At the end of
the course, Karyab organised a bank transfer of £10,000 to buy the
equipment and requisite spare parts, then arranged for it to be sent
to Pakistan. He and the other members of the delegation returned to
Peshawar after a month, convinced that the British government had
known the true purpose of their trip, but with no official confirmation
from anyone in Westminster.14
***
Hizb used the equipment bought by Karyab in the UK to set-up a radio
station in Kunar, broadcasting out of a forest high up in the La Hussein
valley in Kashmir Khan’s home district of Shaygal. Looking out over a
vista of bright orange persimmon trees and walnut groves, the station
went live for a few hours each day, airing religious propaganda and news
from the frontlines.15 In the pre-internet age, Hizb at last had a way of
spreading its doctrine to a mass audience. Hekmatyar regularly tuned
into the broadcasts via a small transistor radio he kept in Peshawar.
Hizb was at its strongest in Kunar, with Kashmir Khan now the
party’s military commander for the entire province. His immediate
superior was Jamil-ur-Rahman, whose nephews had been arrested by
the Daoud government as they smuggled night letters into Afghanistan
in the incident that broke open the Jan Mohammed case. Spurred on by
the radio station, Hizb felt unstoppable locally. That summer of 1979,
the party targeted one of the government’s last redoubts in the area, a
military brigade at Asmar, immediately east of Shaygal, where 2,000-
3,000 regime troops were garrisoned.16 In July, Hekmatyar wrote to
the leader of the mutiny in Zabul, General Muzaferuddin, asking for
help.The latter responded by sending a supply of captured Kalashnikovs
and anti-aircraft guns to Kunar.17 Within a month mujahideen were
swarming over the mountains surrounding Asmar, ready to strike.
As Kashmir Khan’s fighters closed in, a council of twenty-three
army officers who had agreed to defect to Hizb met in secret inside the
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garrison to make the final preparations for a mutiny. On the night of

22 August they assassinated a core group of regime loyalists at the base,
knowing that most of the low-ranking soldiers would subsequently
follow their lead and switch sides. The mutineers then contacted
Kashmir Khan, who hurried to Asmar to meet them. They asked him
not to publicise news of the garrison’s fall until they had killed or
captured Kunar’s governor, Nizamuddin Bikhoda. He agreed.
Bikhoda’s brutality was legendary. In April he had overseen the
massacre of 1200 people in the village of Kilara after accusing them
of aiding the insurgency.18 Hekmatyar would eventually visit the site
of the killings and donate almost $3000 for the local community to
build a wall of remembrance around a mass grave in which the victims
were buried.19 Long before then, though, Hizb exacted revenge for the
killings. Bikhoda, whose name meant‘Godless,’ was stationed elsewhere
in Kunar and had no idea an uprising was underway at Asmar—one of
the most important military bases in eastern Afghanistan. Luring the
governor into a trap, the mutinous officers notified him via military
radio that they had captured several insurgents. Bikhoda told them
to keep the prisoners alive until he could come to the base and hang
them himself; he arrived by helicopter the next day and approached
the officers in typically crass fashion, asking ‘where are the Ikhwanis?’
Before he had a chance to realise that he had been duped, a rogue
soldier, Nur Rahman, rushed up and shot him multiple times in the
head, continuing to fire even as the governor lay dead on the ground.
Hiding outside in a row of shops, Kashmir Khan watched as Bikhoda’s
corpse was dumped in the road. The rebel officers then contacted
regime headquarters and explained that the governor was unable to
return on schedule because his helicopter had broken down. They
asked if some engineers could be sent to carry out repairs.
For three days the regime remained unaware that Asmar had fallen
to Hizb. News travelled slowly in much of Afghanistan and Kunar was
relatively isolated from any major city; Kashmir Khan’s fighters were
also disciplined enough to keep the mutiny a secret until they had
reaped its full rewards. Unwittingly, the government sent helicopters
laden with men, flour and ammunition to the rebel base. The officers
seized the supplies, arrested more troops and began to sort through
the huge haul of weapons stored at the garrison. For the guerrillas of
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Hizb, who moved around on dirt trials, possessed only a handful of

assault rifles and often transported their wares by donkey or horse,
the enormous supply of arms had the potential to alter the course
of the war: 3,000 Kaslashnikovs, 107 rockets, 27 mortars, 300 semi-
automatic Makarov pistols, 12 heavy artillery pieces, 2 helicopters
and 64 jeeps and trucks. By the time the regime realised its mistake
and government aircraft began to strafe the area, Hizb was ready and
waiting. Asail Khan, a former Muslim Youth member and one of the
rebel officers in charge of the mutiny, gathered his troops to organise
the defence. He had personally overseen the execution of thirty-four
communist officers during the uprising and would go on to serve as
an intelligence operative for Hekmatyar. He and his soldiers hurried
to anti-aircraft positions in the surrounding mountains and shot at
the government planes. By the end of the fighting, the bodies of dead
soldiers and horses littered the pockmarked landscape. The regime’s
attempt to regain control of the garrison had failed.
What should have been Hizb’s finest hour soon descended into
another feud with a rival mujahideen party. Sibghatullah Mojaddedi,
the cantankerous scholar who led Jabha-ye Nejat-e Mili, walked to Asmar
from Pakistan when he heard that the base was in rebel hands. While he
claimed to have made the eleven-day trip to pay homage to the mutineers,
Hizb suspected him of trying to muscle in on its victory. Tensions rose
when the highest-ranking rebel officer, Abdul Rauf Khan, declared the
mutiny a success for all the mujahideen factions, not just Hekmatyar’s.
The other officers accused him of betraying an earlier pledge of loyalty
they had all made to Hizb and became convinced that Mojaddedi had
bribed him into switching sides. With the massive haul of weapons
still not securely in Hizb’s possession and both factions now eyeing the
lucrative prize, the dispute turned violent. Plans for a joint mujahideen
offensive on Chaga Serai, the central market in Kunar’s provincial capital,
were acrimoniously cancelled as Kashmir Khan’s fighters and soldiers
loyal to Rauf Khan fought for the guns, mortars and military vehicles—
prioritising their ownership of the supplies and materiel over the chance
to build on the success at Asmar. More than 140 men were killed, with
many of the bodies washed into the Kunar River.
When the bloodshed ended, Hizb retained the bulk of the captured
arms and began the arduous process of transporting them into
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Pakistan. Mojaddedi denounced Hekmatyar’s mujahideen as ‘selfish’

but Kashmir Khan had no regrets: the battle for Asmar had been a very
personal triumph for him, as well as a major victory for Hizb. Among
the most notable defectors after the mutiny was the sergeant who had
raided Kashmir Khan’s house earlier in the war, grappling with him
over the mujahideen’s first Kalashnikov while the troops outside killed
his uncle. Remarkably, Kashmir Khan now welcomed the sergeant into
Hizb-e Islami and would go on to hire him as one of his bodyguards.
In doing so, he was following the example of the Prophet Mohammed,
who had pardoned the killer of his own uncle and taken him into the
fold of Islam.20
***
The religious nature of the guerrilla war spreading uncontrollably
through Afghanistan terrified the Kremlin, which feared a repeat of
the Islamic revolution that had just swept Iran in a flurry of show trials
and public executions. Like Afghanistan, Iran bordered the Soviet
Union and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had consistently denounced
Moscow for interfering in the affairs of Islamic countries. Should
Hizb ever seize power in Kabul, the Soviets would have yet another
openly hostile Islamic state on their doorstep, ready to provoke unrest
among the large Muslim populations of its central Asian republics. This
time, however, the revolutionaries would be Sunni rather than Shia
Muslims—the religion’s largest sect and a ready-made powder keg of
anti-communist resentment.
Throughout 1979 Moscow watched apprehensively as Hizb grew
stronger. One ‘top secret’ communique relayed to the Communist
Party in Hungary on behalf of the Soviet leadership surmised that
‘the most active counter-revolutionary force’ in Afghanistan ‘is the
organisation of “Muslim Brothers”, the headquarters of which can be
found on Pakistani territory.’ From there, ‘armed diversion units’ were
entering Afghanistan and urging people ‘to start a “holy war.”’21 In the
summer, as Hizb took new ground, the Soviet politburo decided to
warn India that Pakistan was helping the mujahideen to create ‘a world
Islamic republic’ spanning territory from Afghanistan to Kashmir.22
One senior Soviet diplomat stationed in Kabul summed up the feelings
of his colleagues: ‘Islam, it is a terrible religion,’ he complained.23
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Consumed by Islamophobia, paranoia and a legitimate concern for

the long-term security of its southern border, Moscow spent much of
the year making contingency plans in case the situation deteriorated. It
was already selling military equipment to Kabul at a heavily discounted
rate and had thousands of specialists advising the Afghan government.
The Soviet Ministry of Defence created a Muslim Battalion of 500
soldiers from the Tajik, Uzbek and Turkmen Soviet republics who
would be ideally suited to fight in Afghanistan should the need arise.
Meanwhile, an air assault battalion operating undercover as technical
advisers was deployed to the air base at Bagram, north of Kabul, to
protect Soviet transport planes and crew. The KGB sent some 120
members disguised as routine diplomatic staff to defend the Soviet
embassy and to reconnoitre Afghan government buildings.24
Although the Kremlin could see that Taraki’s regime was losing the
war, it was unwilling to abandon him. For all the trouble he had caused
his patrons in the past, the two parties shared a bond that went beyond
the politically convenient relationship of strategic allies. For decades
there had been speculation that Taraki was a Soviet agent and, though
some of his colleagues still did not know it, the rumours were true.
The man who once seemed destined to be remembered as nothing
more than a mediocre writer was recruited by the KGB in 1951, when
he set to work under the codename Noor. The Soviets even funded the
1965 parliamentary election campaign in which he, Sulaiman Layeq
and Babrak Karmal ran for office as phoney independent candidates.25
Moscow had invested years of emotional and financial capital into
Taraki’s political career. Now his life and the entire communist project
in Afghanistan was under threat like never before.

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CULTURE WARS

Even as it waged war inside Afghanistan, Hizb-e Islami was busy building
the framework of a radical shadow state in the Pakistan borderlands.
The process of creating this government-in-waiting had begun in a
quiet but telling fashion a month before the communist coup,1 when
Hekmatyar decided that the party needed its own newspaper. Since
the days of the Muslim Youth, he and his fellow Islamists had yearned
for a professional way to showcase their writing and propaganda.
Under the monarchy they had used the newspaper of their friend
Minhajuddin Gahiz to get their message across. However, since his
assassination and the decline of free speech under the Daoud regime,
they had struggled to find a simple means of reaching a wide audience.
Night letters, which had become their signature technique, were ideal
for intimidating people and ensuring that the party’s message reached
small communities in isolated villages, but their scope was limited.
Only a newspaper could convey Hekmatyar’s grand ambitions.
Always on the lookout for sources of inspiration, no matter
how unlikely they seemed, he came up with the idea after studying
the work of a leftist militant organisation in Iran, the Sazman-e
Mujahideen-e Khalq-e Iran (the People’s Mujahideen Organisation of
Iran). Throughout the decade prior to Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic
Revolution, Marxist groups had waged a guerrilla war against the
Shah and his allies. As part of the campaign, the Mujahideen-e Khalq
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had been linked to a series of attacks targeting US military personnel

and American civilians stationed in Iran. The tactics adopted in these
attacks, including one of the first known uses of a remotely detonated
improvised explosive device and co-ordinated ambushes in urban
areas, were far more sophisticated than anything Hizb had yet tried.
Hekmatyar took notice and, as a news addict and politics obsessive, he
had the group’s newspaper delivered regularly to him in Peshawar. The
more he read it, the more impressed he became with its layout and
contents, until he eventually asked a friend if something similar could
be produced on behalf of Hizb. The friend was Qarib-ur-Rahman
Saeed, who had previously composed the typewritten letter offering
the Daoud regime the chance to work in tandem with Hizb against
the communists. A well-read mujahid from a family of book lovers, he
thought a newspaper was a superb idea.
Hekmatyar adopted a hands-on role to ensure that the project was
a success. De facto head of the party’s cultural committee at the time,
he came up with the newspaper’s name, Shahadat, which carries the
dual meaning of ‘martyrdom’ and ‘witness’ in Arabic, Pashto and Dari.
He also designed a logo for Hizb that could be printed in each edition,
as well as reproduced on official documents, night letters and flags.
The logo was an astute, striking piece of symbolism that captured
everything Hekmatyar wanted the party to stand for in a few choice
symbols and phrases. At the top was the Islamic profession of faith:
‘There is no God but God and Mohammed is the messenger of God.’
The logo’s most prominent feature, was a Qur’an resting open on a
wooden rehal book stand, beneath the rays of a rising sun. Written
across the Qur’an were the words Kashmir Khan had witnessed on
a protest banner years earlier, urging Muslims to ‘hold fast to God’s
rope.’  The rehal was balanced on the tip of a mihrab, an arch-shaped
niche in mosques that indicates the direction of Mecca. Inside the
mihrab were three steps symbolising a minbar, the pulpit imams use
to deliver sermons. Near the foot of the logo were quotes from the
Qur’an that Hizb used to justify its opposition to man-made laws:
‘Control of the heavens and earth belongs to God … God controls the
outcome of all events … Judgement belongs to God the Most High,
the Most Great.’2 Two sheaths of wheat and a pair of swords ran either
side of the logo, signifying Hizb’s determination to provide and fight
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for Muslims. At the very bottom was the party’s name and the year of
the Muslim Youth’s establishment, 1969—a subtle riposte to Hizb’s
rivals in Jamiat who claimed that they belonged to Afghanistan’s oldest
Islamist group.
Not yet party emir—his election would take place months later—
Hekmatyar had consulted colleagues, who approved the logo’s design
and the newspaper’s publication. With their backing, the book-loving
Saeed was sent to Lahore, a city in Punjab renowned as Pakistan’s
literary capital, to find a local printer willing to publish Shahadat.
He soon returned to Peshawar with the newspaper hot off the press,
proudly presenting the first edition to the Hizb leadership. The font
was so small that the insurgent commander Jalaluddin Haqqani joked
he would need a magnifying glass to read the stories, but it was a
minor complaint;3 despite looking more like a student newsletter
than a serious broadsheet, Shahadat lifted the mujahideen’s spirits
when the jihad was still in its infancy. The paper’s publication also
marked the start of a highly successful propaganda campaign that Hizb
would refine and expand in the decade to come. Copies of its second
edition were sent to Kashmir Khan in Kunar just before his house
was raided in the incident that saw him capture the mujahideen’s
first Kalashnikov.
In time, Hizb would print dozens of different publications aimed at a
cross-section of Afghan society. These included the quarterly women’s
magazine Payem-e Zan-e Muslimeen (Muslim Women’s Message) and Nesa
(Women), a four-page monthly newspaper aimed at informing women
about the rights accorded them in Islam.4 Shahadat, however, would
always remain the party’s flagship title, with its journalists doubling as
fighters and the editorial board in Peshawar held in the same reverence
as senior military commanders serving on the frontlines. Among the
mujahideen hired by the newspaper was Haji Abubakr, the former
high school teacher who had shown his courage and self-motivation
in his failed attempt to start the jihad in Logar. In the summer of 1979
he went to Kunar on his first assignment as a cub reporter, just as
the Asmar mutiny was unfolding. For the next five years Hizb would
employ him as a photographer, a fixer escorting foreign journalists
into the field, and a cameraman filming battle footage for use by
international television networks.5
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Hizb’s decision to establish a media wing reflected the party’s

wider goal of waging a cultural war in conjunction with its armed
struggle. Not content with achieving dominance through force alone,
Hekmatyar’s men wanted to permanently change the way Afghans
thought about politics and religion. Prominent party figures took great
pride in the Muslim Youth’s origins inside Kabul’s higher education
system, seeing themselves as more urbane and studious than their
counterparts in other mujahideen factions. Their rivals frequently
drew on the traditional teachings of rural Afghan madrassas or
laissez-faire Sufi preachers for guidance and recruitment; in contrast,
Hizb’s leaders had a ravenous appetite for new ideas, as typified by
Hekmatyar’s willingness to use a leftist newspaper as his inspiration for
Shahadat. Prominent Hizbis had read the work of Hassan al-Banna and
Sayyid Qutb in the late 1960s and early 1970s, even as they spent years
studying for degrees in subjects ranging from literature and medicine
to engineering. Now they were more determined than ever to pass
on their knowledge; Hekmatyar in particular was starting to think
of himself as something of a polymath, happy to hold forth on any
issue but always looking for the answers through the prism of radical
Islam. He was convinced that Muslims were still suffering from an
inferiority complex caused by the break-up of the Ottoman Empire,
a caliphate which at its peak ruled over territory from Belgrade to
Jerusalem. Following the First World War, the victorious European
powers dismantled and carved up this once great empire, installing
compliant leaders in its place to govern submissively on their behalf in
newly created nation states.
Hekmatyar felt an abiding hatred for those leaders, accusing
them of betraying their own people by failing to implement Islamic
educational curriculums, and he set out to right this perceived
historical wrong.6 After the early editions of Shahadat appeared in
1978, Hizb opened the Abdul Rahim Niazi School, named in honour
of the deceased Muslim Youth leader, near the dam at Warsak, north
of Peshawar. Run by four teachers from Logar, Kunar and Nangarhar,
the school was short-staffed and badly in need of supplies but again
served as a signpost of Hizb’s ambition. Pupils studied Dari, Pashto
and English, and received religious guidance. Some 250 students, all
of them children of refugees, ranging in age from eight to nineteen,
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were registered there—boosting the party’s credentials among the

growing community of impoverished Afghan exiles in Pakistan.
Although the students were all boys, Hizb did not object to educating
girls once there was sufficient demand from families and the necessary
resources became available. Hekmatyar paid close personal attention
to the students’ development, occasionally getting behind the wheel
of a dark-coloured saloon car—the only vehicle the party owned at
the time—and driving himself to the school to inspect their progress.
The students would gather to welcome him by reciting a specially
composed Pashto nasheed, a type of hypnotic a cappella song replete
with religious imagery.7
Soon after opening the Abdul Rahim Niazi School Hizb set up a
school in central Peshawar, with Pashto, Dari, Mathematics and Islamic
studies placed on the curriculum. This time the school—in which boys
and girls were taught in separate classes—was named in honour of
Sayyid Jamaluddin al-Afghani, a pioneering Islamist of the nineteenth
century who had dedicated his life to countering the influence of
imperialism.8 Radicalised in British India, Afghani was a proponent of
violent resistance to the West. ‘There is no day in which foreigners
do not grab a part of the Islamic lands, and there is no night in which
foreigners do not make a group of Muslims obey their rule,’ he once
proclaimed. ‘They disgrace the Muslims and dissipate their pride. No
longer is the command of [the Muslims] obeyed or their word heeded.
[The foreigners] chain up the Muslims, put around their necks a yoke
of servitude, debase them, humiliate their lineage, and they do not
mention their name but with insult.’9 Hizb’s school in Peshawar was a
testament to his vision.
In paying tribute to the work of Afghani, Hizb was openly
acknowledging that its ambition to rebuild Islam as a political and
military force in the world owed a debt to revolutionaries of the past.
Ever since the death of the Prophet Mohammed a panoply of Islamic
movements had offered a wide range of solutions to Muslims yearning
for a government in God’s true image. Caliphates such as the Ottoman
Empire had been and gone, and smaller revivalist projects had burst
forth in explosions of violence, only to crumble and dissolve when faced
with the immovable obstacle of international realpolitik. As recently
as the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, South Asia, the
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Middle East and North Africa had experienced rebellions by militants

trying to ignite uprisings that would prelude a pan-Islamic awakening.
In 1830 Peshawar had been briefly governed by a radical interpretation
of Sharia when an Indian Islamist, Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi, took control
of the city. His mini-Islamic state lasted for just two months until
local Pashtuns grew tired of moderating their customs and forced him
to flee. More than fifty years later, a fundamentalist cleric in Sudan,
Mohammed Ahmad ibn Abdullah, had declared himself the Mahdi,
a holy figure whose arrival on earth Muslims believe will presage
judgement day. Seizing Khartoum from British and Egyptian forces,
Abdullah established a regime governed by an austere interpretation
of Sharia and declared jihad an obligation that all Muslims were duty-
bound to fulfil. But after dying of typhus, both his radical Islamic state
and his plan to ignite uprisings across the region gradually withered,
and the British returned to Khartoum.
As colonialism ran its course and a new world order began to
emerge at the turn of the century, Muslims elsewhere picked up the
revolutionary mantle. In the 1920s a Bedouin militia in the Hejaz
region of what became Saudi Arabia massacred thousands of civilians it
accused of apostasy, then attacked its sponsors in Mecca’s ruling clergy
and attempted to enflame a transnational insurgency. The rebellion
was crushed but the Bedouin militia’s belief in Islam as a homicidal and
virulent dogma, instead of the flexible and tolerant faith practised by
most Muslims, would later be reborn in the form of ISIS—a movement
whose very existence came to owe much to Hizb.
More pertinently for Hekmatyar and his disciples, Kabul too had
once been overrun by militants justifying their actions in the name of
religion. In a period of history largely forgotten outside Afghanistan,
a band of rebels under the command of an obscure outlaw, Habibullah
Kalakani, waged a self-declared jihad that briefly toppled the monarchy
in January 1929. As an ethnic Tajik, Kalakani’s coup defied decades of
political orthodoxy stipulating that a Pashtun must rule Afghanistan.
He governed for less than ten months before being overthrown and
hanged by Nadir Shah, the father of the future king Zahir Shah—the
Muslim Youth’s bitter foe. His brief tenure had since been dismissed
by most Pashtuns as an anomaly, but Hekmatyar was less critical; he
regarded Kalakani as a ‘servant of the messenger of holy God’ who
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‘rose up from among’ the people and was overthrown by a conspiracy

hatched between the deposed royal family and Afghanistan’s arch
enemy, the British.10
On the face of it, these abstruse cults had little in common with
the structure of leadership elections and internal committees that now
formed the backbone of Hizb. Yet the unique strength of Hekmatyar’s
party lay in its ability to fuse the sophisticated and organised political
Islam of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood with the kind of messianic zeal
displayed by the Saudi Bedouin. Hekmatyar in particular understood
the need to marry ideological puritanism with strategic pragmatism,
because he wanted the party to mentor a new generation of Afghans
who would grow up to run the government’s institutions with both
the skill of professional civil servants and the devotion of natural-
born fanatics. In doing so, he would create a hybrid Islamist force that
excelled in politics and combat. Like the publication of Shahadat and
Hizb’s victories on the battlefield, the schools spread the doctrine that
jihad was an obligation until God’s law reigned supreme in Afghanistan
and ultimately the world. For a party that had still not come close to
capturing Kabul, it was a bold ambition.
***
The Muslim Youth had twice tried to stage a coup in the Afghan
capital, only to fail spectacularly on both occasions—the first attempt
resulting in Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman’s arrest and the second leading
to the disastrous insurrection and the trial of Jan Mohammed. In late
summer 1979 another opportunity presented itself to Hizb; this time,
Hekmatyar knew he must be more careful. The communist prime
minister Hafizullah Amin was planning to move against the president,
Noor Mohammed Taraki, and wanted Hekmatyar’s help.
Although Amin and Hekmatyar were ideological opposites and
sworn enemies, a political partnership between the pair was not
as unlikely as it seemed. Both men were ethnic Pashtuns from the
Kharoti branch of the Ghilzai tribe, a group that once prided itself
on being the dominant force in Afghan politics. In recent centuries
the tribe’s authority had waned, with stories of its demise embedded
in the psyche of each new generation. Amin and Hekmatyar were
motivated first by dogma and secondly by personal ambition, but a
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desire to overturn the political orthodoxy was also in their blood.

This ancient tribal grievance was not all that connected them; under
the king, their families had enjoyed a cordial relationship in Kunduz.
Amin’s older brother, Abdullah, was an acquaintance of Hekmatyar’s
father. His nephew, Asadullah, had gone to high school with the Hizb
emir, when their argument about the existence of God converted
Hekmatyar to the cause of radical Islam. With the Taraki regime in
crisis, Amin now wanted to find out if they could work together to
accelerate its demise. He sent the sister of a close aide, Sayed Daoud
Tarun, to meet Hekmatyar in Peshawar, confident that she would not
be recognised by anyone from the Hizb rank and file. Their talks went
well and they agreed that a second round of negotiations would be held
in the Shagyal district of Kunar—the territory of Kashmir Khan—at
some point in the future. Both sides, however, knew that they must
proceed with caution. Hekmatyar worried that his own fighters would
turn against him if he compromised with Amin, and his communist
counterpart had to tread just as carefully, fully aware that his contacts
with Hizb amounted to an act of treason.
Even before this, the Soviets knew that Amin could not be trusted.
Moscow relayed its doubts to Taraki that September, when the Afghan
president made a brief stopover in the Russian capital on his return
from a state visit to Cuba. On his arrival back in Kabul, Taraki learned
that Amin had planned to shoot down his plane, only to be foiled at the
last minute; the president also discovered that several of his officials
had been replaced without his permission. In shock at what appeared
to be an unfolding coup, he had no idea how to respond. Amin seized
the initiative and turned the controversy to his advantage by claiming
it was in fact Taraki who wanted him dead. Their mutual antipathy
exploded into the open when Amin’s ally and the man who had sent
his sister to meet Hekmatyar, Sayed Daoud Tarun, was shot and killed
in a fracas at the palace, putting the plan to stage further talks with
Hizb on hold. Amin fled the scene and demanded that the president
be arrested. Taraki was detained by the compliant security forces, who
had spent years being indoctrinated by the charismatic Amin. Held
under house arrest, the president was suffocated with a pillow that
October—though the cause of his death was attributed to a ‘serious
illness’ in the government press. Amin took his place as head of state
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and Hizb continued its jihad, but the two sides remained open to the
possibility of further dialogue.
For members of the ruling Khalq faction desensitised to murder,
Amin’s takeover was business as usual. Faqir Mohammed Faqir, the
bureaucrat turned revolutionary who had been so instrumental in
the April 1978 coup that first brought the communists to power, was
eating breakfast with the new president when a guard came to inform
them of Taraki’s passing. Faqir owed Taraki his recruitment into the
communist party and his burgeoning political career, but he refused
to let sentiment trump personal ambition. When preparing the coup
weeks earlier, Amin had manoeuvred him into position to become
minister of interior, so Faqir knew where his loyalty lay. Amin ordered
him to make sure Taraki’s body was appropriately dressed for burial
and he did as he was told.
Amin’s willingness to negotiate in the late summer of 1979 appeared
to vindicate Hizb’s twin-track approach to the jihad. In combining
harsh military tactics, such as the execution of prisoners of war, with
the basics of governance, the party had shown a rare and contradictory
ability to be ferociously uncompromising and disarmingly pragmatic.
While many in the Afghan government were scared of Hekmatyar’s
army, Amin seemed impressed by its prowess and intrigued by the
prospect of making some sort of political deal with the most avowedly
anti-Marxist mujahideen faction of them all. The two sides again made
contact as winter approached, this time with the help of mediation
from a communist military captain named Yaqoob and Asial Khan, one
of the leaders of the Asmar mutiny.11 They discussed setting up the
meeting in Kunar, as proposed in the first round of talks, but time was
running out for the Kabul regime.
Surrounded by hostile forces,Amin’s overture to Hizb was motivated
by self-interest. Unable to stem the insurgency during his brief tenure
as president and unsure of Soviet intentions towards his government,
he wanted to hedge his bets. The contacts with Hizb were part of
a wider diplomatic offensive that also saw him meet the US chargé
d’affaires in an attempt to repair the damage caused by the murder of
Ambassador Dubs earlier in the year. A deal with Hekmatyar’s party
offered Amin a fallback option should either Washington or Moscow
fail to help stabilise his regime. Senior members of Hizb privy to the
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months of faltering dialogue were convinced that the Afghan president

was prepared to hand them the government if they agreed to grant him
an amnesty for his crimes.
Exactly how close Hekmatyar came to formalising the deal and
whether or not the proposed Kunar meeting took place would become
the subject of much speculation. The Hizb leader and several of his
closest disciples denied the talks ever happened. Hekmatyar had very
personal reasons to despise Amin and Taraki; since murdering his father
and one of his brothers, the communists had gone on to kill another
of his siblings, Nooruddin, after capturing him trying to cross into
Pakistan.12 The very suggestion that Hekmatyar had negotiated with
his brothers’ killers was ‘a totally fake and baseless claim’ amounting
to ‘slander’, said the Hizb emir some years later.13
But what mattered to the thirty-one-year-old Hekmatyar more
than anything—even his family—was the jihad, and he was willing
to do whatever it took to make it succeed. By opening negotiations
with Amin’s government, he hoped he would have a better chance of
achieving his long-term goal: power in Afghanistan and the means to
create a new world order with radical Islam at its centre. The collapse
of the talks failed to dent his ambition. If anything, his sense of being
guided by God towards a higher purpose was heightened later that
year, when the districts of Sayid Karam and Jani Khel in Paktia became
the latest swathes of territory to fall to his disciples.14
With Moscow continuing to worry that an Islamic republic was
about to be established in Afghanistan, rumours of a possible Soviet
invasion reached Hizb’s headquarters that winter. In response,
Hekmatyar dispatched an emissary to the American consulate in
Peshawar to gauge the mood of ‘the ancient enemy.’ The CIA was
already shipping arms to the mujahideen and, after asking colleagues
in Washington for advice, the American consul replied that any further
action the US chose to take against Moscow would be diplomatic, not
military.15 Hekmatyar was annoyed by what he characterised as this
passive and weak approach, but his frustration did not last. Rather
than stymie Hizb’s internationalist agenda, as he initially feared, the
impending Russian invasion would turn out to have the opposite
effect, providing the party with a call to arms it could use to rally new
supporters far beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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Hekmatyar was coming of age at exactly the right time. On 20

November 1979, an obscure group of fanatics led by Juhayman al-
Utaybi, a former corporal in the Saudi National Guard, stormed the
Grand Mosque at Mecca. Utaybi denounced the Saudi government as
corrupt and claimed that his brother-in-law was the Mahdi. For two
weeks he held out, barricading himself at Islam’s holiest site, until
Saudi troops stormed the mosque with help from Pakistani and French
forces. Utaybi was arrested and ultimately executed, but his struggle
resonated across the Muslim world. The stars were aligning for Hizb:
radical Islam was on the rise.
***
As Russian officials moved to quell the instability in Afghanistan, the
Soviet chief of general staff, Nikolai Orgakov, warned that attacking
the country risked turning ‘the entire eastern Islamic system against
us.’16 But Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and KGB chief Y   uri Andropov
dismissed his concerns.There was a growing consensus in Moscow that
direct action needed to be taken to save the communist revolution.The
previous year-and-a-half of Marxist rule in Kabul had been a disaster, but
the killing of Taraki marked a tipping point. The grubby, violent nature
of his death disgusted Brezhnev: ‘What a bastard, Amin, to murder the
man with whom he made the revolution,’ he remarked.17 The Soviet
Politburo agreed to deploy 75,000 to 80,000 troops to Afghanistan on
a temporary basis, formally endorsing the decision on 12 December.
Among the justifications put forward that day was the long-standing
rumour that Amin was an agent of the CIA.18  The war would be fought
under the patronage of a new Soviet 40th Army specifically set up for
the task. Babrak Karmal, the exiled head of the Parcham faction, was
readied to be sent to Kabul as Amin’s replacement. Like Taraki before
him, Karmal had been recruited by the KGB in the 1950s, working
under the codename ‘Marid.’19 He was secretly flown in to Bagram air
base, where he waited for the invasion to unfold.
On the night of 24 December, Soviet paratroopers and an air
assault division flew into Afghanistan to support units already deployed
undercover in and around Kabul. The invasion officially began hours
later, at 4.30pm on 25 December, with a ground offensive launched in
two directions from the Soviet border. One military division headed
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west towards Herat and a second targeted the north of the country,
where Hekmatyar’s home province of Kunduz was among its first stops.
The invading Soviet soldiers were told that they were fulfilling their
international duty by helping the Afghan people against the forces of
counter-revolution.20 As recently as early December, Amin had asked
for a limited contingent of Soviet troops and militias to be deployed to
Afghanistan.21 Now, as the invasion unfolded, he was jubilant that the
extra manpower appeared to be on its way. Holed up in Tapa-e Taj Beg,
a former royal estate on Kabul’s western outskirts, rather than in the
more vulnerable main palace in the city, he had no idea that the Soviets
planned to kill him.
On 27 December, Faqir Mohammed Faqir went to Tapa-e Taj Beg
with a group of Pashtun elders who had arrived from Kurram agency
in the Pakistan tribal areas for a routine meeting with Amin. Travelling
in two cars, Faqir and the six elders arrived for their 3pm appointment
only to be informed that the president was seriously ill and receiving
urgent medical treatment. Faqir ushered the elders back into the cars
and told them to return to their rooms at the Intercontinental Hotel.
Left alone, he entered the palace to check on Amin. Faqir found the
president lying in bed with a nasogastric tube lodged into his nose and
his stomach being pumped. A pan sat nearby to catch his vomit while an
Afghan medic and two Soviet doctors watched over him. The doctors
told Faqir to take Amin to the bathroom and wash him with cold water.
Faqir and the Afghan medic carefully undressed the president and
eased him into the bath. For ten minutes Amin sat there shivering as
Faqir nursed him back to health. The president vomited a further two
times but the cold water did its job, taking his mind off the pain in his
stomach. Before the remedial effects of the bath had a chance to wear
off, Amin dried and dressed himself. The president retreated to his
bedroom, exhausted and scared. As he began to fall asleep, he turned
to his old friend Faqir and said, ‘I think I am going mad.’
Earlier that day Amin had hosted a celebratory lunch with senior
members of his regime, elated that Russian troops were now massing
in Afghanistan. He was taken ill soon afterwards, poisoned by a KGB
agent working undercover in his retinue as a cook. Unbeknown to
Amin and the Soviet doctors treating him, this was the third attempt
Moscow had made on his life in a matter of weeks. Previously, KGB
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snipers had been deployed to shoot him on his way to work, only to
abort the plan when Amin’s security was tightened. A fortnight earlier
the president had survived another poisoning, when his Pepsi was
spiked. On that occasion his nephew and the former school mate of
Hekmatyar’s, Asadullah, who had recently become head of intelligence
in the communist regime, fell ill instead.22
Faqir was furious that further precautions had not been taken to
protect the president since then. He confronted Amin’s wife in front
of her still-drowsy husband: ‘Are you not doing the cooking now you
are the president’s wife? Do you imagine yourself to be a queen?’ he
yelled. ‘After this, all Amin’s food and drink is your responsibility. No
one else should cook for him or bring him water.You are responsible!’
She agreed and left the room, visibly upset. Around an hour later Faqir
received a phone call from the military’s chief of staff, Mohammed
Yaqoub, inviting him for a meal at the Ministry of Defence. With Amin
seemingly safe from imminent danger, Faqir agreed, confident that he
would be able to return to the president’s side that night.
When Faqir arrived at Yaqoub’s office he found a dining table
elaborately prepared and a group of Soviet generals waiting for him.
He did not recognise any of his fellow guests but shook their hands and
was about to sit down when a burst of gunfire erupted outside. Faqir
dashed for cover, scrambling into a nearby room, where he lay on the
floor. He took out his pistol and pointed it towards the door, ready to
shoot any intruders. Less than a minute later,Yaqoub burst in, bleeding
heavily; Faqir held fire as Amin’s chief of staff collapsed and died. For
more than two hours Faqir hid in silence beside the body, unsure what
was happening outside. When the gunfire finally ended, he heard a
shout: ‘Anyone who is alive, put down your weapons, come out and
surrender.’ Faqir replied that he would not. The demand was repeated
twice and Faqir finally relented when he heard the familiar voice of an
Afghan commander among the search party. Leaving his pistol behind,
he crept out of the room dazed and covered in the blood that had seeped
from Yaqoub’s body. As he did so, he realised that he had been tricked.
Sitting on the floor in front of him, facing a wall and with his hands tied
behind his back, was the commander whose familiar voice had lured him
out. Also bound and facing the wall was Amin’s nephew, Asadullah. All
around them were Soviet soldiers, who tied Faqir’s hands and ordered
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him to join the other prisoners. At 2am on 28 December, two Russian

officers arrived to inspect the detainees. Faqir knew one of them, an
advisor to the presidential guard. The advisor freed Faqir’s hands, but
the pain from having his thick, fleshy, wrists bound for so long remained
excruciating. The tightly-wound knot had restricted his blood supply,
turning his fingertips black. Faqir was led away into an armoured vehicle,
while the other two prisoners were ordered to stay put.
Driven through the deserted streets of the freezing Kabul night, Faqir
was taken to a building across town. Unable to see anything that could
help him identify where he was being held, he could only guess that it
was the Soviet embassy. After an hour he was transported to another
location — a military base in the neighbourhood of Shashdarak. There
he was told to sit in a corridor and given a thin gruel-like dish of rice to
satisfy his hunger. He refused to eat the food. Later that morning two
Afghan communists earmarked for roles in the new regime came to
see him. They were unarmed and accompanied by someone carrying
recording equipment, whom Faqir took to be a Soviet journalist. They
told Faqir to denounce Amin as a fascist tyrant and spy of the CIA, as
well as order Amin’s forces to stop their resistance. Faqir refused and
swore at the Afghan communists in Pashto, a response that sealed his
fate. Unwilling to turn on his hero Amin, he was transferred to Pul-e
Charkhi, the jail where Professor Niazi had been killed in May 1979.
He would spend the next decade in its squalid, overcrowded cells.23
Amin, his leader and idol, to whom he would remain loyal for the rest
of his life, was not so lucky.
The Soviet assault on Tapa-e Taj Beg had begun thirty minutes after
Faqir left the ailing president to attend dinner at the defence ministry.The
Muslim Battalion, specifically designed for combat in Afghanistan, led
the charge. Flares lit the night sky and fires broke out inside the building
as Amin’s guards desperately tried to fight off the Soviet attackers.With
bodies piling up on the palace grounds, the president wandered the
smoke-filled corridors in white shorts and a t-shirt, forlornly holding
IV tubes and bottles of medical solution that were attached to his arms.
Dazed and deluded, he had no idea who the attackers were. After one of
his doctors removed the IV tubes, Amin sat down by a wall in the palace
bar, his young son by his side, and waited to die.24

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 10

‘THE WEST IS AFRAID’

Kashmir Khan was in his home district of Shaygal when he heard

about the Soviet invasion. Accompanied by the former Hizb-e Islami
leader Mohammed Amin Weqad and a cadre of senior mujahideen, he
travelled west to the isolated region of  Wata Pur to inform villagers
that the country was under attack. On 29 December, they broke the
news at a local mosque after the Friday Jumu’ah prayer. Weqad, a
credible spokesman on religious issues thanks to his degree in Islamic
law, stood up and did most of the talking. ‘Now our main work has
started,’ he said. ‘It was difficult before because some people were
with us and some were with the government, but now the Russians
are here—they have invaded.’ He told the worshippers that there was
no longer any excuse for them to remain idle: they must fight. Tens of
thousands of foreign soldiers were in the country but the Soviets were
mistaken if they thought they could win the war. ‘Can you beat them?’
he asked, knowing it would illicit a defiant reaction. ‘Yes,’ came the
unanimous response. Weqad incited the mosque further, saying that
Afghanistan’s mountainous landscape would aid the mujahideen’s
struggle. ‘We are with you,’ the men cried out.1
Hizbis in Peshawar were not so confident. When word of the
invasion reached party headquarters, many of them felt a sickening
sense of dread; others felt the nervous excitement of soldiers on the
eve of battle, aware that a defining moment in their lives was at hand
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and that some of them would surely be martyred. Hekmatyar had

long been convinced that the forces of Islam and communism were
destined to fight each other in an epochal struggle for the future of
mankind. Since he was a teenager he had prayed to God to expedite
the confrontation. That day had arrived.
The Hizb leadership hoped that, just as in the Wata Pur mosque,
previously uncommitted Afghans would join the fight against the
invaders. But there was also a realisation within the thirty-six-member
executive council that the party couldn’t simply rely on a strategy of
business as usual. The old insurgent tactics that had so far brought Hizb
a significant degree of success ‘counted for nothing’ now, said one
high-ranking member. The party must evolve if they were to stay ahead
of its communist enemies and mujahideen rivals. As it had done when
publishing the Shahadat newspaper, Hizb once again found inspiration
in the Marxist guerrilla campaign waged against the Shah of Iran and
his US allies in the 1970s. The party obtained a book on insurgent
techniques published by one of the leftwing groups involved in the
struggle, which gave instructions on weapons handling, bomb making
and battlefield tactics. Copies of the text were distributed among
senior commanders, who readied themselves for a bloody new phase
in the war.2
***
Less than 150 miles west of Peshawar, government officials in Kabul
were poker faced as they braced themselves for Hizb’s reaction. In a
pre-recorded radio address, the Parcham leader and newly installed
president of Afghanistan, Babrak Karmal, formally announced the end
of Hafizullah Amin’s regime on 27 December. Making no mention of
Soviet forces, he said that Amin’s government had been ‘crushed under
the weight of its own crimes.’3 The speech fooled no one; supporters
and opponents alike knew the country had been invaded. Prior to
Karmal’s radio address, prisoners in Pul-e Charkhi had watched Soviet
aircraft pass on the flight path to and from Kabul airport. For Sulaiman
Layeq, who was enduring a miserable year in its fetid cells, the low
hum of the planes’ engines represented a lifeline.The former master of
communist propaganda had been sentenced to hang after his arrest in
late 1978 and the arrival of the Soviet 40th Army offered him hope of a
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last minute reprieve. Sure enough, with his Parcham comrade Karmal
now in power, he was released in a matter of days as part of a general
amnesty for thousands of political prisoners.4
Layeq returned home to find his family struggling. Rather than
showing joy at being reunited with her husband, his wife, Mahera,
burst into tears and told him his father had recently died of natural
causes and been buried in Baghlan, the northern province to which he
had long ago been exiled. Layeq was devastated; a decade had elapsed
since his father received the night letter from Hekmatyar warning that
Layeq did ‘not count as a Muslim anymore.’ Throughout that time the
tribal elder and religious scholar had stayed loyal to his son, refusing
to denounce him in public or rebuke him in private as he rose through
the ranks of the communist movement. Layeq mourned but refused to
be consumed by grief; in much the same way that Hekmatyar’s resolve
was hardened by his own father’s murder, the leftwing ideologue
returned to work with a renewed sense of purpose. Within a fortnight
of his release he was appointed to the new government’s Revolutionary
Council. Noor Ahmad Noor, the main suspect in the assassination
of Layeq’s brother-in-law, Mir Akbar Khyber, served alongside him.
Layeq pushed the mistrust he harboured towards his colleagues to the
back of his mind. Karmal had given Layeq a second chance and, despite
also blaming him for Khyber’s death, Layeq was determined to take it.
He and the president set out to crush Hizb once and for all.5
The regime’s amnesty for prisoners was motivated by political
necessity rather than genuine compassion or regret. Backed by the
Soviets, its primary aim was to win over undecided sections of the
Afghan public and stop Hekmatyar’s forces. Karmal showed his hand
on 23 January 1980, when he held a charged press conference with
the international media in Kabul. He announced that he knew his
predecessor as president, Amin, had established close contacts with
Hekmatyar, a notorious agent ‘of black reaction and the hireling of
imperialism.’ The talks, he claimed, were supported by the British and
Israeli foreign intelligence services and the CIA. Had their ‘satanic
designs’ succeeded, they would have triggered a period of butchery
‘more terrifying’ than the mass killings carried out by the Khmer
Rouge in Cambodia, he said. On the alleged list of Hekmatyar and
Amin’s targets were educated professionals, including doctors,
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teachers, students and engineers; only the ‘timely assistance’ of the

‘peace-loving Soviet Union’ averted this catastrophe. On the same
day that Karmal’s remarks were reported in the re-named Kabul New
Times a cartoon in the newspaper depicted three different scenes from
American history. The first showed a US plane dropping an atomic
bomb on Hiroshima; the second showed a US plane dropping napalm
on Vietnam; the third and final image showed a US plane dropping
Amin on Afghanistan.6
Karmal’s failure to mention any of the other mujahideen leaders
during his press conference underlined his fear of Hekmatyar, but
the president and his Soviet patrons knew it would take more than
some defamatory remarks to weaken him. The regime also needed
to convince potential recruits to the Islamists that it had learned
from the mistakes of previous administrations. In the spring of 1980
it announced a list of ‘fundamental principles’ that would define its
moderate socialist rule. These included ‘full freedom’ to practice Islam
as a ‘sacred religion,’ and a pledge to protect the rights of land owners.7
A new national black, red and green flag was unveiled to replace the
hugely unpopular Soviet-style banner introduced after the communist
coup. Layeq took this message of rapprochement to Ghazni, the home
province of his former schoolmate and the Muslim Youth’s spiritual
mentor, Professor Niazi. There, as under the ‘Great Leader’ Taraki, he
attempted to persuade religious scholars and elders that the communist
regime was not hostile to Islam.8 It would prove to be a futile task: as
the Hizb leadership predicted, the Soviet invasion was pushing more
Afghans into the arms of the mujahideen. Hekmatyar’s strength was
growing by the day.
***
Although the US denied that Amin was ever a plant of the CIA, it
saw the Soviet invasion as an opportunity too good to miss. On 31
December 1979, US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski
received an internal memo from an aide assessing the options open to
Washington. One of the recommendations was for the US government
to stress the ‘anti-Islamic element’ of the invasion, ‘particularly among
countries of [the] Middle East.’ Hekmatyar could not have phrased
the communique better. ‘We should portray [the] regime as a Soviet
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puppet and Soviet action as anti-Afghan and anti-Muslim. [Our] aim

should be to isolate [the] Soviets within [the] Muslim world,’ it said.9
The White House had reached a critical turning point. No longer
was it content to drip feed non-lethal logistical support to the
mujahideen; it was now prepared to take the fight to the Russians,
fuelling Hekmatyar’s global ambitions in the process. US President
Jimmy Carter soon authorised the CIA to begin secretly shipping
weapons to the Afghan insurgents, arming radical Islamists who were
not only anti-communist but avowedly anti-American. The first guns
Washington sent to the Afghan rebels arrived in Pakistan on 10 January
1980. They were predominantly British .303 Lee Enfield rifles,
purchased from countries including India and Greece.10 The guns were
not cutting-edge military technology, but they could still be deadly
in skilled hands. Four days after the first weapons shipment reached
Pakistan, Washington sponsored a resolution at the UN Security
Council condemning the Soviet invasion and demanding the immediate
withdrawal of Russian troops. This was brushed aside by Moscow.
Beneath their diplomatic posturing, American officials were not
displeased with the Soviet’s intransigence; they were in no rush to
end the war. On the same day as the UN Security Council met, the
White House sent a memo to National Security Adviser Brzezinski
stressing the need for a ‘documented study’ on ‘Soviet exploitation
and persecution of Islam’ to strengthen its broader strategy of fuelling
anti-communist sentiment in the Muslim world. At a meeting in the
White House later that week, Brzezinksi commented that a ‘massive
insurgency at present is probably not in our best interest.’ Instead, the
US should encourage a ‘low-level and enduring’ guerrilla war‚ to keep
the Islamic states mobilised against the Soviets in Afghanistan.’11
By funnelling arms through Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency and
refusing to get directly involved with the feuding Afghan mujahideen
parties, the US aimed to hide behind a cover of plausible deniability
that would allow it to ramp up supplies in the months and years ahead.
Inside the CIA there was a bombastic approach to the conflict, driven
by a palpable desire to avenge America’s defeat in Vietnam. Only
five years earlier the last US civilians had been airlifted from Saigon,
bringing a disastrous war to a chaotic and humiliating end. More than
58,000 American troops had been killed fighting south Vietnamese
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guerrillas and a national liberation movement backed by Moscow; it

was now time to ‘make trouble for the Soviets,’ recalled one senior
officer at the agency. Killing as many of their soldiers as possible was
the CIA’s primary objective, and Hizb’s hatred of Western values was
not important; all that mattered was that its members had a taste for
Russian blood. Afghanistan would be for the Soviets what Vietnam had
been for the Americans.12
***
In early January 1980, residents of Hekmatyar’s home province,
Kunduz, attacked local government offices. They seized control of two
districts, including his birthplace, Imam Sahib. Using crude grenades
made from a mixture of boiling engine oil and soap poured into glass
bottles to be thrown at regime soldiers, they held the territory until
mid-February 1980. The revolt had been a spontaneous surge of anti-
communist populism, not orchestrated by any of the mujahideen
parties. When local rebels caught two Hizbis acting suspiciously they
took them to their commander for questioning. Hauled in front of
a group of elders and tribal leaders who demanded to know their
purpose, the Hizbis displayed astonishing self-confidence by turning on
their interrogators and preaching about the party and its origins in the
Muslim Youth. ‘Where were you during the uprising against Daoud?’
one of them asked. ‘Where were you during the struggle against the
king?’ As they quoted from religious and political texts, it became
clear that the theories they espoused were incomprehensible to their
illiterate audience. The commander who led the questioning was one
of the few who understood what they were saying. He was impressed
with their knowledge and manners—even their insults were couched
in polite terms—and decided to let them go. Leaning over to one of
the captives, he whispered: ‘Do not talk to them as if they are educated.
They do not know your books and revolution.’ These Hizbis had been
spreading their radical message through Imam Sahib and strengthening
the party’s local contacts when they were detained. While the elders
who questioned them were confused by their sophisticated preaching,
Hekmatyar’s vision found new local converts: some 200 of the men
who had participated in the Imam Sahib uprising soon left Kunduz

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for the neighbouring province of Takhar, to join a high-ranking Hizb

commander camped out in the area.13
Hekmatyar’s party deployed similar tactics—which combined
elements of espionage and infiltration with overt missionary work
and political grandstanding—to great effect across the country. On
14 February, its underground cells in Kabul made arrangements for
a city-wide protest, scheduled to take place the next day. As planned,
residents in the neighbourhoods of Khair Khana and Deh Dana climbed
to the rooftops of their homes and cried out ‘God is greatest’ during
the call to prayer. Near the Ministry of Interior Hizb’s green flag,
emblazoned with Hekmatyar’s logo, was raised over the city for the
first time. A week later, on Friday 22 February, Kabul was rocked by a
series of anti-communist rallies encouraged but not organised by Hizb.
On the street of Jadi Maiwand, down which the funeral cortege of the
Muslim Youth leader Abdul Rahim Niazi had travelled, a young Afghan
woman joined the protestors. In what became an iconic moment of
defiance much talked about in the capital, she snatched the hat from
a police officer’s head and told him he should be ashamed to wear
his uniform. Further demonstrations erupted in other parts of the
city, and the government responded with force, deploying tanks and
opening fire. Hundreds of civilians were killed during days of unrest.14
That same month, Soviet forces swept through Kahsmir Khan’s home
province of Kunar in their first major offensive of the war. They would
conduct three more offensives in the area before the end of the year,
failing each time to dislodge the formidable commander and his men
for long.15 In the neighbouring province of Nangarhar, where the party
had been working in tandem with tribal leaders, Hekmatyar’s disciples
made substantial inroads in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion. On
14 January they captured the district of Kama and seized two tanks
from the Afghan government. The adjoining district of Goshta also fell
to them that day, followed by Lal Pur on 19 January.The Hizbis revelled
in their early victories and the bonds they had forged fighting side by
side for much of the last year. In the quiet hours between missions
they made their own bread, kneading the dough into flat circles and
baking it on piping hot stoves. They filled their canteens from brooks
and streams, and prayed under the stars. One squad commander spent
eleven months clutching his British-made L1A1 Self-Loading Rifle and
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ammunition bag as he slept each night, the gun now an inseparable part
of him. However, these bonds were not unbreakable and as a fighting
unit the Hizbis were still no match for Soviet firepower.
In April 1980 Hizb confronted Russian troops in Nangarhar for
the first time. The men who successfully raided Goshta had taken the
tanks they captured to a secluded location between two mountains,
when six helicopters and four fighter jets appeared overhead. The
aircraft destroyed the tanks, paving the way for a ground assault. In
preparation for the offensive, the mujahideen formed a line of defence
beside a river but the strength of the Soviet forces was unlike anything
they had previously faced. As the attack unfolded, the noise of the
gunfire was so loud that the Hizbis could not hear each other’s shouts.
A large number of them turned and ran, leaving just nine fighters to
hold off the advancing enemy troops. Those who stayed behind held
their ground until, at nightfall, the Soviets pulled back, content with
their day’s work. The Hizbis collected the bodies of their dead friends
and left the area.16
That same spring the volatile young Islamist Adam Khan, who had
once stormed off with a pistol to confront Burhanuddin Rabbani after
hearing he had roast chicken to eat, was killed fighting the Soviets in
Nangarhar. His fellow Hizbis were not surprised; even during his time
in the MuslimYouth, he had lived with an intensity few of his colleagues
could match. At his memorial service in Peshawar, Hekmatyar’s Arabic-
language teacher Abdul Rahim Chitrali delivered the eulogy. Just as the
Hizb emir had looked to the Qur’an’s story of Moses for inspiration as
a young man, Chitrali now invoked the fable, adding a contemporary
angle to the tale: ‘The Russians and the Americans do not even have
a tenth of the pharaoh’s forces,’ he proclaimed. ‘God said, ‘Go to the
pharaoh without swords, guns and bombs; go into combat with the
pharaoh and invite him to worship [Me].’’ Chitrali was reminding the
mourners that, with unwavering faith and access to modern weapons,
they could achieve anything they desired. Even at this stage, with Soviet
forces sweeping across Afghanistan, Hekmatyar’s men had not lost
sight of their ultimate aim: first they would vanquish the communists,
then they would wage war against America.17
***

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Adam Khan’s charismatic brand of ill-tempered extremism had helped

Hizb build a substantial following in Nangarhar, but as the Soviets
tried to halt the party’s advance there, Hekmatyar’s men faced new
competition from an emerging splinter group that shared its name.This
faction was led by a local scholar called Yunis Khalis, whose credentials
were impressive: he had been a regular fixture on the Islamist scene
in the 1960s and early 1970s, when he wrote religious and political
tracts for the Gahiz newspaper.Twenty-eight years Hekmatyar’s senior,
Khalis was once considered the Muslim Youth’s spiritual figurehead
in Nangarhar; he now saw himself as Hizb’s rightful emir. He left
the party soon after finishing a distant third in the 1978 leadership
election, dismissing Hekmatyar as a ‘schoolboy’ bereft of the qualities
of generalship. Their rivalry, however, was more like that of an
estranged teacher and student than sworn enemies. Khalis chose to
shun the political squabbling of Peshawar—an environment in which
Hekmatyar thrived—and spent much of his time inside Afghanistan,
fighting alongside his men. Jalaluddin Haqqani, the mujahid who was
so instrumental in the early stages of Hizb’s jihad, defected with him.
Their small band of a few dozen poorly-equipped fighters refused to
relinquish the party’s name, opting instead to share it with Hekmatyar’s
far larger organisation.18 The Khalis group steadily expanded and
picked up supporters across Nangarhar, Paktia, Paktika and Khost, yet
it never developed enough strength to convincingly trouble Hizb on a
national scale. The one real threat to Hekmatyar’s supremacy over the
insurgency came from Ahmad Shah Massoud, the man named as part
of a spy network in Jan Mohammed’s audio-taped confession. Once a
sallow-skinned young activist with a few wisps of hair on his chin, the
Jamiat commander was now a rising force in the jihad with growing
ambitions of his own.
After completing his apprenticeship in Nuristan’s resistance,
Massoud had set his sights on confronting the communists in his
native Panjshir. While he was every bit as ambitious as his bitter rival
Hekmatyar, he knew the cut and thrust of mujahideen politics was
not for him. Instead, he concentrated on what he knew best: warfare.
The people of Panjshir had turned on the Muslim Youth during the
1975 uprising but by mid-1979, just months prior to the Soviet
invasion, he was confident that they would support a rebellion against
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the communist government. In preparation for his return, Massoud

smuggled night letters into the valley, urging people to defend their
culture against the atheist regime; he then snuck back there himself
accompanied by some thirty rebels, carrying seventeen rifles and $130
in cash. This time their call to jihad was heeded. First they stormed a
government outpost, rousing villagers from their slumber; old men
and children rushed to join them and they pressed onwards, rampaging
down dust-blown donkey trails armed with sticks, axes, shovels and
sickles.With Massoud at its head, the mob lynched communist officials
and made it all the way to the Soviet-built road that ran from Kabul to
northern Afghanistan. Only when government troops shot Massoud in
the leg did the group scatter. He retreated into the mountains, having
found his true calling.
A voracious reader, Massoud had already studied some of the
twentieth century’s most effective guerrilla leaders, including Che
Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong. Encouraged by his early
success, he set to work on joining them in the pantheon of legendary
revolutionaries. As residents of Panjshir flocked to his cause, he created
static fighting units to defend villages and mobile flying squads to
launch hit-and-run operations throughout the valley. By August 1979,
four months before the Soviet invasion, the US had identified Panjshir
as one of the mujahideen’s most successful battle fronts.19
Not everything under Massoud was running smoothly, however.
The Jamiat leadership had yet to recognise the full extent of his unique
talent as a military commander, and left him to fend for himself.
The isolation and pressure of combat had left him feeling weary and
exposed; normally a shrewd tactician and judge, his confidence was
wavering. Massoud had used his rivalry with Hekmatyar as a constant
source of motivation. He still blamed the Hizb emir for the disastrous
Muslim Youth insurrection against the Daoud government and the
killing of Jan Mohammed. For years he had channelled that sense of
injustice into his guerrilla training, rising through the ranks of the
mujahideen in the hope that one day he would be able to challenge
Hekmatyar. Now he stood accused of rupturing the unspoken but
tense truce he had struck with the Hizb emir in Peshawar.
The allegation stemmed from an incident in which a group of
100 Hizbis fled to Panjshir after losing Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman’s
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home district of Nijrab to the communist regime—their retreat the

culmination of several days in which the territory repeatedly changed
hands. Weary and despondent, they had reached the area of Dara-e
Hazara when a militia ambushed and disarmed them. Anti-government
Maoists were active locally and the Hizbis briefly wondered if they
were responsible, but Massoud’s 300 fighters ruled most of Panjshir
and they too fell under suspicion.The twenty Kalashnikovs stolen in the
ambush were replaceable; it seemed clear that whoever carried out the
attack was more interested in humiliating the Hizbis. In Afghanistan’s
masculine culture, where millions of people regarded weapons
ownership as both a right and a duty, taking a man’s gun by force was
tantamount to an act of emasculation. Not content with stealing the
Kalashnikovs, the attackers also demanded that Hekmatyar’s men hand
over a much-prized semi-automatic Makarov pistol they had seized
when capturing Nijrab’s district headquarters.
When word later reached the Hizbis that Massoud had been seen
carrying the pistol, a confrontation seemed inevitable. But the rumour
was never confirmed and the Jamiat commander moved to quell any
unrest; if he was indeed responsible for the ambush, he had made
his point. Now the Hizbis understood that he could not be crossed
in Panjshir, he felt confident enough to ask for their help. For all
his success in recent months, Massoud was still isolated and poorly
equipped. The communists were preparing an offensive and he knew
he would not be able to hold out alone. There were around sixty
Hizbis based permanently in Panjshir, and Massoud needed every one
of them to agree to back up his own men. The Hizbis were wary: they
feared their ranks had been infiltrated by spies, as this seemed the only
plausible explanation for the way their friends had been ambushed and
forced to disarm. Once again—just like after the Muslim Youth’s failed
uprising—they were left with troubling questions about Massoud’s
loyalty. Before agreeing to his plea for assistance, they sought advice
from one of Hekmatyar’s most promising young commanders.
Engineer Tareq was a former Muslim Youth activist who had played
a lead role in the battle for Nijrab. Badly injured during the fighting,
he was convalescing in the neighbouring province of Laghman when a
delegation of Hizbis came to see him from Panjshir. Still unable to find
a doctor to patch up the bullet wound in his back, he listened to their
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concerns despite receiving orders from the Hizb leadership to return

to Peshawar for the winter. For the next four months heavy snow and
sub-zero temperatures would make living conditions in Afghanistan’s
mountains perilous, while staying in the low ground left the mujahideen
vulnerable to attack. Stung by the blow of losing Nijrab, it made sense
for Tareq to rest and recuperate in Pakistan, ready for another fighting
season in the spring. But the delegation from Panjshir persuaded him
otherwise. Rather than continue east as ordered, he opted to turn
around and accompany his visitors on the return leg of their journey
with ten of his best men.
After hiking through Nuristan and arriving in Panjshir, he found
the situation worse than expected. People told him that Massoud
was disillusioned after months of combat and might even return to
Pakistan, leaving the valley exposed to a counter offensive by the
regime. Tareq spent several weeks gauging the mood of villagers and
mujahideen before arranging to meet Massoud in person. The two
commanders—one an ardent admirer of Hekmatyar, the other his
sworn enemy—formed a surprisingly amicable bond. They were both
ethnic Tajiks who had studied engineering at Kabul Polytechnic and
were now accomplished guerrillas on course for acclaimed military
careers in their respective parties. Massoud said he would stay in
Panjshir if Tareq was willing to assist him; he needed better educated
and more experienced mujahideen, he admitted, and only Hizb could
provide them. Tareq offered his support and asked party headquarters
to deliver a fresh cache of weapons from Peshawar to help with the
valley’s defence.
The agreement to cooperate across party lines held until Soviet
troops attacked Panjshir in early 1980. As the assault began, Massoud
sent a letter to Tareq, who was stationed nearby. Addressing him
respectfully as ‘brother,’ it said he wanted to pull his men back until he
could figure out the Soviets’ plans. Tareq replied that he had ordered
the Hizbis in Panjshir to use their own initiative to launch quick-fire
attacks against the Russians. Any kind of unified central command was
impossible at this stage, he said, but if Massoud’s men were similarly
confident in their abilities they should also carry out lightening assaults
on the enemy before withdrawing to safety. Tareq’s tactics were put to
the test when Soviet troops entered Panjshir in April 1980, and a squad
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of Hizbis ambushed one of their patrols in an isolated area between

Paryan and the Khawak Pass—the first time any mujahideen party had
attacked the 40th Army in Panjshir. After killing several Soviet soldiers
and looting five AK-74s from their bodies,Tareq’s fighters—led by one
of his sub-commanders—fled.
Massoud’s men covered the Hizbis from the surrounding
mountains, so when the weapons were taken to a safe location he
decided that they were entitled to a share of the bounty.Tareq balked at
Massoud’s presumptuousness and brought in local elders to mediate;
the elders decreed that the AK-74s—a sleeker upgrade of the AK-
47 Kalashnikov—should be divided between both camps. Tareq
accepted their decision but could not hide his resentment. Twice in
a matter of months Hizb and Jamiat had almost come to blows over
weapons captured on the battlefield and neither side was willing to
compromise again. With Massoud’s forces in Panjshir outnumbering
his three or four to one, Tareq left the valley and was appointed as
Hizb’s main commander in Nijrab. He was later given responsibility
for the provinces of Kapisa and Parwan, a remit that was meant to
include Massoud’s home territory. By then, however, Hizb’s influence
over Panjshir had receded. Instead, the factional rivalry moved a few
miles west, where the two mujahideen parties began to clash along the
Soviet-built highway connecting Kabul to northern Afghanistan. In a
series of confrontations, Tareq’s mujahideen swooped in and arrested
Jamiatis patrolling near the road, only for Massoud’s forces to reply in
kind. They invariably agreed to exchange prisoners, content to have
proved their point and not yet ready to hit each other harder.That time
would come.20
***
By the end of 1979 there were already 400,000 Afghan refugees in
Pakistan. The exodus gathered pace after the Soviet invasion, turning
large parts of Peshawar—once a vibrant and hopeful city—into slums
of anti-communist resentment. Dozens of insurgent groups varying
in size and ideology clamoured for the refugees’ support, but most
of them could not compete with Hizb and, to a lesser extent, Jamiat,
the party of Rabbani and Massoud. The siren song of the Islamists was
becoming impossible for Afghans to ignore: Hekmatyar’s messianic
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vision, combined with the prospect of receiving weapons and supplies

from his party, appealed to increasing numbers of refugees. The
Muslim  Youth’s grandiose aims, which had seemed so out of touch
with mainstream society a decade earlier, now felt appropriately
ambitious for a nation seeking to defeat the all-conquering Soviet
Union. However, Hizb’s growing stature was not without cost. The
core values of discipline and humility that had in many ways defined the
student movement under Abdul Rahim Niazi were beginning to erode.
Some of its most senior figures, including Hematyar, had started to
develop an air of entitlement at odds with the party’s austere origins.
Aware of the broiling rivalries between the dozens of different
groups it was hosting, the Pakistani government tried to exert
control. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood also intervened, sending
a delegation to Peshawar headed by its most senior figure, or general
guide, Umar al-Tilmisani. The delegation brought the leaders of
the six main mujahideen parties together for talks at the Khyber
Intercontinental Hotel in Peshawar, where a cassette recording of Jan
Mohammed’s confession had once been played to a room full of tearful
Hizbis. Tilmisani then met other representatives from the six parties
at the Peshawar Club, an old colonial haunt replete with elegant white
colonnades and stuffed antelope heads mounted as hunting trophies
on the walls. Following the talks, the six parties agreed to put aside
their differences and form an alliance, Ittehad-e Islami Baraye Azadi-ye
Afghanistan (the Islamic Union for the Freedom of Afghanistan). Hizb
was joined in the coalition by Jamiat, as well as the splinter faction led
byYunis Khalis.The three other main parties, all of which advocated the
long-term return of the Afghan monarchy, reluctantly came aboard.
A mujahid with no strong ties to any of the individual factions was
chosen to lead the alliance. Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf had been a friend
of Professor Niazi and occasional mentor to the Muslim Youth without
ever belonging to the movement. During the last year of the king’s
reign he was appointed deputy of the first incarnation of Jamiat, only
to be arrested by the Daoud government soon afterwards. Recently
released from Pul-e Charkhi, he had just represented the Afghan
mujahideen at a conference in Tayef, Saudi Arabia, where his oratory
and modest appearance attracted sympathy and new funding pledges
from wealthy private donors. On first appearance Sayyaf seemed like a
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good choice to run Ittehad, but he had no desire to be a straw man for
the other mujahideen. Avaricious and almost as extreme as Hekmatyar,
he soon adopted the alliance’s moniker for a newly-formed party of his
own, and the coalition collapsed.
Sick of the persistent discord between the various insurgent factions,
in the summer of 1981 Pakistan announced that it recognised the seven
parties as the official Afghan resistance. All refugees would have to
belong to one of the groups if they wanted to live in registered camps
and receive rations. The parties again formed an alliance but again it
fell apart, this time because the leaders of the three pro-monarchy
groups were unhappy at being subordinate to Sayyaf, who was yet to
generate any kind of meaningful following. Their departure from the
coalition left Hizb in a loose conglomerate of Islamists consisting of
its smaller namesake, plus Jamiat, Ittehad and a few minor splinter
groups, including one led by the cleric who had killed Jan Mohammed,
Nasrullah Mansour. In reality, each party worked according to its own
agenda—an arrangement that suited Hizb.21
Despite claiming to be a neutral broker between the mujahideen,
the Pakistani government continued to be closest to Hekmatyar’s
party. Islamabad had been working with Hizb since the days of the
MuslimYouth and senior officials including the president, General Zia-
ul-Haq, knew Hizb’s leadership circle well enough to trust the party
to work in their interests. Like millions of Pakistanis, Hekmatyar was a
Pashtun; just as importantly, his radical brand of Islam was in keeping
with General Zia’s own growing fundamentalism. Hizb’s fighters could
yet prove to be a valuable asset in any future war against India. By
sidelining dozens of other insurgent groups, Pakistan was deliberately
concentrating more authority in Hekmatyar’s hands, which added to
his impregnable sense of manifest destiny.
With Pakistan’s blessing, in 1981 the Hizb leader sent a team to
survey a patch of desert south of Peshawar as a potential location for
a new township to house his growing band of supporters and their
families. Engineer Abdul Salaam Hashimi, a former roommate of
Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman’s at Kabul Polytechnic, led the team.
Arriving by jeep, he was shocked by the sparse conditions; the area
was known by the Pashto word for tortoise, ‘Shamshatu,’ after the
animals that lived in its barren earth, and the only road in sight was
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the one he drove in on. To Engineer Salaam, whose real name was
Sayed Emir, it was famous as an inhospitable wasteland—‘a place of
thieves and murderers’ on the run from the police. Despite this grim
reputation and the obvious lack of amenities, he gradually noticed
Shamshatu’s potential. He sketched out a plan to establish a township
there that could be divided into two sections, ‘A’ and ‘B’, situated on
either side of the main road. A total of 1000 refugee families would
be accommodated in newly built 20 metre x 15 metre single-storey
houses, which would be connected by a network of broad side streets.
Satisfied that the plan could work, Hekmatyar agreed that Hizb should
rent the land from the Pakistani government on a ninety-nine-year
lease. Engineer Salaam was the first person to move into the township,
settling there with his family. As more people followed, Shamshatu
became known as Nasrat Mina (Victory Quarter) in honour of the
martyred Muslim Youth member Saifuddin Nasratyar.22
The creation of the township was another landmark moment in
Hizb’s expansion. Members of the party still saw themselves as the
custodians of the MuslimYouth’s legacy and the vanguard of the Afghan
resistance. Their years of hard work, coupled with the party’s growing
military and political strength, encouraged a casual imperiousness
in Hekmatyar that won him almost as many admirers as detractors.
For every new disciple who joined Hizb convinced that Hekmatyar
was a strong and resolute leader acting out God’s will, he created
new enemies who accused him of unbridled arrogance. He had no
intention of leaving Afghanistan’s fate to the rest of the parties: victory
would come in his image or not at all. Western journalists arriving in
Peshawar to cover the war rarely had anything good to say about him,
but he didn’t care. He kept a pistol and a Qur’an on a desk in his office
and liked to say that he was the only true leader of the resistance.
He betrayed no sense of self-doubt and routinely broke up interviews
to pray or admonish his questioners.23 When he wasn’t abrupt, he
was conceited. On meeting Hekmatyar in late 1981, an American
journalist found him ‘bored and aloof,’ yet candid about his intentions.
‘The West is afraid,’ the Hizb emir boasted. ‘We are fighting jihad and
we cannot lose. Our strength is our faith.’ Hekmatyar explained that
the government he was destined to establish would not be like Saudi
Arabia, which falsely presented itself as a defender of Islamic values. ‘It
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is too corrupt,’ he said. ‘It is a family-run country, not a pure Islamic

state such as we, by the grace of almighty God, shall create. We shall
drive the Russians out. The West, mind you, must not come in.’24
At around the same time as Hekmatyar was boasting of his inevitable
victory, Arab extremists who would soon work in partnership with
Hizb announced their presence to the world in a burst of gunfire. On 6
October the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, was attending a military
parade in Cairo to mark the eighth anniversary of the 1973 war against
Israel. With American diplomats watching from the stands, Sadat was
saluting passing troops when the attackers struck. Four men dressed
in army uniforms jumped from one of the parade vehicles, throwing
grenades at the officials and shooting the president. ‘I have killed the
pharaoh!’ cried one of the assassins, Khalid Islambouli, a lieutenant
in the Egyptian army. His words echoed the speech of Hekmatyar’s
Arabic teacher a year earlier. They also mirrored the thoughts of the
Hizb emir himself, who as a high school student had constantly invoked
the Qur’an’s story of Moses when seeking inspiration for his evolving
radical beliefs. Now Sadat lay dead before Islambouli, slumped on the
ground in front of overturned chairs and suited dignitaries rushing for
cover.25 Watching on from Peshawar, Hekmatyar made sure that Hizb
was ready to welcome these killers into its ranks.

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 11

BLACK TULIPS

Soviet atrocities ravaged Afghanistan during the first years of the

occupation. The dire prophecy uttered by Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman
a decade earlier had become reality: the land was soaked in blood.
In the Hizb stronghold of Logar, Russian troops tied together forty
people, doused them in petrol and burned them alive. In Nangarhar,
they rounded up twenty civilians, including eight women, and executed
them in the centre of a village. Across the country mujahideen were
murdered on the spot or thrown to their deaths from helicopters.
During a five-month period in 1984, the Soviets claimed to have
killed more than 18,000 insurgents—a body count inflated by rules
of engagement that blurred the line between rebels and civilians. Even
livestock were routinely gunned down, robbing impoverished families
of their means to survive. Crops were torched, houses looted and
irrigation systems bombed. Hundreds of thousands of mines began
to litter the country, destined to kill and maim children for decades
to come. Some of the worst crimes took place in Hekmatyar’s home
province of Kunduz, where, on 22 December 1984, Russian troops
eviscerated three pregnant women with bayonets.1
Rape, though not systematic, became a feature of the war as
the ill-disciplined and traumatised soldiers of the Soviet 40th Army
rampaged through villages.The troops who waged this medieval terror
were overwhelmingly young and poorly paid, with no prior combat
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experience. Conscripts served for two years, undertaking just four to

six months’ worth of training before being deployed. Bullying was rife
within their ranks; suicide was far from uncommon. Many troops took
refuge in drugs and alcohol to get through their tours of duty, selling
weapons and ammunition to the very Afghans they were fighting in
an effort to fund their addictions. Reliant on understaffed and badly-
equipped hospitals for medical treatment, a majority of Soviet soldiers
suffered from a serious illness at some point during their deployment,
with hepatitis, dysentery, typhoid fever and malaria spreading through
their disease-ridden bases and outposts.2
Most of the 40th Army’s troops were stationed in and around Kabul
or eastern Afghanistan, places of acute strategic importance that were
also Hizb redoubts. With little prior knowledge of the culture, climate
and topography, the Russian soldiers were constantly vulnerable to
attack. Hekmatyar’s mujahideen felt unstoppable, their idealism and
zeal sharpened in the furnace of war. As they prepared to launch their
ambushes they communicated with each other using lanterns, smoke
signals and flashes of light reflected off pocket mirrors. Then, from
camouflaged positions overlooking remote mountain passes, they
would strike, trapping cumbersome Soviet columns in hails of gun
and rocket fire.3 Hekmatyar’s fighters earned a reputation for savagery
unmatched by the other parties. Russian soldiers warned comrades
who had just arrived in Afghanistan not to wander off base or Hizbis
would skin them alive. Others described how they found the corpses
of missing colleagues with their eyes gouged out and strange symbols
carved into their flesh. Rumours circulated that mujahideen were
hacking off the limbs of prisoners, before binding their wounds with
tourniquets to ensure they would survive horribly disfigured, rather
than bleed to death.4
In April 1981 seventeen Hizbis targeted a convoy of hundreds of
Russian and Afghan communist troops near the village of Hassan Khil
in Paktia, near the Pakistan border. Drenched from pouring rain, the
guerrillas lay in wait beside a field as the armoured cars and tanks
rolled past.Then one of them lost patience. Standing up holding a RPG
grenade launcher at his waist, rather than resting it on his shoulder,
he fired the opening salvo of the ambush. The backdraft killed him
instantly, but the rocket hit the convoy, causing a truck to burst into
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flames. In the ensuing chaos, one of the Hizbis used a megaphone to

urge the troops to surrender, hoping they would not realise just how
few insurgents were attacking them. The ploy worked: some of the
demoralised soldiers fled in panic, while others turned themselves in.
It was typical of the shadow play used by Hekmatyar’s insurgents in the
first years of the war, when they relied on obfuscation and suicidal acts
of bravado to make up for their shortfalls in firepower. Hizb persistently
harried Soviet and Afghan communist forces in Paktia, though all sides
suffered heavy casualties in the brutal combat. In one instance, Russian
troops cornered a squad of Hizbis in an abandoned house. With the
soldiers on the ground floor and the mujahideen on the floor above,
the two groups directed their fire towards the sound of each other’s
footsteps, shooting through the mud and wood partition that separated
them until the Russians pulled out and called in a helicopter to destroy
the building.5
Some of the fiercest fighting of the war came further north, in
Kashmir Khan’s home territory of Kunar, where the Soviets conducted
a massive land and air offensive in May and June 1985. Six months
earlier, the mujahideen had successfully adopted hit-and-run tactics to
fend off a far smaller assault. Now, with Hekmatyar’s chief lieutenant
at the helm, what seemed like entire battalions of Islamist fighters
stood their ground using well-built trenches and berms for cover as
they attempted to push back the invading troops. By the end of the
two months, the Soviets claimed to have killed 4,200 militants in the
province, with much of the combat taking place in and around Asmar,
the site of the 1979 mutiny that had marked such a defining moment
in the initial stages of Hizb’s jihad.6
From March 1980 to April 1985, a total of 9,175 Soviet troops
were killed in the war, at an average of 148 a month. Moscow refused
to openly acknowledge that its forces were engaged in combat in
Afghanistan—preferring instead to portray the conflict as a state-
building and peacekeeping operation. After being returned home
on Antanov An-12 cargo planes nicknamed Black Tulips, the bodies
of dead soldiers were delivered to their families at night in a futile
attempt to hide the truth from the Soviet public.7
***

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The war was dirty, fragmented and chaotic. While the Soviets and the
Afghan communists maintained a semblance of security in the cities,
the mujahideen dominated the countryside. Hizb prided itself on a
tightly-controlled leadership structure that made it unique among
the insurgent groups. The party’s obsession with rules and the chain
of command was almost Leninist in character. Although these strict
internal protocols meant it lacked a figure like Ahmad Shah Massoud
who was willing and able to make brilliant strategic decisions on the
hoof, Hizb’s regimented approach to the jihad added to its mystique.
Fanaticism and discipline were the party’s calling cards: every roadside
bombing it conducted seemed to have been carefully planned; every
ambush appeared to have been sketched out to the finest detail. While
the reality was more chaotic, perception was all that mattered. To the
government and to millions of Afghans, Hizb seemed omnipotent.
Groups such as Jamiat looked amateurish in comparison.
As Hizb encircled him, the Afghan president Babrak Karmal grew
desperate in his attempts to stem Hekmatyar’s influence. He closed
down the Sharia faculty at Kabul University—the spiritual home of
the Muslim Youth—and the engineering faculty where Hekmatyar
had once studied.8 Terrified of travelling outside the capital, Karmal
employed a presidential guard of 2,300 to 2,500 personnel whose job
was to protect him and politburo members from mujahideen assassins
and aggrieved comrades within his own party. Even these guards were
subject to his paranoia; many of them were made to carry empty
magazines in their Kalashnikovs in case they turned their guns on the
president. Karmal regarded Hizb as the main threat not just to the
government’s prospects of survival, but to his own life and the lives
of his ministers. In regular intelligence briefings, he made sure the
presidential guard received constant reminders that Hekmatyar’s party
was active in most of the rural areas encircling Kabul, including the
Shomali plain to the north, Kohi Safi and Deh Sabz to the north east,
Tarakhil to the east and Chahar Asyab to the south. Unbeknown to the
president, Hizb had also infiltrated the interior and defence ministries
with hundreds of undercover mujahideen tasked with recruiting
government staff as informants.9
Hekmatyar’s men conducted military and propaganda operations
in the heart of Kabul, working in small units to avoid suspicion. One
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Afghan army officer joined them after being falsely accused of Hizb
membership by his brigade. Deciding he may as well defect given that
he was already under suspicion, he began to run errands for the party
in the capital and Logar, stuffing night letters inside his uniform and
distributing them around town. His eldest daughter helped, concealing
hundreds of the documents beneath her school clothes.10 Elsewhere in
Kabul, Hizbis launched hit-and-run attacks on Russian troops who had
grown accustomed to relaxing in the city after being out on missions
in the far more dangerous countryside. Three mobile groups of seven
undercover fighters were always on the lookout for opportunities to
ambush patrols and convoys in Darulaman, near the Soviet embassy,
and Mikrorayon, where the cream of the Afghan communist leadership,
including Sulaiman Layeq, now lived.11
Under siege, Karmal’s government ratcheted up the propaganda
campaign against Hekmatyar’s men. A story in the Kabul New Times
falsely claimed that the Hizb emir had been trained by the CIA during
the king’s reign. Another article, published on 5 July 1984, reprinted
a letter purportedly written by Hekmatyar and intended for one of his
commanders. An obvious forgery that contained none of the caution or
religious language typical of internal Hizb communiques, it urged the
commander to send some of his men to Pakistan, where US instructors
were waiting to teach them how to use ‘poisonous chemical grenades.’12
Supplementing this crude media offensive, a special disinformation
unit within the KGB set about inflaming the rivalries between the
Afghan mujahideen parties. The unit’s main target was Hekmatyar
and, like the Kabul regime, it blended fact and fiction to portray the
Hizb emir as a nightmarish figure prone to acts of wanton savagery,
spreading rumours that he killed disobedient subordinates with his
own hands.13 Although the more lurid stories about Hekmatyar and
Hizb were largely unsubstantiated, the party’s terrifying reputation
was not without merit. Once a fringe extremist group, by the mid-
1980s it had developed into a formidable paramilitary organisation and
semi-autonomous government.
In Warsak, north of Peshawar, the camp Hizb opened in 1978 had
expanded significantly in the years after the Soviet invasion. Initially
used to house 250 mujahideen in temporary accommodation, by the
early 1980s it was known as the Warsak Division and was turning into
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a sizeable military base—one central to Hekmatyar’s shadow state.

Hizb had made a point of showing off the impressive facility to the
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader Umar al-Tilmisani when he was
in Peshawar trying to unite the mujahideen factions. Located near the
Warsak Division was the party’s very own Jihad University, a West
Point-style military academy for the best and the brightest. Designed
by Hizbis who were former engineering students, the university had
newly built barracks, classrooms, firing ranges and assault courses,
as well as sports grounds where recruits were put through rigorous
daily exercise routines. The training programme to turn raw young
mujahideen into skilled and dedicated soldiers did not just focus on
their physical attributes. Hizb also recognised the importance of
ideological indoctrination, schooling students in the party’s radical
interpretation of Islamic law. Up to 19,000 fighters would be trained
there by the end of the war. Upon graduation they were rewarded
with certificates stamped with Hizb’s distinctive Hekmatyar-designed
logo. Afghan mujahideen ran the university but Pakistan’s government
provided the state-owned land on which it was situated.
At the same time as Hizb expanded its army, the party branched
out into the world of commerce. First, in 1981, it purchased a factory
for manufacturing water pumps in the Hayatabad area of Peshawar.
Then the party bought several houses in and around the frontier city
that could serve as offices. Hizb also invested in its own printing press,
buying the different machine parts in Germany and Jhelum, a city
in Pakistan’s Punjab province. Hekmatyar personally approved each
transaction, before seeking and getting support from the executive
council. While the factory ensured that Hizb had a modicum of
legitimate income, should funding from private donors and arms
supplies from the US dry up, the houses allowed the party to save
money it would otherwise spend on rent. The printing press meant
that the party could cut costs by publishing the Shahadat newspaper
itself, rather than via private companies. Motivated by this same sense
of long-term financial planning and a desire to house Hekmatyar in a
property befitting his growing stature, Hizb bought its leader a home
in the west of Peshawar. The mastermind behind these commercial
and real estate operations was Jan Mohammed’s successor as finance
officer, Mawlawi Storay, a former madrassa student from Nangarhar.
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He ensured that each purchase was made in the name of Hizb members
carrying Pakistani national identity cards—a requirement under
Pakistani law. The identity cards were forgeries obtained through
Jamaat-e Islami, the Pakistani party that inspired the Muslim Youth.14
These logistical improvements were accompanied by refinements
to Hizb’s organisational structure on both sides of the border. Prior
to the Soviet invasion the party had one local leader per province, but
this system changed as its resources grew. Each province now had its
own local leader, also referred to as an emir, stationed in Peshawar and
tasked with overseeing the bureaucratic work for his designated area.
This local leader coordinated with the province’s jihadi emir—the
main military commander in the field.Transferring arms from Pakistan
into Afghanistan was not always easy, however: Hizb only sent weapons
convoys to the remote central province of Ghor twice a year; similar
convoys went to other parts of the country at different intervals.
The men who transported the weapons, walking and accompanied
by donkeys or horses, were paid basic expenses; the further their
journey, the more money they earned. In contrast, ordinary fighters
and commanders did not receive any kind of stipend or salary, though
the party did take care of food and accommodation and look after their
families when they were in Peshawar.15
Lest they be in any doubt about their responsibilities, thousands of
Hizbis were issued with a book detailing the personal and professional
standards they were expected to uphold. The book gave members
twenty-seven rules for their personal lives by which they should abide,
emphasising traits such as politeness, humility, honesty and cleanliness
that are traditionally held in high regard in Islam. At times it resembled
a meditative self-help manual: ‘Always be serious and committed, and
avoid speech or thought that is of no benefit,’ ran one piece of advice.
Even the most simple instructions, however, were a blueprint for
creating the perfect Islamist soldier. ‘Always be thinking about jihad
and martyrdom in the way of God. Make yourself completely ready,’
said the nineteenth rule on personal lives. The obligations continued
in a section of the book entitled Party Responsibilities. ‘Defend the
decisions of the party with full power,’ one rule said. ‘If moves are
made against the policies, seriously condemn them. Do not avoid any
sacrifices that will achieve victory.’ All Hizbis were implored not to
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think solely about Afghanistan but to work tirelessly ‘towards perfect

unity among Islamic forces all over the world.’
The party’s highly disciplined organisational structure, which
still employed ministerial-like committees for specific policy areas,
remained secretly intact even when Hizb was meant to have dismantled
it in favour of working in alliance with other mujahideen groups. By
spreading power across several layers of shadow government, the party
aimed to ensure that whoever served as its leader did not have supreme
authority. The Hizb manual urged executive council members not to
disclose the nature of disagreements raised during meetings or to
form factions. In their spare time, they should recite the Qur’an, study
the Hadith and ‘review the work and achievements’ of other Islamic
groups. Emirs at all levels, including Hekmatyar, were not above the
rules. They had their own sixteen-point section, ordering them to
listen carefully to any criticisms from colleagues and lead by example
in their courage, piety and truthfulness. If the party emir were to find
that he does not have the trust of the executive council, he should
resign, the book said.16
While Hizb’s laws stipulated that no member was better than any
other, Hekmatyar was the unquestioned leader, a first among equals.
Foreign journalists underestimated him, frightened by his extremism
and alienated by his condescending and belligerent attitudes towards
them. They dismissed him as a crank and a blowhard with an
exaggerated sense of his own self-importance; and as a consequence,
they belittled the victories he oversaw on the battlefield and ignored his
subtly malevolent charm. Hekmatyar was a magnetic and intimidating
presence in the company of his supporters, who took confidence
from his serious, self-assured demeanour and unstinting work ethic.
In Peshawar, he convened weekly meetings of all the provincial emirs
to discuss the latest political news and plan strategy.17 He liked to
micro-manage the party’s affairs, writing letters to his commanders
in Afghanistan and paying close attention to their progress. When he
heard that one had shot down a Soviet helicopter in Paktia, he rewarded
him with a new pistol complete with a silencer, and an American-
made gun.18
Not everyone inside the party approved of his growing stature.
Try as he might to feel happy for his old friend, Mohammed Amin
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Weqad watched Hekmatyar’s stratospheric rise with envy. In the years

since he lost the party leadership, Weqad had seen Hizb become a
formidable force, just as he hoped. But the party’s success came at
a heavy personal price: he had been gradually sidelined within the
movement and was now in danger of being written out of its history
entirely. Appointed Hizb’s first leader in 1976, he had gone on to run
its military committee in the opening months of the Soviet occupation,
only to see his authority usurped once the war intensified. Now more
charismatic men than himself filled the party’s two most illustrious
positions: while Hekmatyar garnered plaudits as overall emir,
responsibility for monitoring day-to-day combat operations inside
Afghanistan had been handed to a former medical student, Dr Hanif,
who came from a family in rural Kandahar that claimed lineage to the
Prophet Mohammed. Early on in the war Dr Hanif had teamed up with
the young madrassa student who worked with the Gahiz newspaper to
give the Muslim Youth a foothold in the southern province in 1970.
They fought side by side in the district of Maruf, earning Dr Hanif a
reputation as a tenacious and dedicated mujahid. By the mid-1980s his
ancestry and combat experience made him a popular choice as the new
head of Hizb’s military committee.19
Blinded by ambition and convinced that he had nothing left to lose,
Weqad made his move against Hekmatyar soon after Dr Hanif took
his job. An attempt at uniting the various mujahideen factions had
just broken down. Convinced Hekmatyar was to blame and sensing a
chance to fatally undermine him, Weqad invited several hundred party
members to a meeting in Peshawar under the guise of discussing the
coalition’s collapse. Once they arrived he intended to use the gathering
as a referendum on Hekmatyar’s leadership and present himself as a
worthy replacement.
In front of a packed hall of several hundred people, Weqad got on
stage and took hold of a microphone. Just as he began to address the
audience, recalling the Muslim Youth’s struggle against the Daoud
regime, an excited murmur swept through the crowd. Peering into
the distance to find the source of the commotion, Weqad was stunned
to see Hekmatyar making his way towards him, despite ordering the
guards not to let him enter under any circumstances. The murmur
grew louder as more of the audience realised who had arrived. Soon,
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spontaneous shouts of ‘Long live Hekmatyar’ and ‘God is greatest’

filled the air; people jostled and pushed to get a better view. When
Hekmatyar reached Weqad he waited for him to finish his speech before
taking the microphone. Addressing his challenger using the honorific
‘Qazi,’ meaning judge, in deference to Weqad’s status as a graduate in
Islamic law, Hekmatyar concealed his anger well. ‘If a dispute arises
between the imam of a mosque and his followers, what should they
do? I don’t think they should destroy the mosque—they should change
the imam. I am asking you not to destroy Hizb-e Islami but to make it
better,’ he said. Hekmatyar offered to stand aside as leader if that was
the wish of party members.‘The door of this hall should be closed so no
one else can come in and we will hold an election now, in this meeting,’
he said. ‘Qazi Sahib and I will be the candidates. If this meeting chooses
me as emir, he should work under me. If it chooses Qazi Sahib Amin
Weqad, I will work under him.’ At this the crowd erupted into more
cries of ‘Long live Hekmatyar,’ each one louder than the last. There
was no need for a vote; Hekmatyar was the undisputed leader of the
party. Strengthened by this show of support, the Hizb emir had the
remit he needed to expand the jihad internationally.20
***
If the 1967 and 1973 wars between the Arab states and Israel were
catalysts for a generation’s despair and anger, that discontent had turned
into a furious, propulsive energy by the mid-1980s. In contrast to the
interminable struggle to liberate Palestine, the conflict in Afghanistan
was immediate and visceral. Some of the poorest Muslims in the world
were being massacred by godless communist forces on a daily basis,
yet against all odds they were holding their own. Foreign Islamists
with no prior combat experience were moved by the devotion and
sacrifice of the Afghan mujahideen to travel to Pakistan to join the
fight. Hizb’s place at the centre of the resistance gave Hekmatyar the
perfect opportunity to exploit this new phenomenon. First, though,
he needed to make up ground on his rivals.
The first party leader to promote the cause of the Afghan resistance
in the Middle East had been Jamiat’s Burhanuddin Rabbani, who knew
senior members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood from his days
studying at Al-Azhar University in Cairo. Rabbani had travelled to Saudi
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Arabia while the Daoud government still ruled Kabul, conveniently

avoiding the awkward questions Hekmatyar wanted to ask about his
role in the Jan Mohammed spying case. Prior to the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, a few Arab volunteers fought alongside the former Hizb
commander Jalaluddin Haqqani in the east of the country. After the
invasion, Haqqani and the Ittehad leader Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf went
to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates to recruit fighters and raise
funds for the jihad.21 But these efforts were no more than exploratory
forays on behalf of interested individuals; the Brotherhood’s brief
intervention to unite the Afghan mujahideen was similarly limited
in scope. In contrast, Hizb had a long-term strategy in place when it
branched out beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan. Hekmatyar’s party did
not just want to raise money or receive token offers of support; rather
it wanted to embed itself within the Muslim world, using the war as
a rallying point and template for future civil and military uprisings
in South Asia and the Middle East. The Hizbi trusted with sowing
the seeds for this crucial work was Jan Baz Sarfaraz, one of the chief
interrogators of Jan Mohammed.
Slight of build, with raven-black hair, thick eyebrows and a neat
beard, Sarfaraz never courted the limelight. He was well respected
within Hizb, having served as a part-time gun runner for the Muslim
Youth, and attended one of the early guerrilla training courses
organised by the Pakistani government. The unwavering commitment
and lack of sentiment he showed over Jan Mohammed’s death had not
gone unnoticed by Hekmatyar, who regarded such rare characteristics
as the hallmarks of a uniquely talented mujahid. Since then, Sarfaraz
had graduated with a degree in Islamic law from Al-Imam Mohammed
Ibn Saud Islamic University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. His education,
on top of his distinguished past as an activist, marked him down as the
ideal candidate for an extraordinary role in the party.
Sarfaraz’s promotion was signed and sealed on 16 December 1978,
when the Pakistani government issued him with a passport, number
AG707450. Although Sarfaraz was from Nangarhar in Afghanistan,
the inside page said he was from Peshawar. This passport allowed him
freedom of movement and ensured he could do the job that would
cement his reputation within Hizb. Travel documents in hand, he
was appointed head of the party’s ‘relationship committee’ with the
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Arab world, in effect its roving international jihadi envoy. He took

to the role immediately. Throughout the next eight years Sarfaraz
made several trips to Saudi Arabia, opening offices for the party in
Riyadh and the two most revered cities in Islam, Mecca and Medina,
where almost a million Muslims from across the globe descended
annually for the hajj pilgrimage. His visits were sponsored by the
General Intelligence Directorate, the Saudi intelligence service,
which renewed his visa at the appropriate times. Sarfaraz held regular
meetings with powerful clan leaders, rich businessmen and scholars.
In contrast to other mujahideen envoys, he did not ask them for money
but lectured them on the needs and principles of jihad. He knew the
wealthy sheikhs would be happy to provide cash as an easy way to
assuage their consciences and fulfil the Islamic obligation of donating to
charitable causes.What Sarfaraz really wanted from them was a deeper
commitment: their ideological adherence to the cause of radical Islam.
An articulate, honest and direct speaker, he had no trouble convincing
his Arab audiences of the righteousness of Hizb’s cause. Spurred on
by his words, sheikhs poured money into the party’s coffers, causing
Sarfaraz to employ ten Afghan students as part-time accountants just
to try and keep an accurate record of donations.
Sarfaraz travelled the world on his Pakistani passport. On 10
December 1979, two weeks before the Soviet invasion, he was given
a visa by Iran’s consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He flew to Tehran’s
Mehrabad International Airport on 29 December and left on 3 January
1980. The following year, 1981, he visited Germany; on 12 May, he
received a one-month visa from the Jordanian consulate in Bonn and
soon departed Europe for the Middle East. In the mid-1980s he spent
much of his time working for Hizb in Malaysia. For years he criss-
crossed continents in this fashion, his passport listing his occupation
as ‘student.’22
In addition to his work overseas, Sarfaraz acted as Hizb’s chief liaison
with the small but growing community of Arab volunteers in Peshawar
who were coming to join the jihad. The leader and primary recruiter
of these fighters was an influential Palestinian scholar, Abdullah Azzam,
who had begun to build on the pan-Islamic vision of the Muslim Youth
and Hizb by issuing a fatwa declaring that jihad in Afghanistan was fard
al-ayn, a religious duty for all Muslims, akin to the five daily prayers
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and fasting during Ramadan. He would go on to send hundreds of

foreign fighters to Hizb training camps.
***
Azzam was teaching at the International Islamic University in
Islamabad when he first met Hekmatyar and Rabbani. Their encounter
was arranged by a member of Jamiat, who had studied alongside two of
Azzam’s nephews in Saudi Arabia. The Ittehad leader, Sayyaf, was also
present at the meeting. Azzam welcomed the Afghans to his Islamabad
house and they talked long into the night. ‘I came here to help the
jihad,’ he said. ‘I do not like being a lecturer.’ Azzam demonstrated the
hospitality and generosity expected of a pious Muslim by inviting the
three mujahideen leaders, together with the intermediary, to sleep at
his house. The Afghans accepted, rising as the call to prayer rang out at
dawn. Azzam, Rabbani and Sayyaf were all formally qualified scholars,
yet the Palestinian asked the far less educated, younger Hekmatyar
to act as their imam that morning. With this small gesture of respect,
he sealed his short but explosive friendship with the most radical of
Afghanistan’s guerrilla leaders.23
Soon afterwards, Azzam moved to Peshawar and set to work. He
knew his talents lay in proselytising, not combat, and laid out his
doctrine in a series of revolutionary texts, the first and most important
of which was The Defence of Muslim Lands. Written as an extension of
the fatwa he issued in 1983, it was a pioneering piece of scholarship
that portrayed the war in Afghanistan as a ‘defensive jihad’ and rebuked
Muslims for forgetting the ‘obligation of fighting.’ Afghans alone had
proved unable to defeat the Soviets and their communist allies, so it was
now incumbent on Muslims ‘upon the whole earth, from the East to
the West,’ to join them in the struggle, he wrote. Those willing to fight
should do so without hesitation; sons did not need the permission of
their fathers and wives did not require the approval of their husbands.
In such cases as the war in Afghanistan, ‘the sin is suspended over the
necks of all Muslims as long as any hand span of land that was Islamic is
in the hands of the disbeliever,’ he wrote. Azzam wanted the majority
of Muslims to prioritise the war in Afghanistan over the more obvious
goal of liberating Palestine from Israeli occupation. He justified this
by contrasting Islamists like Hekmatyar, who were at the forefront
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of the Afghan resistance, with the secular leaders of the Palestine

Liberation Organisation (PLO).24
Backing his words with action, Azzam established the Maktab al-
Khidamat (Services Bureau), an office in Peshawar designed to mentor
Arabs who wanted to take part in the war. There are no firm statistics
on the number of Arab mujahideen who journeyed to Afghanistan or
Pakistan prior to 1984 because, until the formation of the Services
Bureau, their ranks were disorganised and their time in combat limited
to occasional missions or patrols. Azzam’s Bureau changed all this: by
the end of 1985 around one hundred Arabs were participating in the
jihad,25 with Sarfaraz their principal contact in Hizb. While continuing
his regular trips abroad, he now organised the foreign fighters’
combat training and collected donations via the Services Bureau for
Hekmatyar’s party. Over a period of four years Arab ‘individuals and
groups’ gave him up to $100,000, he recalled.
The most prominent Hizb camp for foreign jihadists was established
at the sprawling Warsak Division. There, recruits were taught how to
use Kalashnikovs, assemble and plant mines, fire rocket-propelled
grenade launchers and use mortars. Lessons were given in Pashto
and interpreted on site into Arabic and English. Sarfaraz had special
clearance to enter the camp, which was off limits to Afghans including
other high-ranking party colleagues. Hizb opened a second training
centre for foreign fighters near Parachinar in the Kurram tribal agency,
eighty-four miles west of Peshawar, where they formed their own
division, the Tanzim ul-Momineen (Organisation of the Faithful). The
camp featured a prison in which Hizb held a small number of Soviet
soldiers captured in battle and kept alive as potential bargaining chips
in any future political negotiations. Hekmatyar frequently visited both
training centres to monitor the militants’ progress.
Language differences were not the only reason the party chose to
train Afghan and foreign recruits separately. Hizb was careful to ensure
that the Gulf Arabs, who were not used to harsh living conditions, were
better fed than the Afghans, and senior party officials knew that this
preferential treatment might cause resentment. Islamic jurisprudence
was another possible flashpoint that required this same sensitive
approach: while the Afghans were Hanafi Muslims, the foreign fighters
followed the Maliki, Hanbali and Shafi’i schools of thought; keeping
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them apart was the best way to avoid arguments over religious practice
and doctrine. At both camps the training programmes focused on
military techniques rather than ideological indoctrination, with courses
lasting between two weeks and a month. The Arab recruits hailed from
Saudi Arabia, Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Libya and
Algeria. ‘They were living under dictatorships and wanted to train to
overthrow their own states,’ recalled Sarfaraz some years later.26
As time wore on, many of the recruits to Hizb’s cause fell under the
influence of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, an Egyptian cleric tried but
acquitted in Cairo for sanctioning the murder of the former president
Anwar Sadat. With his vision impaired by diabetes at an early age,
he had memorised the Qur’an using Braille and led an underground
militant group in his homeland. The blind sheikh first met Hekmatyar
during a visit to Saudi Arabia early on in the war and in 1985 they
linked up again in Peshawar, with the Egyptian eager to experience
armed combat. On a Friday that winter, just after the Maghrib sunset
prayer, the portly cleric squeezed into a flak jacket for a guided
tour of the frontline. Mohammed Shawqi Islambouli, the brother of
Sadat’s assassin Khalid Islambouli, went along for the ride, having also
befriended Hekmatyar after fleeing the authorities in Egypt. Driving
on a moonless night, past caravans of mules laden down with crates full
of weapons for the mujahideen, they crossed into Nangarhar, arriving
just as the first rays of morning sun split the mountains. They stopped
at a Hizb outpost, its buildings riddled with bullet holes. Tears stained
the blind sheikh’s cheeks as he walked to a sandbagged position on the
crest of a hill, artillery fire audible in the distance. ‘If only God could
give me eyes for a couple of years, or for a couple of hours, so I could
fight in the jihad,’ he said.27
***
With the war raging in Afghanistan, Hekmatyar’s disciples were also
working tirelessly to spread their extremist doctrine across Europe.
Rather than resort to headline-grabbing acts of violence, Hizbis in the
Afghan diaspora were careful to abide by even the most inconsequential
laws of their host countries. In this way, they were able to operate
openly throughout the continent without drawing unwanted attention
to Hekmatyar’s stated belief that peace with ‘infidels’ was impossible.
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In the long-term, their tactics proved far more effective than any direct
attacks against Soviet or American interests abroad.
The activists’ work began in earnest in 1981, when Afghans in the
West German city of Frankfurt established an Islamic students’ union.
With a majority of its members affiliated to Hizb, the union sought to
raise awareness of the mujahideen’s insurgency, spread ‘hatred towards
the Soviets and communism’ and ‘attract the sympathy of Turkish and
Arab Muslims’ living on the continent, recalled one activist. A year
later Hekmatyar’s party branched out alone, forming civil society
groups in a number of West German cities, among them Munich,
Stuttgart, Bonn, Hamburg and Cologne. It also established residents’
associations and activists’ councils in Britain, France, the Netherlands,
Belgium and Denmark. The offices were predominantly run by unpaid
volunteers with the aim of collecting money, medicine and clothes
for refugees in Pakistan, but their role was not solely confined to the
war effort. As the number of Afghans seeking shelter in Europe grew,
the offices functioned as outreach centres for new arrivals. They held
funeral services, solved marriage disputes and staged ceremonies in
which the call to prayer was recited directly into the ears of newborn
babies, a centuries-old Islamic custom first used on a grandson of the
Prophet Mohammed.
Keen to replicate the success of the Shahadat newspaper in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, Hizb produced similar publications in
Europe. From the early 1980s in Bonn it regularly printed 2000 copies
of Al-Sobh (Morning), a monthly Pashto and Dari newspaper. On
27 December 1984, Hizb launched Mujahida Khor (Mujahid Sister),
a monthly publication for women, in Hamburg. Elsewhere, Hizb
identified and exploited the rich potential of local Arabic-speaking
communities. In Belgium, the head of its Brussels office, Mohammed
Qasim Hemat, held meetings with immigrants from North Africa
and ensured party propaganda was published in their mother-tongue.
Similar efforts were made in France, where two Hizbis, Mohammed
Amin Karim and Kabir Akhtari, spoke about the war to the Algerian,
Moroccan and Turkish diaspora. As Hizb’s stature grew, Turkish and
African immigrants across the continent slaughtered sheep for the
party, donating the meat to the destitute families of mujahideen in
Pakistan. The work of the Hizbis in Europe was most evident at public
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protests, where demonstrators held aloft pictures of the Muslim

Youth’s first leaders, Abdul Rahim Niazi and Engineer Habib-ur-
Rahman. Marching through city streets, they waved handmade signs
proclaiming ‘Down with Communism,’ ‘High is the Islamic Flag in
Afghanistan,’ ‘Mujahideen will defeat Infidels’ and ‘No East, No West,
Islam is the Best.’ The rallies were relatively small—involving anything
from a few dozen to a few hundred people, including women and
children—but they embodied the party’s growing confidence abroad.
Inevitably, even thousands of miles from Peshawar, the omnipresent
figure of Hekmatyar was central to Hizb’s appeal.28
The fanaticism that made Hekmatyar popular with European
Muslims, desperate to rally to the defence of Afghans, also endeared
him to US officials eager to ratchet up the pressure on the Soviets.
They did not stop to think about what would happen when he finished
killing Russians and turned his guns on them. While Hekmatyar had
always been open in his hatred for the US, he studiously enhanced
his position as the leader of Afghanistan’s most powerful insurgent
faction by developing mutually beneficial but ambiguous relationships
with influential figures inside the American political and intelligence
establishments. Ever since Ronald Reagan succeeded Jimmy Carter
as US president in 1981, America’s support for the mujahideen had
grown—a trend that would accelerate throughout the decade until the
Afghanistan programme became the biggest covert campaign in US
history. Hekmatyar, and Hizb, were the chief beneficiaries.
In the first fiscal year of the Reagan administration, Congress
gave the CIA a budget of about $30 million to spend on the Islamist-
dominated insurgency—already a substantial increase on the relatively
modest $500,000 initially authorised by Carter in 1979. By 1984 the
budget had risen to $200 million and by 1987 it reached $630 million.
These amounts were doubled by Saudi Arabia, which agreed early in
the war to match US spending. Riyadh’s contribution was sent to its
embassy in Washington, before being transferred to a CIA-controlled
Swiss bank account. Flush with cash from Congress and the Saudis,
American agents went shopping on the international arms market.29
The CIA’s first secret weapons shipment in 1980 had been a
consignment of old-fashioned British .303 Lee Enfield rifles.Within two
years the agency was using its swelling budget to send the mujahideen
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Chinese-made Kalashnikovs and mortars, rocket-propelled grenade

launchers and thousands of 12.7 millimetre heavy machine guns. The
weapons were sourced from communist countries or Soviet allies,
giving the US cover to publicly claim that the mujahideen had captured
them on the battlefield. Central to the entire clandestine campaign
was American congressman Charlie Wilson, a womaniser and alcoholic
who took it upon himself to ensure that his colleagues on the House
Appropriations Subcommittee on Defence gave the CIA all the money
it needed.
Wilson was an anti-communist idealist who sympathised with the
plight of Afghans under Soviet occupation. He was also a compulsive
political hustler who loved the thrill of covert activity, and he was
soon operating far beyond his official remit. In January 1984 he met
Hekmatyar at the Pearl Continental Hotel in Peshawar, accompanied
by Cynthia Gale Watson, a former Miss Northern Hemisphere, who
wore a pink jumpsuit for the occasion. Hekmatyar greeted them
both warmly and got down to business, suppressing the reserve he
usually displayed when meeting Western women who failed to dress
with the conservatism he expected. Wilson told him that he was
trying to persuade the CIA to buy weapons for the mujahideen from
Israel, which had seized them from the PLO, and wanted to know
if the Hizb emir would have any moral objections to receiving arms
indirectly from the Jewish state. Hekmatyar replied that he would
not: after all, his men had no qualms about looting guns from dead
Soviet soldiers. ‘God has many mysterious ways of providing for his
faithful,’ he said.30
For Hekmatyar, it made perfect sense to accept this deal and any
others like it. At no point during the jihad did American or Pakistani
officials proffer guns to Hizb on the condition that he compromise
his beliefs, cease training foreign fighters or give up his dream of
turning Afghanistan into a radical Islamic state. He would therefore
agree to take any weapons that were available, regardless of their
origins, knowing that he could use them to defeat the Soviets and
his mujahideen rivals, before storming to power in Kabul. Once
ensconced in the capital as head of his Islamist regime, he could turn
the guns on his former suppliers in Washington via his proxies across
the Islamic world.
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If the ebullient and naive Wilson was unaware of the true nature of
Hekmatyar’s fanaticism, the same could not be said of the CIA.While its
agents prudently tried to avoid any face-to-face contact with the Hizb
emir in the first years of the war, they viewed his expanding jihadist
army as a priceless asset with the best organised fighters. By the mid-
1980s the CIA’s station chief in Islamabad, William Piekney, thought
of himself and Hekmatyar as ‘brothers in combat’ but knew that it was
a relationship of convenience.31 The CIA continued to funnel weapons
through Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency, which feared provoking
the Soviets into incursions on its soil, or even an outright invasion,
if American involvement in the jihad became too pronounced. Based
in a large camp on the northern outskirts of Rawalpindi, the ISI’s
Afghanistan Bureau coordinated arms drops to the mujahideen and
ensured the war steadily intensified without ever boiling over. This
arrangement suited Islamabad and Washington, allowing the US to
deny Soviet accusations that it was aiding the resistance and giving
Pakistan direct control over how the weapons were distributed. It also
benefited Hizb, which had been cultivating a relationship with the ISI
since the days of the Muslim Youth.
Arms were shared out among the seven mujahideen parties
according to a sliding scale that prioritised the bigger factions whose
interests most closely aligned with Pakistan’s. Hizb received the
largest allocation—around eighteen to twenty per cent of weapons—
followed by its rivals in Jamiat and Ittehad. The head of the ISI’s
Afghanistan Bureau found Hekmatyar ‘the toughest and most vigorous’
of the guerrilla leaders, an ‘excellent administrator’ and ‘scrupulously
honest.’ But he also thought him ‘ruthless, arrogant, inflexible,’ and
‘a stern disciplinarian’ who ‘does not get on with Americans.’32 All
these characteristics were clearly evident in 1985, when the Hizb emir
travelled to New York on a trip that would foreshadow his post-9/11
confrontation with the US.
Hekmatyar’s visit to America came after he was given the rotating
leadership of another faltering alliance of the mujahideen, formed at
the urging of Saudi intelligence officials and the Pakistani government.
In this role, he arrived in New York in the autumn of 1985 for talks at
the UN, accompanied by a coterie of Hizbis including an interpreter.
Although Hekmatyar spoke good English after learning it at Kabul
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University, when dealing with Westerners he preferred to use a

translator; it gave him time to consider his words, demonstrated his
pride in his culture and, crucially, indicated that he had no interest in
pleasing foreigners for the sake of being polite.The Hizb emir managed
to avoid causing controversy in the routine discussions at the UN, but
away from the talks his behaviour was typically combative. An adviser at
the US State Department, the Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, relayed
to him a formal offer to meet President Reagan at the White House.
Surprised, Hekmatyar did not know how to respond. In just over a
decade he had gone from being a student activist to one of the world’s
most prominent guerrilla leaders. Playing for time, he contacted
Hizb’s executive council in Peshawar and asked its members to make a
decision on his behalf. The executive council prevaricated, first saying
he could meet Reagan, then abruptly changing course when he pressed
for a definitive answer, deciding that he should reject the offer. Some
members were perplexed that Hekmatyar even felt the need to consult
them; they trusted his judgement and would be happy whatever he
decided. Hekmatyar broke the news to Khalilzad in uncompromising
fashion, saying he was not interested in going to the White House just
so the US president could use him for a photo opportunity.
Reagan had become vocal in his support for the mujahideen,
without openly admitting to funding and arming the Afghan insurgency.
Hekmatyar now feared that the American president wanted to claim
credit for his own hard-won achievements as leader of the largest and
most effective guerrilla faction. He told Khalilzad that being pictured
with Reagan would undermine him in the Islamic world. ‘It was a
psychological problem,’ confirmed one executive council member;
Hekmatyar ‘considered himself leader of the revolution’ and did not
want the mujahideen’s struggle to be seen as ‘America’s war.’ Khalilzad
was shocked that anyone would turn down such a prestigious offer, but
asked the Hizb emir if he would like to visit some of NewYork’s tourist
attractions instead. Hekmatyar declined, claiming the city was full of
‘houses of prostitution.’ Rather than sample NewYork’s culture, he left
for California, where he met with Afghan exiles in San Francisco and
Los Angeles. His refusal to meet Reagan only added to his prestige.33
***

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Fresh from his groundbreaking visit to America, Hekmatyar

flew to West Germany in early November 1985. He had been there
once before, years earlier, to meet the minister-president of Bavaria,
Franz Josef Strauss, and prominent figures from the Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood living in Europe. Now, wearing a lambskin hat and an
incongruous cream-coloured raincoat over his shalwar kameez,
Hekmatyar toured Bonn, Berlin, Strasbourg and Cologne, talking
to members of the Afghan, Turkish and Arab diaspora about the
importance of supporting Hizb’s war. He also met Nobel Peace Prize
winner and former chancellor of Germany, Willy Brandt.34
At a press conference in a Munich mosque Hekmatyar took
questions on the jihad, sitting beneath a green banner bearing the
Islamic profession of faith. He spoke of the danger that the mujahideen
would drive out the Soviets only to let Afghanistan fall into the ‘hands
of other colonisers’—a thinly-disguised reference to the US. Hizb had
‘emphasised that this jihad maintain all its Islamic values,’ he said.When
asked why his men were not attacking Soviet interests abroad, he gave
a pugnacious reply. ‘Our policy is that we will attack anywhere we
can,’ he said. ‘If we can damage the heads of our enemy with a punch,
we should. If we can throw stones at them, we should. If we have guns,
we should use them. Anywhere we have anything, we should use it. We
should put the enemy under pressure and force it to leave our country.’
In his closing remarks, Hekmatyar spoke of his hope that ‘a day will
arrive when our nation will follow one party and one line, and fight
under one flag of Islam.’35
He was equally bullish in a speech at a mosque in Hamburg, where
he stood at a lectern that was draped in a green flag bearing Hizb’s
logo. Behind him, to his left, was a large banner with a crossed-out
communist hammer and sickle and the crossed-out letters ‘USA’ in
opposite corners. Between these two symbols, in bold black writing,
was the word ‘Islam.’ In chillingly prophetic remarks, Hekmatyar told
the Afghans in the audience that they should be proud of their country
because it would defeat the Soviets and transform the world. ‘I believe
that half a century later the path of history will once again be changed
by the hands of our nation,’ he said.36
Hekmatyar returned to Pakistan after completing his tour of
Germany, but his work overseas was not yet done. Following a short
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period of recuperation, he and two fellow Hizbis flew from Islamabad

to Istanbul at the invitation of the opposition Turkish Islamist Welfare
Party. Turkey was under a military dictatorship at the time and they
spent much of their week-long trip drawing inspiration from the
history of the Ottoman Empire. They toured the tomb of Mohammed
al-Fatih, who led the Islamic conquest of Constantinople in the
fifteenth century, and visited the Sultan Ahmed Mosque. They also
went to the mausoleum of Sultan Abdulhamid, whose autocratic rule
had been unable to prevent the Ottoman Empire’s gradual decline
into malaise and, ultimately, its transformation into a secular Turkish
Republic in 1923.
The highlight of their stay was an invitation to watch a boxing match
as guests of the Welfare Party. Turning up at the venue, Hekmatyar and
the two other Hizbis were ushered past a huge crowd more interested
in seeing them than the fight. When the Afghans eventually found their
seats, Hekmatyar was asked to give a speech. He spoke for ten minutes
about the mujahideen and the need for all Muslims to support the
jihad, then sat down to watch the bout. Next to him was the Welfare
Party’s founder, Necmettin Erbakan, who had made his name calling
for the restoration of Islamic law in the country and urging Turks across
Europe not to assimilate with their host nations. A purveyor of anti-
Semitic conspiracy theories,37 in 1996 Erbakan would become Turkey’s
prime minister, yet it was Hekmatyar who was feted like a king as they
sat together. Men clambered towards the Hizb emir, stuffing letters
of support into his hands. When the boxing was over, he was grabbed
by members of the crowd and lifted onto the shoulders of the adoring
public. Wearing a blazer over his shalwar kameez, Hekmatyar smiled
and raised his right fist in the air as he was carried to the ring. He
greeted the boxers and lapped up the applause, before climbing under
the top rope and pushing his way back to his seat as people surged
forward to touch him. It was not the only remarkable moment of their
stay. That same week the Hizbis met the head of the Istanbul branch
of the Welfare Party and future president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan. With Hekmatyar perched on a chair and Erdoğan kneeling
by his feet, the two men chatted like master and apprentice.38

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THE MOTHER PARTY

Feted in cities from Los Angeles to Istanbul, Hekmatyar was a hybrid

of firebrand preacher, rogue army general and outlaw statesman. He
relished the demands each role placed upon him, working eighteen
hours a day as he shuttled from meeting to meeting, pored over maps
of the Afghan battlefield and delivered speeches to crowds of refugees.
In his spare time he wrote and read poetry, composing the stanzas in
between sending out messages urging his troops to fight to the death.
He studied Islamic history and examined the tactics of contemporary
guerrilla movements, desperate to pick up any tips that could bring
his messianic vision closer to reality. In the middle of the night he
woke to say the tahajjud prayer, just as the Prophet Mohammed had
done, then fell asleep again before rising at dawn. He fasted two days
a week to purify himself and resented anyone who turned up late for
appointments or kept him busy for longer than necessary. Every single
minute mattered to him.1 The Hizb leader had built his government-
in-waiting; now he was intent on constructing his empire.
With the war capturing the imaginations of Muslims across the
globe, Hekmatyar and his men began referring to Hizb-e Islami as
the ‘Mother Party,’ in homage to its influence over the international
jihadist movement emerging in its midst.2 They noticed with pride
how increasing numbers of young Egyptians were turning to them
for guidance and a role in the war, and rejecting the advice of elders
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in the Muslim Brotherhood back home, who wanted them to abide

by the more moderate teachings of Jamiat and Burhanuddin Rabbani.
The Hizb training camps at Warsak and Parachinar swelled with newly-
radicalised Algerians, Yemenis and Saudis who saw Hekmatyar as the
leader with the ideological vision and wherewithal to prepare them
for the wars they planned to wage in the Middle East after the Soviets
were beaten in Afghanistan. In Peshawar Hekmatyar’s liaison to the
foreign fighters, Jan Baz Sarfaraz, understood that the vast array of
recruits under his watch had a much greater ambition than liberating
Afghanistan from Russian occupation. When that job was done they
wanted to ‘defeat Israel and free Jerusalem.’3
Abdullah Azzam’s role in their radicalisation was crucial. While the
Palestinian scholar tried not to favour any single mujahideen faction,
Hizb’s dominance over Peshawar made it impossible for him to remain
impartial. Hekmatyar was attracting the majority of the Arab recruits
and had more power and prowess than any of the other party leaders.
Azzam admired Hizb; he also knew he had to work closely with the
party if he wanted to stay relevant and ensure the jihad against the
Soviets succeeded. He wrote books urging Muslims everywhere to
join the resistance and went on speaking tours across the Middle East,
Europe and the US. His arcane religious references and impassioned
calls to arms shared striking similarities with the uncompromising ideas
of Hizb and the Muslim Youth. As far as Azzam and Hekmatyar were
concerned, jihad meant combat with weapons—nothing else.4 Just as
Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman had once outlined his vision for an Islamist
utopia fashioned from the bloodstained ruins of Afghan communism,
Azzam characterised the war in Afghanistan as an attempt to form a
‘newborn’ Islamic community and cautioned that, like in childbirth,
‘with labour there must be pain.’5 Echoing words Hekmatyar used
when railing against Jan Mohammed’s co-conspirators for betraying
the Muslim Youth, he quoted the Prophet Mohammed as defining fear
as a love for life and a hatred of death.6
While Azzam later came to be hailed as the founding father of the
modern global jihad, he was acutely aware of the substantial debt he
owed to Professor Niazi, Abdul Rahim Niazi and Engineer Habib-ur-
Rahman. ‘The blessed jihad was established by a handful of youths
who were nurtured in Islam, and by a group of scholars who devoted
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themselves to God,’ he wrote in his book Join The Caravan.7 He praised

Hekmatyar’s frugal and disciplined lifestyle, which he compared to
that of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, the eighth-century caliph who expanded
the Muslim world beyond its Arab heartlands, into ancient Persia.8
By the late 1980s there were approximately 3,000 to 5,000 foreign
mujahideen directly involved in the war.9 The majority of them served
as doctors, cooks and teachers; Hizb, however, was mainly interested
in the few hundred who wanted to fight. One of the most promising
volunteers it took under its wing was a quietly assured Saudi who often
seemed lost in his own thoughts. Hizbis knew him as Abu Abdullah; the
world would know him as Osama bin Laden. The son of a construction
magnate, bin Laden was born into a life of privilege that could not
have been more different from that of the Afghans he came to fight
alongside. After studying under Azzam at university in Jeddah, he
travelled to Pakistan for the first time in 1980, visiting Lahore, where
he donated large sums of money to Hekmatyar and the Jamiat leader
Rabbani. The funds were handed to them via Jamaat-e Islami, the
Pakistani Islamist party with historic ties to the Muslim Youth.10 When
Azzam’s Services Bureau formed in 1984, bin Laden was appointed
to take care of its financial affairs and in this capacity got to know
Hizb’s jihadi envoy, Sarfaraz, who initially found him ‘very quiet and
calm.’11 By the mid-1980s, however, it was clear that there was much
more to this timid, ethereal Saudi than his money. Hekmatyar and the
rest of the Hizb leadership started to talk among themselves about
his potential as a kind of ‘superman’ of the jihad, a rare combination
of ideologue, fighter and benefactor who possessed an almost other-
worldly aura that entranced those around him. Although they had no
way of knowing just how influential bin Laden would become, they
could tell he was different to the other Arabs flocking to their cause. He
came from one of the wealthiest families in Saudi Arabia, yet expressed
no sense of entitlement. All he wanted was to serve God as a mujahid.
In 1985 Hizb’s political committee—which had overall responsibility
for the foreign militants in the party’s ranks—decided to test bin
Laden’s credentials. It contacted one of the party’s best commanders,
Sayed Rahman Wahidyar, and informed him that a group of Arabs would
soon be visiting him at the front. The committee did not mention
bin Laden by name and it knew that Wahidyar—a good and loyal
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soldier—would ask few questions. Tall, dignified and used to taking

orders, the white-bearded commander was an economics graduate
who joined the Muslim Youth in high school. He had spent much of
the war fighting in Logar and Wardak but now led a newly-formed
military division within Hizb, based out of a camp called Spin-e Shiga
in Paktia. The Fatah division had 1,000 fighters and was less a guerrilla
unit than a battalion set up to confront Soviet troops head on. Its men
were battle-hardened and had no interest in hosting war tourists. For
bin Laden to live and fight alongside them, he would need to be the
real deal.
When the twenty-eight-year-old Saudi arrived in early summer
he was known to Wahidyar only by his Arabic kunya, Abu Abdullah,
or Father of Abdullah, after the name of his eldest son. Hundreds of
mujahideen passed through Spin-e Shiga at any one time on their way to
and from the frontlines and, although Wahidyar was under instructions
to watch bin Laden closely, he did not treat him differently to anyone
else. The Saudi ate with the rest of the men and slept alongside them,
impressing Wahidyar with his humility, discipline and bravery. It was
the start of a relationship between Hizb and the future leader of Al-
Qaeda that would continue intermittently up to, and beyond, 9/11.
Not long after that first visit to Spin-e Shiga, bin Laden was among
twelve Arabs who accompanied Hekmatyar and Wahidyar on a mission
to Pul-e Alam in Logar. He was there informally, not as a representative
of any organised group or network. The aim of the mission was to
capture the provincial capital, just as Hizb had tried to do in 1978
under Haji Abubakr. But after blocking the main road leading into
town and seizing several government checkpoints, Hekmatyar and bin
Laden could not muster enough support among the local mujahideen
to complete the mission. After fifteen days, they returned to camp. As
far as anyone in Hizb was aware, the Logar mission was bin Laden’s
first taste of combat. A year later, in 1986, he tried again. This time,
he was not acting of his own accord. Together with Azzam he rallied
to support Hekmatyar after a Hizb base came under attack from the
Russians. When he arrived on the scene Hizb had already repulsed the
assault, but bin Laden was increasingly set on getting more actively
involved in the war effort. Thirsty for combat, he went on to set up the
Lion’s Den, a base for Arab fighters in Paktia.
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 THE MOTHER PARTY

While Hizb had nurtured the quiet Saudi, the Lion’s Den was
bin Laden’s own project and situated in territory out of the party’s
control. Wahidyar often visited him there and was again impressed by
what he found. Although the Arabs lacked the heavy artillery available
to Hizb, he noticed that they were more resolute than many of his own
men. Before the Russian invasion in 1979, Moscow had warned about
a ‘world Islamic republic’ being established in Afghanistan. With Hizb
and Osama bin Laden now aligned, that nightmare was another step
closer towards becoming a reality.12
***
As Hekmatyar’s forces grew in strength, and the Afghan government
struggled to survive, the Soviets decided that their client, Babrak
Karmal, had to go. At best, the war had become a stalemate; at worst, it
was a quagmire, slowly draining the Soviet empire of resources, morale
and manpower. Although the Russian death toll had declined since the
early years, it remained alarmingly high: from May 1985 to the end of
1986, 2,745 Soviet troops were killed at an average of 137 a month.13
The mujahideen controlled the countryside and routinely ambushed
the main highways, turning cities into strategically-isolated enclaves
forever vulnerable to attack. With little influence in rural areas, where
most Afghans lived, the Karmal regime was unable to collect the
taxes it needed to generate funds for the war effort, instead relying
almost entirely on Soviet aid. Moscow bought gas from Afghanistan at
exorbitant prices, artificially inflating the market rate, and provided
Kabul with everything from weapons to school textbooks. No matter
how hard the Russians tried, however, they could not paper over the
cracks. From a prewar strength of 110,000 troops, the Afghan security
forces were left with around 30,000 troops by mid-1985 as floods of
soldiers deserted en masse to the mujahideen.14
For much of this, the Russians blamed Karmal. Dour, indecisive
and despised by a large section of his own party, he had survived in the
job by rarely leaving the confines of his palace—a lonely and isolated
figure surrounded by enemies, both real and imagined. The Soviets
could not put up with him any longer. If they were to salvage anything
from the war, they needed a man of action who was prepared to take
responsibility for the fighting and wrest back momentum from the
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mujahideen. They quickly recognised that the only candidate with the
credibility and gravitas to bring an orderly end to the conflict was one
of Karmal’s most senior officials, Najib, also known as Dr Najib or Dr
Najibullah, the broad-shouldered former medical student who had a
history of fighting the Islamists.
As a young Marxist activist in the late 1960s and early 1970s,
Najib brawled and fought with equal élan, earning himself a notorious
reputation on the campus of Kabul University for his eagerness
to confront the young men he derided as ‘Ikhwanis.’ Even then, his
confidence had left a lasting impression on Hekmatyar. During one
student debate, the Hizb emir recalled telling Najib that Afghanistan
risked becoming another Soviet satellite state like the central Asian
republics. Najib had simply replied, ‘That’s okay. The central Asian
countries are in a much better condition than us.’ This ruthlessness
was central to his appeal; one dossier produced by Soviet military
intelligence described him as ‘clever and a vicious politician.’15
Najib’s rise to prominence owed much to Hekmatyar’s old
adversary, Sulaiman Layeq. Their inseparable bond could in part be
traced to the ancestral roots they shared in the same region of south-
eastern Afghanistan, but it went deeper than a mere tribal allegiance.
By the mid-1980s they were kindred spirits with almost twenty years
of friendship behind them. Both members of the Parcham faction of
the communist party, Najib and Layeq had contrasting personalities,
yet their different characteristics were one of the reasons they got on
so well. There was an alchemical quality to their relationship that took
their flaws as individuals and melded them to each other’s strengths,
making them a formidable match for their opponents. Layeq was a
scholar and propagandist, increasingly wary of the limelight and
unwilling to get caught up in the bloodshed he encouraged. Najib
lacked his mentor’s subtlety and craft but he was a charismatic soapbox
performer and street-smart thug with an uncanny ability to appeal
to the masses. In partnership, they were the future of the Afghan
communist movement.
Over the years, events had only brought them closer together.
When the communists seized power in 1978, inter-party rivalries
saw Najib exiled as ambassador to Iran while Layeq was imprisoned in
Pul-e Charkhi. Facing political ruin and even death, both men found
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redemption in the Soviet invasion. While Layeq went on to occupy

various posts within the Karmal government including his current
position as minister of tribal affairs, Najib had been hired as head of the
all-powerful Afghan intelligence service, known by its new acronym
KhAD. He used the job to resume their lifelong crusade against the
Muslim Youth and Hizb.
KhAD was a more clinical and pervasive incarnation of the
communists’ previous intelligence agencies. Modelled on the KGB, it
planted informants in public institutions and sent its men storming
into houses to raid the homes of suspected insurgents as they slept. In
his time as head of the agency Najib demonstrated a brutality and work
ethic every bit as ferocious as Hekmatyar’s. He paid close attention to
everything that went on at KhAD, skipping meals and sleeping just four
hours a night so he could immerse himself in the minutiae of individual
cases.16 Just as Hekmatyar’s personality defined Hizb’s approach to the
jihad, Najib expected the behaviour of KhAD operatives to reflect the
two traits central to his character: acumen and cruelty. The impressive
but cynical tradecraft he wanted from his agents—luring potential
assets into honey traps where they could be blackmailed, or turning
children into informants—was married to a sadism that saw him
disregard the hippocratic oath and preside over the systematic torture
of prisoners in KhAD’s detention centres. Inmates had their nails torn
out, their tongues stabbed with pins and their beards set on fire; some
were anally raped using bottles and bullets; others had weights hung to
their testicles or drills inserted into their thigh bones.17
While all opponents of the communist regime were vulnerable to
abuse, Najib and his henchmen delighted in tormenting Hizbis. His
younger brother, Sadiq, had once been stabbed and injured in a skirmish
with the Muslim Youth and throughout the early 1980s Najib exacted
revenge on his sibling’s behalf with undisguised glee. In one typical
instance, a disciple of Hekmatyar’s was arrested and taken to KhAD’s
Sedarat compound in the heart of Kabul, where Najib punched him in
the face, knocking out two of his teeth. ‘I was looking for you in the
sky but found you on the earth,’ he told the prisoner, ridiculing his
belief in God. Najib’s subordinates spent the next month-and-a-half
trying to force the Hizbi into a confession. They got drunk on alcohol
and tortured him to the love songs of Ahmad Zahir, a well known
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philanderer whose music was despised by the Islamists as much as it

was adored by Kabul’s cosmopolitan youth.The Hizbi was electrocuted
via a wire wrapped around his big toe, burnt on the calves of his legs
with red hot kebab skewers and subjected to a mock execution while
blindfolded and bound to a tree. At one point he was tied to the ceiling
of his cell, leaving him hanging in excruciating pain, while the door
was left open in front of him so he could see three female prisoners—
two girls and a woman—being sexually assaulted in a nearby room.
His torturer warned him that his family would meet the same fate if he
did not reveal more information about Hizb.18
Najib’s ambition, brutality and track record of fighting Hekmatyar
were not all that appealed to the Soviets. He also had close ties to
the Pashtun tribes of eastern Afghanistan whose influence had the
potential to make or break any presidency. In October 1985, the
same month Hekmatyar visited the UN, the new Soviet leader Mikhail
Gorbachev summoned Karmal to the Kremlin and told him that he
was considering pulling the 40th Army’s 100,000 troops out of the
country. Then, on 25 February 1986, Gorbachev delivered a landmark
speech that characterised the war as ‘a bleeding wound.’ That spring,
as he prepared to embark on his domestic glasnost reform programme
and ease the economic and political pressures placed upon the Soviet
Union by the war, he asked Karmal to step down.The Afghan president
reluctantly agreed, resigning as secretary general of the communist
party on 4 May. Karmal kept the title of president for a further six
months but ceased to wield any of the authority inherent in the
position. In his place, Najib was put in charge of ending the war and
crushing Hizb.19
Afghanistan’s new leader was frank in his assessment of the task
at hand. He estimated that the government controlled only a quarter
of the 35,000 villages in the country and, with the insurgents from
the various mujahideen groups numbering roughly 183,000 men—
significantly more than his own security forces—he feared it could take
another three decades to defeat them militarily.20 With Layeq’s help, he
slowly began to come up with a strategy to exploit the mujahideen’s
rivalries and play them off against each other, while reverting to the
communists’ origins as a Pashtun nationalist movement and rebranding
his regime as a bulwark against Pakistani influence. Pro-government
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 THE MOTHER PARTY

militias would be established to empower local communities tired

of atrocities committed by the Afghan security forces and the
fundamentalist guerrillas. If the plan worked, there was a chance that
the Soviets might save face and Najib’s administration could survive. If
it failed, there was no telling what furies might be unleashed.
***
On 16 June 1986, the Jamiat leader Rabbani met Ronald Reagan at
the White House. Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, the irascible old scholar
who had once turned down the chance to join the Muslim Youth and
clashed with Hizb in Kunar, went with him. Reagan refused their
request to give the mujahideen diplomatic recognition but pledged his
‘unshakeable commitment’ to their struggle. Rabbani also took the
opportunity to repeat a long-held complaint among the Afghan rebels:
that they needed more effective weapons to combat Soviet air power.
This wish would soon be granted, just not in the way he hoped.21
Although Hekmatyar had turned down the chance to meet Reagan
a year earlier, it was his dead-eyed extremism, as opposed to Rabbani’s
more pragmatic approach to politics, that continued to appeal to the
virulent anti-communists in the CIA steering America’s covert Afghan
campaign. Hizb, not Jamiat, was therefore issued with the first US-
supplied surface-to-air Stinger missiles sent to any mujahideen party.
The arrival of the weapons soon after Rabbani’s Washington visit was a
direct reaction to the deployment of helicopter-borne Russian Spetsnaz
commandos a year earlier—part of a last-ditch effort by Moscow to
weaken the insurgency before withdrawing.These highly trained special
forces troops were taking the fight to the mujahideen, sneaking up on
once impenetrable rebel encampments with devastating efficiency. By
the time the rebels realised they were under attack, it was often too
late. The commandos stabbed or shot them, then returned to their
helicopters, sometimes carrying out several ambushes in a matter of
hours. For the mujahideen, it felt like the sky had fallen in. They had
grown used to picking off ill-disciplined and inexperienced Russian
conscripts; now they were faced with a nimble and fearless enemy that
thrived in close combat. Fearing that the Spetsnaz were about to cause
an irrevocable shift in the war’s momentum, President Reagan and the
US National Security Council gave the CIA permission to distribute the
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Stingers. It was a significant escalation in the American strategy, making

it impossible for Washington to claim that the rebels were finding all
their armaments on the battlefield. Pakistan agreed to receive an annual
allocation of 1000 to 1,200 missiles and 250 grip-stocks, to be divided
among the various insurgent factions. Realising the importance of the
moment, the ISI handpicked a member of Hekmatyar’s party to have
the honour of conducting the first Stinger attack.22
The chosen recruit, a commander named Engineer Ghaffar, was
among a team of Hizbis trained to use the weapon at a Pakistani army
camp in Rawalpindi. Hosted by Pakistani officers mentored in the
US, his lessons were occasionally conducted in the presence of the
CIA’s new station chief, Milton Bearden. The Hizbis practised using
a missile simulator to track the beam from a penlight across a white
linen sheet hand-painted with scenes from Afghanistan. Ghaffar
excelled at this role-playing exercise and on 25 September 1986
he and his squad of fighters carried out their first mission, shooting
down three Soviet MI-24D helicopters as they came into land at
Jalalabad airport. The CIA equipped them with a video camera to
film the historic strike and the shaky, uneven footage captured their
cries of joy as the first helicopter was hit. The last ten seconds of the
film showed the bodies of the Soviet crew members strewn among
debris on the ground, before the mujahideen approached them and
riddled their corpses with gunfire. An edited version of the footage,
minus the final gruesome scene, was sent to Reagan, who screened it
triumphantly at the White House.23
The Soviets made a raft of tactical adjustments to counter this new
threat: planes that had been devastating the Afghan countryside with
indiscriminate bombing were ordered to fly higher, out of the missile’s
range, and close air support for ground operations was reduced;
helicopter gunships now darted fast and low between mountain
outcrops, making it harder for the mujahideen to hone in on their
targets but giving the pilots less time to pinpoint insurgents below. The
psychological effect of the Stinger was even greater than its tactical
impact, with Soviet pilots left feeling constantly vulnerable and the
mujahideen no longer so exposed to attacks from the air.24 As word of
the Stingers’ arrival spread through Afghanistan, Hizbis clamoured for
the chance to use the weapon.
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In Kapisa, the home province of the murdered Muslim Youth

leader Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman, one Hizbi was so desperate to
go to Pakistan for Stinger training that he threatened to disobey his
commander, who refused his request on the grounds that he could not
afford to lose such an able fighter from the frontline even temporarily.
In a fit of pique, the mujahid laid down his Kalashnikov and vowed
to go anyway, until Kapisa’s most senior Hizb official intervened and
gave him his blessing. Arriving at Hekmatyar’s version of the West
Point academy, the Jihad University north of Peshawar, the enthusiastic
young fighter was annoyed to find the Stinger programme tightly
regulated by instructors from the ISI. His frustration hinted at a
simmering discord among some in the party who feared that Pakistan
was exercising undue influence over their leaders.25
***
Pakistan’s president, General Zia-ul-Haq, was a committed Islamist
whose speech patterns were inflected with the outdated colloquialisms
of the English upper class. While using phrases such as ‘old chaps’ and
‘by jingo’ in every day conversation, he was an ardent believer in a
strict interpretation of his religion, banning the sale and consumption
of alcohol by Muslims, introducing harsh punishments for adultery and
outlawing blasphemy of the Prophet Mohammed. In 1971, when the
Muslim Youth was in its infancy, there were 900 madrassas in Pakistan.
By 1988, 8000 of the Islamic schools were registered, with an
estimated 25,000 unofficial ones. Many of those were funded by Saudi
donors and operated on the Afghanistan border without government
oversight.26 But it was Zia’s Islamisation of his country’s security forces,
and particularly its ISI intelligence agency, that particularly benefited
Hekmatyar and Hizb. The agency developed an ideological bond with
the party’s leadership, often acting as its unofficial advisor in political
and military affairs.
Since the beginning of the jihad against the communists, mid and
low-ranking Hizbis had been noticing strangers from the ISI engaged
in deep discussions with Hekmatyar or showing up at confidential
party meetings, influencing events from the sidelines with a quiet
but tangible authority.27 As the Soviets prepared to withdraw from
Afghanistan, Pakistan increased its influence over Hizb by establishing
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an elite military force within the party, Lashkar-e Issar (the Army
of Sacrifice). To lead the 800-man force Hekmatyar selected Haji
Abubakr, the former high school teacher who had naively tried to
start the jihad in Logar a decade earlier. Having gone on to work as a
journalist and media fixer for the party, Abubakr had returned to his
home province and served as a lauded insurgent commander. Among
his prize possessions was a AKS-74U Krinkov short assault rifle issued
to Soviet officers.
Abubakr was taken under the wing of the Pakistan army, attending a
three-month training course at a forest near Attock. As head of Lashkar-e
Issar, he was given responsibility for a highly disciplined battalion-sized
force designed as the foundation for a new Islamist-oriented Afghan
army to be assembled after the communist regime was overthrown.
Abubakr was to report regularly to Hizb’s military committee, but
he and Hekmatyar had grown close and often communicated directly,
bypassing party protocol as they prepared to capitalise on Moscow’s
retreat.28 The formation of the Army of Sacrifice only fuelled rumours
already sweeping through Peshawar that Hizb and the ISI were working
in tandem to consolidate their hold over the insurgency and eliminate
their enemies.
Critics of Hizb had been turning up dead in the Pakistan borderlands
ever since the murder of Jan Mohammed in 1977. But as Hekmatyar
felt victory move tantalisingly within reach, the body count climbed.
Corpses were found floating facedown and bloated near the dam at
Warsak, their mottled skin shades of purple and blue. Others were
left where they had been shot, their bodies surrounded by spent bullet
casings. Still more vanished without a trace, their fates subject to
conjecture and rumour for years to come. In most instances there was
no definitive evidence that Hizb, much less Hekmatyar, was responsible,
yet friends and relatives of the victims were in no doubt. Peshawar
was Hizb’s town now and the party acted with impunity there; the
formerly vibrant, welcoming city had become a claustrophobic and
hateful place.29
One of the first high-profile murders occurred in late summer 1984,
when a prominent Pashtun writer and journalist, Aziz-ur-Rahman
Ulfat, was killed walking home from a mosque in the Faqeerabad
neighbourhood of the city. Approached by three men, he was shot
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multiple times in the chest and left for dead. Ulfat was a prolific author
close to completing his latest book, a polemical critique of Hekmatyar.
He kept the existence of the 350-page, handwritten treatise a secret
from all but a few people and, with the manuscript recently proofread,
was due to have the book printed a week after he was killed. Relatives
were convinced that news of its impending publication was deliberately
leaked to Hizb by Ulfat’s editorial assistant. Their suspicions were
heightened when they asked Hekmatyar to attend the funeral only for
him to decline—a response they interpreted as a deliberate insult in
a culture that puts a high premium on public displays of formality and
respect. In contrast, senior figures from the other mujahideen parties,
including the Jamiat leader Rabbani, paid their condolences. Fearing
further recriminations from Hekmatyar, a family member of Ulfat’s
secreted away the only existing copy of the manuscript and the book
was never published.30
Three years later another high-profile murder was linked to Hizb.
In 1987 a noted intellectual and activist, Sayid Bahauddin Majrooh,
commissioned a survey for his civil society organisation, the Afghan
Information Centre. The survey, which drew on the opinions of
1,787 educated refugees, found that Afghans were clamouring for
the king to return from exile in Italy to stabilise their country. Tired
of the Soviet occupation and distrustful of the constantly-feuding
mujahideen parties, they yearned for the very system of government
that the Muslim Youth had worked so hard to overthrow. Almost three
quarters of respondents wanted unity between the insurgent factions,
effectively opposing Hekmatyar’s aim of becoming the uncontested
leader of a future Islamist state in Kabul.31
Majrooh had a complicated relationship with Hizb that said much
about the way religious extremism was changing Afghan culture. A
whisky-drinking aesthete who embraced Sufi mysticism, he came from
Shaygal in Kunar, the same place as Kashmir Khan, and knew him well.
They were never close friends, yet they shared a common heritage that
bound them together. Majrooh entrusted Kashmir Khan to protect
his ancestral home when he abandoned it early on in the jihad, and
for a short time one of his sons had even been a member of Hizb.
Inevitably, however, the ties between the family and the party frayed as
Hekmatyar’s disciples grew more extreme. The survey was Majrooh’s
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 NIGHT LETTERS

riposte to their binary vision of the world, and after the results were
published he quickly started receiving night letters from anonymous
sources. Then, on 11 February 1988, the doorbell sounded at his home
in Peshawar. He walked through the yard, which was obscured from
the street by a high wall, and opened the front gate to find a group of
armed men waiting for him. They grabbed at his jacket, trying to pull
him away from the house, and shot him dead when he resisted. Pakistani
police paid a brief visit to the family home that night but did not ask
any questions relating to the murder or mention any possible suspects.
‘It was like they knew already,’ opined Majrooh’s son. In the days that
followed, delegations from the various mujahideen parties came to offer
their condolences, with Rabbani again attending the funeral on behalf
of Jamiat. No one from Hizb even pretended to sympathise with the
family. Although Majrooh’s son felt certain that Hekmatyar sanctioned
the attack, he reserved most of his anger for the ISI, which he regarded
as the real force behind Hizb’s malevolent conduct.32
Every time there was a murder it went unpunished. A leftwing
political activist, Faiz Ahmad, was abducted and tortured to death in
Peshawar. As a founder of the Afghanistan Liberation Organisation, a
Marxist group with origins in the Maoist student movement that clashed
with the Muslim Youth, he was a long-term adversary of Hekmatyar.33
His wife, Meena, was then killed in the city of Quetta, south-west
Pakistan. Leader of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of
Afghanistan (RAWA), she was a target in her own right, running secular
schools and establishing a self-published magazine that promoted her
vision of a democratic Afghan government free from the influence of
the Islamists. On 4 February 1987, Meena was at home in Quetta when
she received a message saying that a woman wanted to meet her on
urgent business. She left the house to see her and never returned. The
Pakistani police refused to investigate Meena’s disappearance but six
months later RAWA activists were alerted to stories in the local media
that her body had been found buried in a deep and narrow hole in the
garden of a property once rented by the organisation. Aged thirty and
a mother of three young children, Meena’s hands had been tied behind
her back and she had been strangled. Her assassins tried to conceal
their crime by concreting over the hole containing her remains; nearby
they hid the corpse of a male RAWA supporter they had also killed.34
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 THE MOTHER PARTY

Less than nine years earlier, when Jan Mohammed had been
hanged and buried in an unmarked grave for being a government spy,
Hizb was careful to cloak the murder in a veneer of respectability,
appointing a judicial board of clerics to investigate and sentence him.
The assassinations in Peshawar and Quetta were markedly different,
carried out with a cartel-like contempt for due process and rule of law.
Hizb’s dirty work was done by its all-powerful intelligence branch.
Divided into two main sections, the central body, Itlahat, carried out
conventional espionage activities such as spying and infiltrating the
communist government; it also conducted the assassinations. A second,
smaller paramilitary wing, Shafa, was used as a kind of emergency
reaction force, capable of being deployed at short notice to locations
in Pakistan and Afghanistan.35 To competing mujahideen factions the
party’s entire intelligence network was simply an unofficial branch of
the ISI, so closely were they entwined. Even if other insurgent groups
wanted to stage assassinations in Peshawar, they could not easily do so
without risking the ire of the Pakistani government. Hizb operated
with no such constraints. When one senior party member was asked if
Hekmatyar had used violence to eliminate dissent, he replied without
hesitation. ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘Every day.’36
In the middle of this killing spree, the CIA Station Chief Milton
Bearden held a one-to-one meeting with Hekmayar, to gain ‘a better
measure of the man,’ who seemed to be operating in a manner
dangerously out of America’s control. ISI director general Akhtar
Abdur Rahman arranged the meeting in March 1987, in a sparsely-
furnished interview room at its Islamabad headquarters. Bearden had
met Hekmatyar before, but only alongside other mujahideen, and found
him to be a ‘commanding presence.’ With tea and biscuits on a table
beside them, Bearden thanked Hekmatyar for coming, then adopted a
more aggressive tone, asking why he deliberately went out of his way
‘to irritate Americans.’ The Hizb emir fingered a set of prayer beads
and dismissed the question: ‘I can’t answer for the irritation of the
Americans,’ he replied. Bearden brought up Hekmatyar’s reputation
as a ‘brutal fundamentalist’ and mentioned some of the allegations
levelled against him, including one dating from the time of the Muslim
Youth, when he was accused of throwing acid in the faces of women.
The claims were ‘fantasy,’ said Hekmatyar. ‘I am fighting an enemy that
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is brutal, and I match their brutality. But the stories are lies, and they
are unimportant.’ The conversation continued in this fashion, with
Bearden probing for an opening and Hekmatyar deploying the peculiar
yet effective mix of nonchalance and aggression that he often used
when faced with hostile questions. Towards the end of the meeting, he
asked why the CIA chief was planning to kill him. Bearden denied that
there was any such plot and asked why the US would want the Hizb
leader dead. ‘The United States can no longer feel safe with me alive.
That’s why you feel you must kill me,’ said Hekmatyar. Bearden came
to wonder if he should have shot him dead there and then.37
Later that same year another murder was traced back to Hizb. In
October 1987, a British TV cameraman, Andy Skrzypkowiak, was
stopped by a group of rebels inside Afghanistan. The fighters offered
him protection but betrayed their word, crushing his skull with a
rock as he slept. The British government gathered evidence that Hizb
was behind the murder and the ambassador to Pakistan, Nicholas
Barrington, confronted Hekmatyar, who denied the accusation
with the same insouciant disdain he used with the CIA chief. The
coldhearted response riled Barrington, who was left in no doubt that
Hekmatyar’s men were guilty and ‘he knew that I knew.’ The UK was
one of the chief benefactors of Hekmatyar’s old adversary Ahmad
Shah Massoud, sending detachments of SAS commandos to train and
supply his forces north of Kabul. Since 1984 these links had been
partially supplemented by the CIA, but the US still preferred to funnel
its weapons to the party leaders in Peshawar via the ISI. Barrington
concluded that Skrzypkowiak was targeted because he was travelling
back to Pakistan from Panjshir, where he had been shooting footage of
Massoud. The cameraman’s murder was the latest Machiavellian twist
in the long-running feud between Hekmatyar and his rival from the
days of the Muslim Youth.38
***
Since his confrontation with Hizb’s Engineer Tareq over the cache
of weapons stolen from dead Soviet soldiers in 1980, Massoud had
consolidated his position in Panjshir, turning it into his own fiefdom
and a bastion of the resistance. Nominally working under the auspices
of Jamiat, he remained very much his own man, taxing residents
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 THE MOTHER PARTY

who worked in the valley’s lucrative emerald mines and forcing local
farmers to donate part of their harvest to his mujahideen. Panjshiris
employed by the communist government elsewhere in the country
were strong-armed into paying five per cent of their salaries to the
rebels. In lieu of cash, some sent supplies of military boots, camouflage
jackets and bars of soap—anything they could get their hands on to
keep Massoud happy. Like Hekmatyar, the man now known to his
supporters as the ‘Lion of Panjshir,’ or simply ‘The Officer,’ understood
that the jihad needed to be fought culturally as well as militarily, and
he appointed mujahideen to teach at schools, hired judges to solve
disputes in makeshift rebel courts and sanctioned the publication of a
newsletter, Allahu Akbar, which was stuck to the walls of local mosques
every Friday.
Naturally reticent in the company of strangers and ill at ease dealing
with the mundanities of civilian life in Peshawar, Massoud felt at home
on the battlefield. He strode around Panjshir with the confident gait
of a general—legs splayed, hips thrust forward—greeting old men
and children as he went. He employed a regular team of five or six
bodyguards, yet prided himself on being close to local residents. No
lover of political grandstanding, he nevertheless had a politician’s gift
of appearing genuinely interested in whomever he met. This trait was
allied to a soldier’s instinct he inherited from his father, enabling him
to quickly gain the measure of new recruits. He was always dressed
in a mixture of combat fatigues and traditional Afghan clothes, his
trademark woollen pakol hat balanced at an improbable angle over his
thick brown hair. Journalists from Europe and the US had taken to
portraying him as Afghanistan’s best hope of establishing a moderate
and stable mujahideen government after the Soviet withdrawal.39
Although Massoud was a talented commander, he skilfully burnished
his reputation by cultivating the international media, becoming the face
of the Afghan resistance in the West. In TV footage, he cut a dashing and
romantic figure, the quintessential warrior poet. He spoke French and
played chess; read widely and prayed habitually; fought in the name
of Islam but did not hate America. On a personal level, he was just
as self-effacing as his public profile suggested, but there was another,
less well-publicised side to his character when it came to matters of
religion, war and power. Surrounded by the Soviets and Hizb, he had
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learned to be ruthlessly pragmatic when it served his wider strategic

ambitions, making him a formidable match for Hekmatyar. Nowhere
was this more apparent than in his complex, contradictory relationship
with the ‘infidel’ 40th Army.
Between October 1980 and August 1982 the Soviets conducted
four major offensives in Panjshir that became the stuff of legend,
with Massoud’s guerrillas recounting how Russian convoys rumbled
through the valley, stirring up dust clouds as high as the mountains.
Each time the rebels fought the invading troops to a standstill, but
each time the Soviets returned with a vengeance, transforming once
bustling villages into skeletal hamlets. With neither side strong enough
to break the stalemate, the Soviets made contact with confidants of
Massoud in Peshawar, offering him a truce. He agreed to talk on the
condition that the negotiations were held in a place of his choosing.
On 31 January 1982, Anatoli Tkachev, a colonel from Soviet military
intelligence, travelled to a safe house near Massoud’s ancestral home
in Bazarak for talks with the famous commander. No Soviet officer had
ever seen a photo of Massoud and Tkachev was curious to know if he
would live up to the communist caricature of an Islamist extremist.
When he finally met him after breakfast the next morning, he was
surprised at how normal Massoud looked: he was young, of average
height and with a serious but cordial demeanour. After several hours
the Soviet colonel and the fundamentalist guerrilla formally agreed to
the ceasefire—a deal that held until April 1984.40
Massoud regarded the Russian troops as victims of an unjust
war, much like the civilians and mujahideen they were killing. His
real grievance was with the communist regime in Kabul, which he
blamed for sanctioning the occupation. The truce was a means for him
to protect Panjshir’s residents as well as an act of self-preservation.
Massoud had no interest in ‘sacrificing himself in the mountains’ and
becoming a martyr if he could stay alive and gain a decisive advantage
on the battlefield, recalled one of his closest friends. The deal gave him
a chance to rearm and figure out not just how to defend the valley from
the Soviets and weaken the government, but how to defeat Hizb, his
main rival for power among the ranks of the mujahideen.The bad blood
from the Jan Mohammed spying case had been further infected by the
petty, yet serious, feud with Engineer Tareq. Since then the quarrel
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 THE MOTHER PARTY

had only intensified, with Hizb blocking the trails Massoud relied on
to receive resupplies of weapons and aid from Pakistan—a potentially
crippling blow given the the importance of battlefield logistics to
the survival of the insurgents. The Jamiat commander responded by
opening up another route through Andarab in neighbouring Baghlan
province, until a local Hizbi cut that off as well. The truce with the
Soviets allowed Massoud to counter-attack against his Islamist foes and,
after breaking the blockade,41 he commenced a ruthless expansion into
northern Afghanistan.
District after district fell under Massoud’s charismatic influence
in the years leading up to the TV cameraman Skrzypkowiak’s murder.
In November 1985 he ordered the execution of between 50 and 250
Afghan communist soldiers captured in the Nahrin area of Baghlan
just as Soviet troops tried to rescue them. Across the north his forces
assassinated Hizb commanders, adopting the kind of fratricidal tactics
nominally associated with Hekmatyar’s disciples. Badakhshan, on
Afghanistan’s borders with the Soviet Union, China and Pakistan,
was one of the provinces worst hit by the violence. For months the
local branches of the two mujahideen parties had been at each other’s
throats, dating back to an incident in 1982, when Jamiat tried to kill a
prominent Hizbi,Woodod Khan, the brother of a revered Muslim Y   outh
activist. Khan survived and fled to Peshawar, but the animosity festered.
Just as Massoud was completing the rearming of his Panjshir troops
in 1984, two of Badakhshan’s most popular Jamiat commanders were
shot dead in a clash with Hizb. The pent-up tension exploded. Jamiat
gunmen stalked the mountains, hunting rival mujahideen rather than
communists. Firefights broke out in sleepy villages shaded by poplar
trees. One Hizb commander, Mawlawi Noor Ahmad, was assassinated as
he prayed at dawn in the district of Jurm. Unable to hold their ground
and stem the attacks, Hekmatyar’s followers became convinced that
Massoud’s troops and Soviet aircraft were cooperating to kill them.42 The
civil war also intensified in Kapisa as Massoud tried to wrest control of a
province that acted as a gateway to Kabul. Hizb was equally determined
to defeat a small pocket of Jamiatis dug in there near Engineer Habib-
ur-Rahman’s ancestral home. Over the course of several years, hundreds
of mujahideen from both sides were killed fighting each other in Kapisa
while Soviet troops watched, unable to believe their luck.43
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Amid the bloodletting, Massoud sought greater diplomatic leverage

over Hekmatyar by sending a close relative to see the deputy director of
the CIA, Robert Gates, who was in Pakistan in October 1986 to assess
the mujahideen’s progress. Massoud’s envoy complained about the
favouritism shown to Hizb when it received the first shipment of Stinger
missiles and asked for fairer treatment in future, giving Gates a pistol as
a gift. The weapon was a Makarov—the same model that Massoud had
once been accused of stealing from Hizb fighters in Panjshir.44
By the time the British cameraman Skrzypkowiak was murdered,
the two rivals were shedding the last political and religious constraints
that had prevented them from declaring all-out war against each other.
Their common enemy, the communist government, appeared to be
on the brink of defeat and the mujahideen were already looking to
the next stage of the war: the battle for primacy among the victors.
The feud between Hekmatyar, the Pashtun Hizb emir, and Massoud,
the Tajik Jamiat commander, loomed over the entire country, each
man bent on defeating the other and determined to stop at nothing in
their pursuit of revenge. Hekmatyar believed that Massoud had finally
shown his true colours as a traitor: talking to Soviet officials was one
thing; agreeing not to fight their troops so he could kill fellow Muslims
was quite another. Massoud, meanwhile, still blamed Hekmatyar for
the Muslim Youth’s disastrous 1975 insurrection and the death of Jan
Mohammed. It was a sombre and foreboding time. The rivalry became
even more personal when Massoud’s half-brother, Deen Mohammed,
went to the US consulate in Peshawar to collect a visa that would allow
him to receive medical treatment in America for his ailing kidneys.
On his way out of the building someone in a waiting car offered him
a lift; he accepted and was never seen again. His family blamed his
disappearance on Hizb and the ISI.45
***
As they prepared to retreat from Afghanistan, the Soviets were in
danger of leaving a power vacuum that would be filled by the emerging
civil war between the rival Islamists. Such a conflict, which would pit
Hekmatyar and Massoud against each other and inflame ethnic tensions,
threatened to drag the wider region into chaos. Unsure how to stem the
tide of violence lapping at their border, Russian military intelligence
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 THE MOTHER PARTY

assessed the strengths and weaknesses of the mujahideen leaders and

their principal commanders. In a confidential report, they described
the Hizb emir as being ‘inclined to extremist actions, imperiousness,
great ambition and eccentricity.’ Hekmatyar embezzled money meant
for Afghan refugees and was involved in the international drugs trade,
processing heroin in a network of laboratories on the Pakistan border,
the report claimed. The Jamiat leader Rabbani was portrayed as
similarly corrupt, profiting from contraband goods and narcotics, and
relying on fighters who styled themselves as soldiers of Islam but were
actually petty criminals who roamed Afghanistan stoned on opium
and hash. Massoud, who had now surpassed Rabbani in fame and
military strength, was more generously portrayed as an ‘experienced
conspirator’ who is ‘reserved, cautious, vain and ambitious.’46
Of all the mujahideen who had fought in the war, the Soviets knew
these few men would challenge Najib for control of Kabul after the
40th Army’s withdrawal. Some in Moscow were indifferent to the
Afghan president’s future; others, including the Soviet foreign minister
Eduard Shevardnadze and the KGB head Vladimir Kryuchkov, felt
ashamed that they were leaving Najib to his fate.47 Gorbachev believed
he had a moral obligation to help his Afghan counterpart cling to power
but, after almost a decade of fruitless conflict, he was determined
to withdraw his troops. On 14 April 1988, the governments of
Afghanistan and Pakistan signed an agreement in Geneva, Switzerland,
approving a series of mutual concessions that would facilitate an end
to the occupation. Washington and Moscow acted as guarantors of the
accords, but the insurgent parties rejected the terms and continued to
call for Najib’s removal. Under the agreement, half the Soviet troops
were to withdraw by 15 August 1988, and the remainder by mid-
February 1989.
Two years earlier Najib had been installed in power to bring the
seemingly intractable war to a conclusion. Now that its end appeared
in sight, the Afghan president and former street fighter was afraid
he had lost. He felt cornered by the Islamic fundamentalists of Hizb
and Jamiat as well as the Soviets, who were making him push through
their military departure according to an artificial timetable that had
nothing to do with his government’s security. In desperation, he
agreed to a Russian plan to team up with Massoud against Hekmatyar.
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The Jamiat commander had again ceased military operations against

the 40th Army, and not just in his Panjshir valley stronghold. He
was now ‘conserving men and equipment, and intensifying armed
combat’ against Hizb, Soviet military intelligence reported, sending
a further 900 men to fight Hekmatyar’s forces in Parwan and Kapisa.
After consulting Sulaiman Layeq, Valentin Varennikov, the personal
representative of the Soviet defence minister in the Afghan capital,
wrote to Massoud in late 1988, offering to cut a deal with Najib. The
extraordinary nature of the proposed concessions, which included the
creation of an autonomous Tajik region in Afghanistan that would have
its own armed forces, showed just how much the Russians wanted
a security buffer to protect them from a radical Islamic state under
Hekmatyar’s leadership. Massoud stalled on the deal as he weighed up
his chances of defeating Hizb in a civil war and gaining control over all
of Afghanistan.48
***
Hekmatyar’s hopes of seizing Kabul before his mujahideen rivals were
dealt a blow when Pakistan’s president and his ideological kin, General
Zia-ul-Haq, died in a plane crash on 17 August 1988. America’s
ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold Raphel, perished alongside him in what
investigators concluded was a tragic accident. Hekmatyar believed Zia
was assassinated as part of a wider US plan to stop Hizb’s march on
Kabul, and while he was wrong about that, he was right to suspect
that Washington was turning against him. The Reagan administration
found itself caught between pushing for a rebel takeover of Kabul
and fearing the Pandora’s Box such a move might open. On Capitol
Hill questions were being raised about the wisdom of continuing to
support the openly anti-American and pan-Islamist Hekmatyar—an
asset Congress, Langley and the White House had nurtured but never
been able to control.49
In 1988 a classified National Intelligence Estimate produced by the
CIA predicted that the communist regime would ‘not long survive’
the Soviet withdrawal. A government ‘strongly fundamentalist but not
as extreme as Iran’ would take its place, with potentially troubling
consequences for the West. ‘At best it will be ambivalent and at worst
it may be actively hostile, especially towards the United States,’ the
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report warned.50 To assess the situation further, the US appointed a

special envoy to Afghanistan, a Vietnam veteran, Edmund McWilliams.
After travelling around Peshawar and Quetta, McWilliams concluded
that Hekmatyar was determined to install a revolutionary Islamist
government in Kabul at any cost, a cause for which he had enlisted
the help of the ISI, Pakistan’s Jamaat-e Islami and ‘radical Arabs.’ The
CIA Station Chief Milton Bearden thought McWilliams was being
melodramatic, and remained confident that the problem could be
contained, despite his earlier hostile meeting with Hekmatyar at ISI
headquarters. The new American ambassador to Pakistan, Robert
Oakley, was similarly certain.51
Newly re-elected as emir of Hizb in another landslide vote held
among party members in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Hekmatyar accused
the US of conducting ‘two faced policies and hypocritical acts’ by
supporting the Geneva accords yet maintaining its clandestine support
for the mujahideen. He mocked politicians from other Asian countries
who bent in slavish devotion when talking to low-ranking US officials.
Recalling how he had stood his ground in the meeting with Bearden,
he vowed to himself that things would change when he was in charge
of Afghanistan: the Americans would cower in awe of Muslims, not the
other way around.53
Speaking at the main mosque in Hizb’s Shamshatu township,
Hekmatyar delivered an ominous warning to Rabbani and Massoud, as
well as the smaller mujahideen factions who advocated a return of the
monarchy to Afghanistan. ‘Martyrdom is our way,’ he declared, before
denouncing ‘religious sell outs’ for colluding with the Soviets and the
US in trying ‘to prevent the establishment of an Islamic government
in Afghanistan.’ He invoked the Qur’an’s story of Lut ibn Haran, a
prophet who sought God’s help to cleanse Sodom of its sins. Lut’s
wish was granted when the city was ‘turned upside down’ and the
population buried in a ‘shower of clay stones.’53 Hekmatyar urged his
supporters not to waver as they neared their sacred goal of capturing
Kabul. ‘In the final stages of victory the mujahideen will be tested by
God,’ he said. ‘Your souls and minds should be ready.’54
In his endless jihad, there was no time for rest or reflection. After
almost a decade of unrelenting combat, many of his fighters were
exhausted and traumatised. In a culture that refused to acknowledge
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their psychological distress, however, Hekmatyar continued to

demand ever greater sacrifices. Even with the Soviets’ defeat assured,
he ordered his men to target the soldiers of the 40th Army. In Ghazni,
the home province of the Muslim Youth’s spiritual founder Professor
Niazi, a squad of Hizbis met the challenge with relish, desperate
to take revenge on the enemy while they still had the chance. One
mujahid ambushed a Soviet tank, stepping out from a culvert and firing
a rocket-propelled grenade into the rear of the vehicle. As the tank
burst into flames, three Russian crew members stumbled out with
their hands up, asking to surrender. Remembering all the civilians he
had seen their comrades kill over the years, the Hizbi jammed a pistol
into the mouth of one of the soldiers and shot him dead, then moved
on to the next man and did the same. He placed his gun against the
temple of the third soldier and squeezed the trigger, feeling a brief
moment of catharsis as the bullet tore through the young man’s skull
and sent him crumpling to the ground.55

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BAGHDAD

The Russians completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan on the

morning of 15 February 1989. Hekmatyar heard the news on his
transistor radio and immediately began to pray, his eyes filling with
tears. He was crying neither out of joy at achieving an astonishing
victory nor sadness over all the blood that had been shed, but in
gratitude to God. Aged forty, he had spent his entire adult life seeking
divine guidance in his quest to bring about the destruction of the Soviet
Union and America. He believed he had just been granted the first
part of that wish; now he prayed for the fortitude to fulfil the second
part.1 At least 15,000 Russians had perished in the war, while more
than 50,000 were wounded.2 The number of Afghan dead stood at
over a million, with millions more displaced and forced into exile. For
Hekmatyar it was just the beginning, and with the Soviets vanquished,
he turned his attention to the ‘ancient enemy,’ America.
That same week, hundreds of representatives from the seven
feuding mujahideen parties met in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi to
vote for an interim government able to take charge inside Afghanistan
once Najib’s regime collapsed. Held under the auspices of the ISI,
which was desperate to show the world that the rebels could unite
for the sake of peace, the meeting did little to quell the simmering
discord. Hekmatyar worried that the vote was part of a plot to keep
him from power, so participated reluctantly; when the results came in,
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they confirmed his worst fears. He had been actively involved in the
fight against communism before any of his major rivals, yet he finished
fifth and had to make do with the consolation prize of being foreign
minister in the interim government—a post he had no intention of
filling in the long term. While he railed against the damage the vote
had inflicted upon his supporters’ morale, he was not the only leader
to feel cheated. Burhanuddin Rabbani, head of the second largest party,
Jamiat, and Massoud’s political leader, finished sixth.The former Kabul
University professor was given responsibility for reconstruction in the
new administration.
Hekmatyar suspected that the US had pressured the ISI into
fixing the outcome, but his humiliating defeat owed as much to
his unpopularity with the rest of the mujahideen as it did to covert
American interference. His ongoing assassination campaign continued
to sow terror throughout Peshawar, alienating the other parties. The five
smallest mujahideen factions had decided that neither Hizb nor Jamiat
should be allowed to claim outright victory in their metastasising civil
war. Pooling their votes, they handed the presidency to Sibghatullah
Mojaddedi, the cantankerous old scholar who had yet to reconcile with
Sulaiman Layeq, his estranged brother-in-law. The leaders of the other
factions shared the most sought-after cabinet positions, including the
ministries of defence and interior, among themselves.3
Mojaddedi revelled in his triumph. Reflecting on his fractious
relationship with Hizb, he regarded the Rawalpindi meeting as sweet
revenge for all the indignities he had suffered at Hekmatyar’s hands.
As far back as the early 1970s, the Muslim Youth had treated him with
contempt when he refused to join them in trying to topple the king.
Then, at Asmar in 1979, Kashmir Khan had beaten him to the most
lucrative weapons haul of the war—an embarrassment he could
neither forget nor forgive. Subsequent confrontations had embittered
him further: in an ambush near the Pakistan border at the start of the
jihad, Hekmatyar’s men had killed eight of Mojaddedi’s fighters, and,
several years later, they had murdered one of his best commanders at a
restaurant in Peshawar. Mojaddedi himself had been targeted by Hizb’s
hit squads on at least two occasions; in one attack his car was strafed with
gunfire. It was not clear if this ambush was a genuine attempt to kill him
or a warning for the future, but Mojaddedi concluded that Hekmatyar
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was ‘insanely obsessed with power.’4 The Hizb emir remained the main
obstacle to the interim administration taking over from the communists,
and to the long-term prospects of peace in Afghanistan.
Hekmatyar’s malign influence was again felt soon after the interim
government’s formation, when a group of Arab fighters in Peshawar
declared takfir against Mojaddedi—a religious decree that condemned
him as an apostate.5 Islam traditionally taught that only the most learned
clerics could pass such a judgement, which was tantamount to a death
sentence. However, the jihad against the Russians had overturned
hundreds of years of religious orthodoxy, with a new breed of radicals
deciding that they knew the true nature of Islam. Although Hekmatyar
said nothing publicly about Mojaddedi’s excommunication, his silence
was a tacit endorsement of the judgement. He saw no reason why he
or his party should be subservient to anyone. Tensions between the
interim foreign minister and president rose further when another of
Mojaddedi’s best commanders, an elderly mujahid in Kandahar, was
poisoned to death.6
Hizb was the only mujahideen faction that functioned inside
Afghanistan as an army, a government, a religious movement and a
lucrative criminal enterprise. Its epicentre was Kunar, Kashmir Khan’s
home territory. The province had finally fallen to the mujahideen
in October 1988, when the communist regime retreated and Hizb
guerrillas entered the local capital, Asadabad, without a fight. Hizb
was similarly strong in the neighbouring provinces of Laghman
and Nangarhar. Although the party was less dominant in the south,
where tribal networks remained deeply engrained in the fabric of the
resistance, it had a core group of fighters in Zabul, Kandahar, Uruzgan
and Helmand, under the command of the former government soldier
General Muzaferuddin, whose mutiny had provided such momentum
at the start of the jihad. In the region around Kabul, Hizb remained the
dominant force. Haji Abubakr’s Army of Sacrifice and Sayed Rahman
Wahidyar’s Fatah Division held much of Logar. Toran Amanullah,
meanwhile, was a rising star for Hizb in Wardak, where he had
established one of the party’s most formidable fighting units, Mashal-e
Haq (Light of Truth).7
Even in western and central areas, where large Shia communities
lived and Iranian influence was strong, the party had cadres willing
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to kill anyone who stood in their way. Across the north Hizb enjoyed
significant backing in Pashtun, Tajik and Uzbek communities, despite
the growing military pressure from Massoud’s troops. Hekmatyar’s
mystique was crucial to sustaining this nationwide support network.
His uncompromising attitude to religion and politics continued to
appeal to a generation of men radicalised by the brutality of the war. In
early 1989 Hekmatyar was at the height of his power and in no mood
to share it with lesser leaders; he told anyone who would listen that the
jihad was far from over.
A Hizb manifesto, distributed across Peshawar in the months
before and after the Soviet withdrawal, was the clearest indication yet
that Hekmatyar intended to carry on fighting until his Islamist empire
became a reality. For the other parties, the war against the Russians
and the Afghan communists was everything. For Hizb, it was a means
to an end. ‘Until human life is based on obedience to God, belief in
the last day and the guidance of the prophets—peace be upon them—
equality and justice are not possible,’ ran the manifesto’s preface.
Inside, Hizb vowed to ‘prevent infidelity, the drinking of wine, un-
Islamic enjoyment and moral corruption’ once it ruled Afghanistan.
Men and women would be forbidden from working together; officials
would be expected to conform to strict Islamic principles even in their
private lives, or risk being dismissed from their jobs; apostates would
be put on trial. But the manifesto was not only aimed at curtailing
the freedoms enjoyed by Afghans in the hedonistic incarnation of
Kabul that Hekmatyar remembered from his youth. It also offered
glimpses of a domestic agenda designed to overturn the rampant social
inequality that had existed since the days of the king and still flourished
under the communists. In a Hizb administration, industrial workers
would be given co-ownership of the nation’s factories; the families of
low-ranking government employees would receive state-sponsored
healthcare, education and housing; welfare would be given to the blind
and destitute; farmers would receive interest-free loans; new trees
would be planted to offset the environmental destruction caused by
the war; the judicial system would be run by trained scholars; and an
elected national parliament would be established.
Such comprehensive planning, coupled with its proven track record
in battle, set Hizb apart from the rest of the mujahideen and other
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militant groups that came before it in Asia and the Middle East. The
party’s foreign and defence policies typified its boundless ambition.
Building on the links that Jan Baz Sarfaraz had cultivated in his role as
envoy to the Arab extremists, Hizb was more determined than ever
to turn Afghanistan into the epicentre of global militant Islam. The
manifesto promised that the country’s armed forces would receive
‘organised lessons in Islamic jihad’ and school children would be
given combat training. At the same time, a Hekmatyar premiership
would encourage Muslim states throughout the world to form a pan-
Islamic political, economic and military bloc capable of challenging US
hegemony. The bloc would recognise Arabic as the official language of
Islam, manufacture its own weapons, establish an international Islamic
court and allow Muslim citizens to travel to and from the different
nations within its territory without being subject to the usual border
controls. If Muslims found themselves under attack or being oppressed
in another part of the world, the bloc would come to their aid. These
policies echoed the aspirations of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the
Muslim Brotherhood whose call for a new Eastern power to rise up
and exert God’s will had so impressed the Muslim Youth’s mentor
Professor Niazi. While Banna had never come close to putting his ideas
into practice, Hekmatyar’s forces had just defeated a global superpower,
and he remained confident that he had the means to succeed. The
manifesto ended with a quote from the Qur’an: ‘As for those who
believe and do good deeds, We shall admit them into gardens graced
with flowing streams and there they will remain forever.’8
Seduced by Hekmatyar’s growing fame, foreign volunteers
continued to sign up to Hizb’s international project. The party
had opened up an office in the US city of Los Angeles and worked
uninhibited in London. One Hizb official in France estimated that Hizb
was given ‘millions of dollars’ in donations by well-wishers there and
in Germany.9 Elsewhere, rising stars in the international Islamist scene
were drawn into Hekmatyar’s orbit. Among them was Hassan al-Turabi,
a Sudanese cleric who would go on to serve as spiritual mentor to his
country’s draconian president Omar al-Bashir. Although the exact date
of their meeting is not known, he went to see Hekmatyar at the Hizb
emir’s bureaucratic headquarters—dubbed the Special Office—on
the Chinar Road in University Town, Peshawar, in the late 1980s. He
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clasped Hekmatyar’s hands reverentially and bent down to kiss them,

before hailing him as ‘the hero of the century;’ their friendship would
have profound consequences for the world when Osama bin Laden
later settled in Sudan. Turabi was accompanied to Peshawar by Anwar
Ibrahim, Malaysia’s minister of education. Ibrahim would later shun
Hizb’s extremist vision in favour of a more inclusive version of Islam,
but like a significant minority of Muslims across the world in the late
1980s and early 1990s, he regarded the Soviet’s defeat in Afghanistan
as a triumph of good over evil, faith over disbelief. He and Turabi gave
bay’ah to Hekmatyar, an oath of allegiance that the first Muslims offered
to the Prophet Mohammed.10
The conflict against the Russians had proved to be one of the most
significant events in the history of modern Islam, and Hekmatyar had
been central to its success. After a century of humiliation at the hands
of the great powers—from the demise of the Ottoman Empire, to the
creation of Israel and Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon—Muslims had
at last struck back. The jihad had dealt a devastating blow to Soviet
prestige and made Hekmatyar a hero for radical Sunnis everywhere,
but he had no time to bask in his victory. The other mujahideen
parties were moving against Hizb and concerns about Hekmatyar’s
ideology and conduct were mounting in Washington. For Edmund
McWilliams, the US special envoy to Afghanistan, stopping Hizb
from seizing power had become something of a personal crusade.
He urged colleagues in the State Department and CIA to put their
efforts into forming a politically neutral administration in Kabul
made up of moderate mujahideen, technocrats and royalists, in order
to undercut Hekmatyar’s influence.11 As rumours of these plots
swirled through Peshawar, Hekmatyar knew his radical project was
under threat. Torn between pushing for a decisive military victory on
the battlefield and trying to outwit his opponents through political
intrigue, he accepted an offer from Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian
guerrilla leader and chairman of the PLO, to try to broker a secret
deal with the communists.
***
Hekmatyar and Arafat had little in common ideologically except their
wish to liberate Jerusalem from Israeli occupation. Yet these lifelong
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revolutionaries, who had both fought and suffered for their beliefs,
were drawn together in the weeks leading up to the formation of
the Afghan interim government. Arafat represented an old guard of
Muslim fighters who still clung to a secular form of Arab nationalism
with roots in the 1950s. The theatrical acts of violence he aided and
encouraged—which included hijackings, hostage takings, bombings
and assassinations—focused on one enemy: Israel. Hekmatyar
embodied a new set of extremist ideas that was gradually taking flight
thanks to the success of the Afghan jihad. His ideological offspring would
soon be carrying out mass casualty attacks against Jews, Christians and
moderate Muslims across the Middle East. In early 1989, both leaders
sensed that their time was at hand. As Hekmatyar plotted to install his
Islamist regime in Kabul and incite unrest across the wider region,
Arafat reached his own political crossroads. A year of civil unrest in
the Occupied Territories had finally persuaded Washington that the
Palestinians had suffered enough; they needed their own independent
state. Arafat understood the gravity of the moment: in a speech to the
UN General Assembly on 13 December 1988, he denounced ‘terrorism
in all its forms’ and called for ‘peaceful coexistence’ with Israel. The
speech was exactly what the US wanted to hear, but its conciliatory
message put the Palestinian leader at odds with Hekmatyar.12
Arafat knew the threat that Hizb’s internationalist agenda posed
to his dreams of statehood, and in early 1989 he decided to intervene
diplomatically in the Afghan conflict. With the Soviets’ blessing, he
sent an emissary named Abu Khalid to Kabul and Peshawar, to meet
separately with Najib and Hekmatyar. Abu Khalid’s task was to broker
a peace deal between the two men and stop Afghanistan becoming
an incubator for international jihad. Empathy for the Palestinians
was one of the few issues that united Afghanistan’s communists and
Islamists, and Arafat’s emissary played on this emotion, knowing that
it was his best chance of bringing the two sides to the negotiating
table. The ploy worked. After shuttling back and forth, he persuaded
Najib and Hekmatyar to agree to high-level talks between Hizb and
the communists for the first time since the Soviet invasion. The talks
would be held in Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, neutral territory whose
rich Islamic history and authoritarian socialist government appealed
to the contrasting political philosophies of both sides. The negotiations
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were scheduled to take place in late January, just weeks before the vote
at Rawalpindi. The other mujahideen parties were not informed.
Hekmatyar selected three men to represent Hizb in Baghdad: his
son-in-law Ghairat Baheer, who had previously held fruitless discussions
with Russian officials in Islamabad, Abdul Karim Mahajerzad, the head
of Hizb in Europe, and Abdul Qadeer Karyab, who had travelled to the
UK a decade earlier to buy equipment for the party’s radio station.
After consulting the Afghan politburo, Najib chose Layeq to lead the
communist delegation. He would be accompanied by the minister
of interior Aslam Watanjar, Najib’s successor as head of intelligence
Ghulam Faruq Yaqubi, and senior politburo member Najmuddin
Kawiani. Najib gave Layeq permission to agree terms with Hizb for a
national unity government made up of the seven mujahideen factions
and the communists, thereby bringing an end to the war. The Afghan
president—a man who had once revelled in brawling with the Muslim
Youth and torturing Hizbis in the government’s dungeons—had come
to realise the futility of trying to bludgeon his way to victory over
an enemy that embraced martyrdom. The ‘Ikhwanis’ had proved to be
tougher than he ever imagined.
Arriving in Baghdad on 23 January 1989, the communist delegation
headed straight to the Al-Rasheed Hotel, an imposing eighteen-storey
edifice overlooking the Monument to the Unknown Soldier. Tired
from the long journey, Layeq began to unpack in his pillbox-like room
when the telephone rang; the unmistakable voice of Arafat greeted him
on the other end of the line. The Palestinian leader asked Layeq to
introduce himself and they chatted in Arabic, which Layeq had learned
as a madrassa student in Paghman. Prodding and probing, Arafat
searched for signs of weakness in his interlocutor. When he questioned
Layeq about Islam, he was surprised to learn that the Afghan knew
more than many scholars. The longer they talked, the more impressed
he became. After several minutes of warm conversation, Arafat told
Layeq to come alone to the Palestinian embassy for preliminary
discussions, and Layeq agreed. Face-to-face later that same day, the two
men relaxed. Layeq began quoting lines from the Qur’an and Hadith,
and reciting Arabic poems, as his innate self-confidence bubbled to the
surface in a litany of rumination and anecdotes. The PLO chairman
couldn’t help laughing; he said that he had expected Layeq to be a
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dogmatic Marxist, not a flamboyant raconteur. ‘All fights are born

from misunderstanding,’ Arafat then proclaimed, before telling Layeq
to summon the rest of the communist delegation. The Hizbis would be
arriving soon.
Hekmatyar’s representatives pulled up at the embassy an hour
later. Layeq stood next to Arafat, ready to greet them, while the other
communists waited inside. After initially mistaking Layeq for one of
Arafat’s retinue, the Hizbis recognised their old adversary and refused
to shake his hand.They sneered that he was an ‘infidel,’ their ordinarily
polite demeanour slipping in front of Najib’s mentor. Throughout the
talks, the Hizbis showed no interest in exchanging pleasantries or trying
to compromise with the communist regime. They demanded that
the Afghan government be formally transferred to the mujahideen’s
control; the only concession they were prepared to offer in return was
a deal to spare the lives of some of the most senior communist officials,
including Najib, with Karyab explaining that Hizb would ensure their
safe passage from Kabul and allow them to adopt false identities if they
wanted to remain in Afghanistan. Layeq was incensed at the implication
that he and his comrades were criminals in need of Hizb’s protection.
He had expected Hekmatyar’s men to turn up with representatives
from the other mujahideen factions or at least come with the authority
to speak on their behalf; instead, they had the audacity to act like they
held his life in their hands. Layeq could not control his anger. ‘Tell
Gulbuddin that if you think you can kill us, I swear by God you should
kill us,’ he erupted. In a bid to calm everyone, Arafat called for dinner.
‘We didn’t come here to sit and eat dinner with them,’ said Baheer.
‘We are at war and we only came here to talk.’ But Arafat insisted:
they all needed to clear their heads. The tension briefly lifted as they
gathered to eat; when they learned that couscous was on the menu—
something the Afghans had never tasted before and the pronunciation
of which bore a striking similarity to a crude Pashto and Dari term for
vagina—even the Hizbis were in hysterics. It was a rare moment of
levity in an otherwise portentous day.
That night, the communists returned to the Al-Rasheed Hotel,
frustrated and tired. Their dismay was compounded by the fact that
the Hizbis were staying at the same venue. In the days that followed,
the two groups passed each other in the corridors and lobby, reluctant
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even to exchange greetings. Later that week, they reconvened for

talks, this time without Arafat in attendance. Baheer again told the
communists that they must surrender and stop imposing their godless
ways on Afghanistan. When Layeq informed Najib that the talks were
still deadlocked, the president ordered him home.
For the Hizbis, Baghdad was an object lesson in realpolitik. Their
stringent demands and inability to compromise had left them cut adrift,
distrusted by their fellow mujahideen and unable to offer the Najib
regime any real incentive to step aside. But the trip was not a total
failure. After twenty years of struggle, dating back to the formation of
the Muslim Youth, they had at last forced the communists to recognise
them as a mainstream political force that represented a large section
of Afghan society, rather than the ‘devils’ of Layeq’s nightmares. Arafat
had treated them like visiting heads of state and it was clear that he
admired their principles, even if he feared their extremist beliefs. To
show his respect, he arranged for them to meet the Iraqi president
Saddam Hussein, reassuring them that the dictator was one of the few
Arab leaders who could be relied upon to keep his word. The meeting
was the start of an informal diplomatic and military alliance between
Hizb and Saddam that would last into the new millennium. In contrast,
Arafat chose not to maintain his ties with Hekmatyar’s men. He did,
however, offer them some advice as they prepared to leave Baghdad:
they must find a way to negotiate with the communists because a civil
war would be a disaster for Afghanistan. Relying on the Americans or
the Russians to act as honest brokers in the talks would be a grievous
mistake. ‘They will devour you,’ he warned.13
In the weeks that followed, Arafat relayed much the same message
to Hekmatyar in person. At a secret meeting in Islamabad, the
PLO chairman and the Hizb emir met for talks with Pakistan’s new
prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, and the head of the ISI. Arafat asked
Hekmatyar to ‘show mercy’ on the communists and allow the king back
to Afghanistan to take charge of a short-term government that could
prepare the ground for new elections. He was wasting his time. ‘There
is no chance for Zahir Shah to return,’ replied Hekmatyar. Exasperated,
Arafat turned to Bhutto and began talking about the peace deal he
wanted with Israel. As Hekmatyar listened, he realised that the PLO
chief was worried about the rise of Hamas, a Palestinian offshoot of the
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Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas’s formation owed much to the influence

of the Palestinian cleric Abdullah Azzam, who had let Hekmatyar lead
him in prayer when they first met years earlier. The Gaza-based group
had hailed the mujahideen’s triumph over the Soviets as ‘a harbinger of
victory in Palestine,’ just as Hekmatyar himself believed. What Arafat
wanted was irrelevant. Hekmatyar knew that it was his views, not
those of the ageing guerrilla leader, that represented the politics of
the future.14
***
On 13 March 1989, Hizb resumed contact with the Najib regime,
this time via the Afghan embassy in London. The vote at Rawalpindi
had panicked both camps. While Hekmatyar had no intention of
welcoming back the king, he feared he was being boxed in by his rivals.
The communists had their own concerns: although they were still
receiving enough Soviet aid and weapons to keep Hizb at bay on the
battlefield, they worried that the international community would soon
recognise the mujahideen’s interim administration as Afghanistan’s
official government. Arafat’s warning that a civil war would devour
the country now seemed like prophecy. With few mutually acceptable
locations left open to them, the Hizbis and communists agreed to meet
in Libya, where Muammar Gaddafi was approaching the twentieth
anniversary of his autocratic rule.
Gaddafi acted as a kind of godfather figure to guerrilla movements
throughout Africa and Asia, espousing a fluid ideology that blended
Islam and authoritarian socialism with his own eccentric economic and
political theories. His interest in ending the war between Hizb and the
communists owed more to his insatiable ego and dislike of Washington
than it did to any wider strategic aims or humanitarian concerns.
Gaddafi thought of himself as a politician of international importance,
capable of starting and ending crises with equal efficacy, and in the
opaque conflict in Afghanistan he sensed an opportunity too good to
miss. Eager to antagonise the US, which had recently shot down a pair
of Soviet-made Libyan fighter jets over the Mediterranean, he regarded
the talks as a chance to reach out to two of Washington’s enemies.
Gaddafi had first captured Hizb’s attention in January 1981, when
party activists in Kabul wrote a letter to the Libyan embassy asking for
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weapons and money to aid the jihad. The Karmal regime uncovered
the note during a house raid, causing the activists to scatter before they
could receive a reply. Hizb was forced to withdraw its solicitation and
Gaddafi went on to assist Jamiat instead, hosting Rabbani’s followers in
Tripoli for academic lessons on the best way to run an insurgency and
teaching them the bizarre ideas of his manifesto, the Green Book. Now
it was the turn of Hizb and the communists to experience life under
his esoteric rule.15
On 16 March Layeq, along with fellow politburo member
Najmuddin Karwani and central committee member Mohammed
Tahir Nasim, flew to Tripoli. For reasons that were unclear, however,
the Hizbis were running late. Rather than wait impatiently in their
hotel rooms, the communists opted to make the most of the delay and
went sightseeing at some of Libya’s Roman ruins. As they did so, news
filtered through to them about a meeting of the Organisation of Islamic
Cooperation in Riyadh, a political coalition which represented the
governments of dozens of Muslim countries. With the help of Gaddafi,
Saddam and Arafat, Hekmatyar had persuaded the organisation to
formally recognise the mujahideen’s interim administration and allow
Afghanistan to return to its seat on the board, having being suspended
in the wake of the communist coup.16
Several days later, the Hizb delegates Abdul Qadeer Karyab and
Ghairat Baheer landed in Tripoli. Just as in Baghdad, they stayed in
the same hotel as the communists. At one point Layeq surreptitiously
watched them go for a dip in its swimming pool while still wearing
the baggy trousers of their shalweer kameez, the loose cotton fabric
billowing in the water as they paddled about, as if they were bathing in
an Afghan river.Yet again, he wondered about the mindsets of the men
with whom he was being asked to entrust his country’s future. How
could they ever be expected to see eye to eye when their world views
were so diametrically opposed?
The communists and Hizbis arranged to meet at 7pm on 20 March,
in the office of the Libyan Islamist party Jamiat-ul-Dawat-ul Islamia.
Within minutes of the Afghans sitting down together, the tension from
Baghdad resurfaced. Layeq opened proceedings by saying that he had
come to Tripoli at the invitation of Hizb; Karyab replied that the talks
had been organised by the communists. Baheer jumped in and said
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that the first contacts were initiated by the Afghan chargé d’affaires in
London, who had told him that Najib wished to hold direct talks with
Hekmatyar. Neither side wanted to show any signs of weakness. When
Layeq asked whether the Hizbis represented their own party or the
mujahideen’s interim government, Karyab said they spoke only for Hizb.
This time, though, Layeq offered an olive branch: the Najib regime was
prepared to strike a ceasefire with Hizb and form a joint commission
to observe the truce. If that went well, Najib and Hekmatyar could
then talk about forming a coalition government. Layeq explained that
the communists would provide Hizb with weapons, ammunition and
financial aid if its members agreed to fight opponents of the deal. But
in his eagerness to make up for the debacle in Baghdad, he had revealed
his negotiating hand too soon. Suspecting that the regime must be
facing inevitable defeat to make such an extraordinary offer, Karyab
doubled down on his own intransigence. ‘You have only one way, which
is to surrender to Hizb-e Islami and guarantee your life and honour,’
he said. No sooner had the opening for peace been presented than it
had been slammed shut. Layeq was apoplectic, just as he had been in
Iraq: ‘You are talking to me like we are your prisoners of war,’ he said,
before accusing Karyab of being ‘arrogant and high-flying.’ For three
hours they argued, with a beleaguered intermediary from the Libyan
foreign ministry looking on. Then, at 10pm, Hizb and the communists
agreed that there was no point continuing. Their disagreement would
be settled on the battlefield.17
***
As the talks in Libya were unfolding, Hizb was laying siege to Jalalabad,
the city in eastern Afghanistan that had once been a fertile hunting
ground for the Muslim Youth. In the early 1970s, Abdul Rahim Niazi
had walked there with a badly injured foot just to attend an event
commemorating the Prophet Mohammed’s birthday. Now Hekmatyar
felt certain that if the mujahideen could capture Jalalabad, Kabul
would follow. In Peshawar that spring he told the readers of the Arabic
language Al Jihad magazine, many of whom would go on to join Al-
Qaeda, that the offensive would cause little bloodshed. ‘We will prove
to the world that the communist regime is unable to resist and fight
back,’ he said.18
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The Pakistani government approved the Jalalabad operation a

week before the Libya talks, at a 6 March meeting of its national
security cabinet. The US ambassador to Islamabad, Robert Oakley,
sat in on the meeting and seemed confident that victory was assured.
Several of the other mujahideen parties agreed to take part alongside
Hizb, ready to install the interim government in the city when the
battle was won. CIA officers sketched out plans for the rebels to
target the road leading into Jalalabad from Kabul, cutting off the
Najib government’s main supply line. The highway ran in a series
of switchbacks through the Mahipar canyon, past a Soviet-built dam
and on towards the Spin Ghar mountain range, before reaching the
broad valley plain that marked the outskirts of Laghman, where
Mawlawi Sahib Habib-ur-Rahman and the Muslim Youth had staged
their insurrection. The entire route looked ready-made for a number
of pinprick ambushes.19
Hekmatyar entrusted the Hizb militants involved in the offensive
to the command of Fazel Haq Mujahid, the son of a farmer and a
member of one of eastern Afghanistan’s most prominent Pashtun
tribes, the Mohmands. Fazel Haq was a quiet man with a rake-thin
build and modest demeanour. Although he did not like to boast
about his exploits in the jihad, his humility disguised a tenacity that
impressed Hekmatyar. He was a talented insurgent who had been with
the party from its inception, fighting alongside Kashmir Khan early in
the conflict before going on to serve on Hizb’s executive council.
As the other rebel factions advanced from the north, south and
west, Fazel Haq launched his attack from the east. Armed with mortars,
anti-aircraft guns, anti-tank missiles and rocket-propelled grenades,
his men charged forward in waves. When communist troops fled a
garrison on the Samarkhel mountain, twenty miles from the city, Fazel
Haq positioned himself there. The road from Pakistan into Jalalabad
passed directly beneath him and the high vantage point gave him a
view over the surrounding scrubland, towards the paddy fields and
date palms that dotted the frontlines. Kashmir Khan’s forces covered
his troops from the rear while Arab volunteers charged into battle in
their own semi-autonomous platoons.
While the earth around Jalalabad shook with rocket and mortar fire
and acrid smoke choked the city’s skyline, the British foreign secretary
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Geoffrey Howe landed in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. It was 27

March, three weeks into the siege, and before he even managed to get
his bearings a group of scholars handed him a petition condemning the
recent publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic V  erses. No sooner had
he filed away the document than a bomb planted under a tree exploded
outside the British council, shattering the windows of its library. Howe
pressed on with his engagements, apparently heedless of the furies his
government was continuing to nurture. He was only in the country
for two days yet he still found the time to meet the Afghan interim
president Mojaddedi and, ironically, Hekmatyar—the man more
responsible than anyone else for the very radicalism that advocated the
banning of Rushdie’s book and the bombing of the library. As a political
gesture, it was one step short of diplomatic recognition.20
While Howe and Hekmatyar spoke optimistically about the siege,
Fazel Haq was still stationed on the mountain on Jalalabad’s outskirts,
struggling to balance the demands of the ISI with the needs of his men.
The highway from Kabul had been cut off and, talking over a military
radio, he liaised with one of his sub-commanders on the other side of
town, where a team of Hizbis was ready to shoot any planes trying to
break the blockade. Yet no matter how carefully Fazel Haq planned
each move, Jalalabad refused to fall. The regime sent Scud missiles
crashing into Hizb positions; communist soldiers fought for their lives
as terrified civilians fled for Pakistan. On the road east towards the
border, families were strafed by government aircraft or torn to pieces
by misdirected insurgent rockets. Old men piled the bloodied bodies
of their relatives onto wooden carts and pulled them towards safety,
their backs bent double under the strain.
The days turned into weeks; the weeks into months. As Fazel Haq
tried to retreat, he was injured when shrapnel from an air strike pierced
his stomach. The mujahideen launched barrage after barrage of rockets
in their attempt to break the city, but the onslaught only galvanised
the government troops, who smashed through the ambush points on
the road from Kabul. Killing the enemy was not enough; the regime
wanted to ensure that people who supported the insurgents suffered
too. Its planes bombed a village on the edge of Jalalabad that had fallen
to Hizb, killing seven members of one family including a sixteen-year-
old girl. Communist soldiers then moved in and booby trapped the
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 NIGHT LETTERS

bodies of the dead with grenades, ready to kill or maim anyone who
came to retrieve them. In response, relatives tied ropes around the legs
of the corpses and tried to drag them away for burial. Facing defeat,
the Hizb squad near the airport began to run low on supplies, begging
locals for food and searching for the medical equipment necessary
to patch up its dozens of wounded. The most severely injured were
evacuated to Peshawar, where the hospitals were already overflowing
with the flayed and burned detritus of that terrible spring.
A perfect confluence of hubris and betrayal had turned the
mujahideen’s offensive into a disaster. Reared on more than a decade
of guerrilla warfare carried out in predominantly rural areas, where
they were able to draw on the support of sympathetic villagers, the
insurgents of Hizb had no experience of conventional combat. For
guidance in coordinating the offensive they had naively placed their
trust in the ISI, yet Pakistan’s intelligence service was equally ill-
prepared for a campaign that required the prolonged siege of a city,
followed by street fighting, to dislodge a battle-hardened enemy. The
CIA was just as complacent and did not care how many Afghans died
in the doomed operation. Reflecting on the failure of the siege, a
Hizbi survivor complained that the party had lost sight of its humble
origins, abandoning the hit-and-run tactics that had given it so much
success in the past. Many of his colleagues were intent on blaming
Massoud, however. This time their grievance was steeped in more
than unbridled paranoia.
After rejecting the Soviet idea of a power-sharing deal with Najib
the previous summer, Massoud had informed the CIA that he would
aid the siege by blocking the highway that ran from the north to the
capital, cutting off the first leg of the government’s resupply route
into Jalalabad. But as the fighting dragged on, he left the road open,
allowing the regime to break through Hizb’s ambush points and luring
Fazel Haq’s forces into a trap. The Jamiat commander was sceptical
that Jalalabad would fall and he was unwilling to risk his men for a
futile cause. He also knew Hekmatyar would be the main beneficiary
in the unlikely event that the siege succeeded. His strategic gamble
paid off at the cost of thousands of lives to the mujahideen.
The Najib regime was also one step ahead of Hizb throughout
the siege. Ten days before the battle, with Hekmatyar and other
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 BAGHDAD

rebel leaders openly previewing the offensive and boasting of an easy

victory, the president sent one of his relatives, a senior figure in the
KhAD intelligence service, to help organise Jalalabad’s defence. Najib
mobilised his forces under the slogan ‘homeland or death,’ acutely
aware that holding the city was central to the government’s hopes of
surviving into the summer. One night, in the heat of some of the most
intense combat, he personally called his relative at 3am to receive an
update, micro-managing affairs just as he had done when working as
Afghanistan’s torturer-in-chief.
Impressed with his handling of the siege, the Soviets started to think
that he might be able to cling to power after all. As the mujahideen’s
rockets pounded Jalalabad, Najib’s muscle memory kicked in, the
instincts he learned as a street fighter in his student days breathing new
life into the gasping communist regime. Then, as now, he absorbed
blow after blow until his foes tired. He was a throwback to the erudite
thugs and gangsters who ran the old Soviet Union; Moscow couldn’t
help but admire his tenacity and work ethic. That spring of 1989 the
Kremlin sent $300 million worth of food and ammunition to the
Afghan government every month, at least twice the amount of aid the
rebels were receiving from the CIA and Saudi intelligence.21

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EXIT WOUNDS

Osama bin Laden joined the battle for Jalalabad in May. Two months
later the fighting was over and more than 100 of the Arabs under his
command were dead, their fetid bodies strewn in trenches and gullies
on the city’s outskirts, or buried in hastily-dug shallow graves. Bin
Laden regarded the defeat not as a catastrophe but as a valuable lesson
in his quest to emerge from the shadow of the Palestinian scholar
Abdullah Azzam and become a revolutionary in his own right. He
told his men to learn from the mistakes they had witnessed. Taking
his admonition to heart, they began to pay closer attention to the
minutiae of basic soldiering: previously neglected skills such as map
reading, camouflage, logistics and triage became key components of
the jihad they hoped to wage against the secular regimes back home
once the war with the Afghan communists had been won. They taught
themselves how to use heavy machine guns, direct their mortar fire
with precision and evacuate their wounded quickly and safely. Most
importantly of all, though, they learned that time was their greatest
weapon. Rather than rush headlong into battle, as the mujahideen
had done at Jalalabad, they would show patience. In doing so, they
believed that they would find success not only in Afghanistan but on
the world stage.1
For the fanatics who looked to bin Laden for guidance, Islam was
a divine way of life that had existed for 1300 years; it could not be
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erased like a line on a map or an idea conjured up by man. In contrast,

the US was barely 200 years old and the Soviet Union was even
younger. Nation states throughout the Middle East were inventions
of the twentieth century whose populations had strayed from God’s
path. With enough devotion and the right kind of guerrilla tactics,
bin Laden and his lieutenants came to believe that the most powerful
and authoritarian governments on earth could be brought to heel.
An organisation he had recently established would test this theory to
its limits.
At the time of its founding in August 1988, Al-Qaeda was a
small band of nine men who spoke of having vague aspirations to
‘lift the word of God’ and ‘make His religion victorious.’2 But with
the enigmatic, wealthy Saudi at its helm, the group quickly began to
expand its horizons. After the siege of Jalalabad, Hizb’s inclination that
bin Laden may turn out to be a jihadist ‘superman’ gradually began to
seem less like a long shot and more like a brilliant piece of strategic
foresight. Increasingly, it seemed as though he and Hekmatyar shared
the same grandiose aims. Although the Hizb emir and bin Laden still
admired Azzam, they had started to view him as too ideologically
cautious and narrowly focused on Afghanistan. For all his belief in the
necessity of violent jihad, the Palestinian scholar wanted the Arabs in
Peshawar to do their utmost to ease the escalating tensions between
the Afghan mujahideen parties. If the squabbling factions and the
volunteer fighters could establish an Islamic government in Kabul, he
hoped that they would set an example for Muslims everywhere. Bin
Laden, however, had little interest in state building. Aged thirty-one
when Al-Qaeda was established, he regarded Afghanistan as an arena in
which his fighters could get the training and experience they needed to
destabilise secular regimes in the Middle East. In Hekmatyar, he found
a powerful sponsor who could help him succeed.
There were striking similarities between Al-Qaeda and Hizb. Bin
Laden told his followers that he wanted to raise a generation of ‘trained,
obedient and faithful youth’—an aim much like that of Hekmatyar
in the late 1960s.3 Just as Hizb prided itself on the rigid rules and
procedures that sought to control almost every aspect of its fighters’
lives, so Al-Qaeda’s founders sought to build a hierarchy in which
all members would have to obey strict ‘statutes and instructions.’
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 EXIT WOUNDS

Al-Qaeda, too, was split into committees and sections. In theory, its
leadership council had the power to replace bin Laden if he deviated
from its extreme interpretation of Sharia, yet in reality the Saudi—
like Hekmatyar—was untouchable.4 These ideological and structural
parallels soon facilitated practical cooperation between the two groups.
***
As Al-Qaeda took shape, Hizb was busy revamping Hekmatyar’s
security detail following an assassination attempt against him. A bomb
had exploded near his car and, though he survived unscathed, the
incident worried his advisors. His bodyguards had always been drawn
from a band of volunteers from within the party, an uncharacteristically
amateurish set-up. On the recommendation of Hizb’s intelligence
wing, the executive council approved a new system to counter the
growing threats to Hekmatyar’s life. In future, anyone wishing to
guard him needed to have a high school education. They would also
be required to provide character references from well-regarded elders
and mujahideen. Hekmatyar’s chief security officer personally chose
the first batch of successful candidates, telling them, ‘We are giving
you a job that is more important than fighting on the frontlines.’
The recruits gathered at a Hizb office in the Shamshatu township;
they were then driven to Hekmatyar’s home in Peshawar and
introduced to him personally. The most impressive candidate among
them, an ethnic Tajik named Haji Islamuddin, was selected to lead
the new security detail. A brother-in-law of the Muslim Youth activist
Saifuddin Nasratyar, Haji Islamuddin hailed from a family of Hizbis
with impeccable credentials. That he came from Panjshir, the home
of Ahmad Shah Massoud, added to his kudos. He had a unique insight
into the way Massoud acted and thought, giving Hekmatyar a small but
potentially decisive advantage over his old adversary.
Haji Islamuddin quickly organised his team of ten guards, known as
the Support Group. He made them work in split shifts of twenty-five
continuous days and paid them a modest sum that was later increased
when they proved their worth. He also expanded Hekmatyar’s car
pool from three to five vehicles: two ‘soft skin’ Toyota Land Cruisers, a
third, armoured Land Cruiser and two Mitsubishi Pajeros. Each of the
vehicles was equipped with an intercom. The bodyguards only truly
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 NIGHT LETTERS

began to professionalise, however, when they were taken under the

wing of bin Laden’s followers. An ex-Syrian army officer and one of
Al-Qaeda’s founders, Abu Burhan Al-Suri, drilled Haji Islamuddin and
his team at a forty-day training camp in Parachinar, teaching them how
to form impregnable security cordons and how to identify and track
potential assassins. He also schooled them in psychological operations,
strengthening their minds for the next stage of the war. Members of
the Support Group who could not understand his Arabic made do with
watching and learning from his actions.5
The close relationship between Al-Qaeda and Hizb reflected the
high esteem in which Hekmatyar was held among the Arab volunteers in
Peshawar. Most of the foreign fighters and ideologues were unequivocal
in their support for him, whether or not they were members of bin
Laden’s organisation. Chief among them was Ayman al-Zawahiri, a
bespectacled Egyptian doctor who had first come to Peshawar in 1980
to work as an Islamist activist and volunteer surgeon treating injured
Afghan refugees. Nine years later, he was one of the most divisive Arab
extremists in the city and held sway over an Egyptian militant group,
Al-Jihad. Zawahiri would go on to become bin Laden’s deputy but for
now he was content to sow discord among his rivals and castigate the
more moderate Afghan mujahideen. He was one of Hekmatyar’s most
vocal backers.6
Across the Middle East there was no shortage of potential new
recruits to Hizb’s and Al-Qaeda’s cause. Some were political radicals,
others petty criminals and drifters in search of anything that could
give their lives meaning. Even after the Russian withdrawal, travelling
to Peshawar to wage jihad was as easy as going on holiday, with few
questions asked of volunteers who turned up at Pakistani diplomatic
missions in their home countries and requested a visa. Once in
Peshawar, they had no trouble finding their fellow Arabs. Passers-by
would rush up to them ‘like bees to honey,’7 offering to take them to
recruiting centres for a pocket full of change, recalled one Jordanian
militant. Many of the recruits ended up gathering at the hospital where
Zawahiri worked before being shuttled off to boot camps. Peshawar
was the only place in the world where this was possible: Islamists from
countries as diverse as Egypt, China and Myanmar could openly come
together to theorise, train and fight.
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 EXIT WOUNDS

Across the border, in south-east Afghanistan, Hizb now ran a vast

new logistics hub for foreign militants, named in honour of one of its
local commanders, Asadullah Jihadwal. The base served as both a way
station and training camp for the party’s growing army of international
extremists. While bin Laden rented land there and regarded it as a safe
location to drill some of his own fighters, other volunteers with their
own distinct causes and groups came and went, all of them owing an
ideological debt to Hizb. Around eighty foreign militants arrived at
Jihadwal each evening from Peshawar, most of them destined to be
shuttled off soon afterwards to fight on the front lines deeper inside
Afghanistan. The Hizbis at Jihadwal had the relatively simple task of
organising their transportation and ensuring that they were equipped
with the right weapons. Not everyone transitioned in and out of the
camp quite so quickly, though. With the Soviet Union on the brink
of collapse, Hizb knew there was a once-in-a-generation opportunity
to fan the flames of Islamism in Central Asia. At Jihadwal it trained
increasing numbers of recruits from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, before
smuggling them back to their own countries. Meanwhile, militants
from a Kashmiri separatist group named in tribute to Hekmatyar’s
party, Hizb-ul Mujahideen, established a semi-permanent presence at
the camp as they prepared to wage war against India.8
Hekmatyar was their fountainhead. In using the teachings of
writers like Sayyid Qutb to create a vanguard of mujahideen capable
of defeating the Soviets in battle, he had changed the parameters of
what it meant to be an Islamist. His influence and confidence were
contagious. Hekmatyar had first turned to takfir, the ancient but rarely
used practice of excommunication, as a university student, when he
co-authored the night letter warning that Layeq ‘does not count as a
Muslim anymore.’ Now, twenty years later, takfir flourished in mosques
and radical study groups throughout the Pakistan borderlands, with the
Arab offspring of the ‘Mother Party’ adopting it to target their enemies.
Hekmatyar’s cocksure intolerance was on display at a press
conference in the spring of 1989, when a Western journalist asked
for his opinion on the foreign fighters heading into Afghanistan, often
under his leadership. ‘It’s none of your business and we won’t accept
anyone interfering in our internal affairs,’ he said. ‘We are against the
Western organisations that spy on us and the Christian organisations
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 NIGHT LETTERS

that come here under a humanitarian pretext.’9 Away from the public
eye, he was even more forthright, encouraging his Arab protégés to
view Ahmad Shah Massoud as part of this ill-intentioned, un-Islamic
nexus. Still smarting from the defeat at Jalalabad and the brutal
purge that Massoud had carried out against Hizb fighters in northern
Afghanistan, Hekmatyar had logical strategic reasons to want his rival
sidelined. Still, there was a primeval, irrational quality to his rage that
unnerved some of his closest confidants. At times it felt like his cold
demeanour was an artificial veneer he used to conceal the broiling fury
within. He did not just regard Massoud as an untrustworthy mujahid,
he viewed him as a symbol of all that was wrong with Islam in the
late twentieth century. In the language of the Qur’an, he thought
of Massoud as one of the munafiqun—a person who would give the
appearance of being a Muslim yet ‘used their oaths as a cover and so
barred others from God’s way.’10
Just prior to the Soviet’s withdrawal, the Arabs in Peshawar had
established a takfiri court to try Massoud in absentia for a range of alleged
offences, from sexual impropriety with French female aid workers to
banning Sharia in areas under his jurisdiction. The claims, which had
Hekmatyar’s tacit support, amounted to an accusation of apostasy and
were written up in a ten-page statement distributed across the city. A
total of twenty-one Arabs from Algeria, Egypt and Yemen supported
the case against Massoud and just two defended him. Bin Laden and a
pro-Hekmatyar Yemeni cleric Abdul Majeed Zindani were among the
judges. In the end, with Abdullah Azzam acting as a peacemaker and
pleading for clemency, the court failed to find sufficient evidence to pass
a definitive verdict. The Arabs agreed that they would express neither
condemnation nor support for Massoud, though privately many were
angry that he had escaped punishment. Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, a Syrian
militant who would go on to become one of the world’s foremost jihadist
ideologues, was among those who sided with the Hekmatyar-backed
prosecution. He claimed that a fact-finding team sent to the north of
Afghanistan to investigate the case had ‘delivered a damning indictment
of Massoud’s conduct’ to the court. ‘But for sentimental reasons and a
desire not to sully the reputation of the jihad,’ Azzam chose to reject the
testimony. The indecisive nature of the verdict satisfied no one.11
***
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For years Abdullah Azzam had walked a tightrope between the rival
mujahideen factions, naturally gravitating towards Hizb but wary of
expressing outright support for the party ahead of the other groups.With
a civil war looming between Hekmatyar and Massoud, he realised that
he could no longer equivocate. In late September 1988, as the salacious
allegations swirled around Peshawar, he decided to meet Massoud for
the first time. At the urging of the Jamiat leader Rabbani, Azzam hiked
to Takhar in northern Afghanistan, where Massoud greeted him on
horseback. Switching to a jeep, they drove deep into the mountains until
they reached a house belonging to Massoud’s father-in-law, where they
settled in for the night. The next morning, 1 October, they began an
intense conversation that would stretch over several days. No subject
was off limits. Massoud talked about his upbringing in Panjshir and
portrayed himself as someone who had been close to the MuslimYouth’s
inner circle, exaggerating the extent of his friendship with Engineer
Habib-ur-Rahman. He was unrelenting in his criticisms of Hekmatyar,
whom he depicted as venal and dishonest, bordering on treacherous.
The more they talked, the more Massoud and Azzam found common
ground in their socially conservative interpretations of Islam and their
desire to see the mujahideen push for a military victory over Najib.12
Massoud’s supporters would later cite this meeting as evidence
that Azzam had turned decisively against Hekmatyar, but the truth
was not so simple. Azzam’s priority was the mujahideen’s victory and,
as an outsider, he carried none of the emotional baggage that dated
back to Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman’s death and the Jan Mohammed
spying case. His sole concern was ensuring that Afghanistan became a
shining example for mujahideen across the world; a civil war between
Hekmatyar and Massoud risked destroying everything for which he
had worked. Hekmatyar was suspicious of Azzam’s improving relations
with Massoud but did not want to alienate the Palestinian, whose
influence on the jihad had been profound. For all bin Laden’s promise,
Hekmatyar knew that the Al-Qaeda leader was still relatively raw. In
contrast, Azzam was a well-educated scholar who had spent much of his
life cultivating Islamist contacts across the Muslim world. Hekmatyar
needed both men if he was to make good on building his empire. Not
to be outdone by Massoud, in the summer of 1989 he invited Azzam
on a tour of eastern and central Afghan provinces.
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 NIGHT LETTERS

Their starting point was Hizb’s base at Spin-e Shiga, where bin
Laden had stayed earlier in the war. Setting out in dozens of heavily-
armed Toyota pick-up trucks and jeeps, they drove west towards
Logar, a province now almost entirely under Hekmatyar’s control.
They were accompanied by Haji Islamuddin, head of the Al-Qaeda-
trained Support Group, armed with twenty of the US-supplied
surface-to-air Stinger missiles and a portable multiple rocket launcher.
They were backed by 100 fighters from Haji Abubakr’s Army of
Sacrifice. Passing burnt-out Soviet tanks and the graves of martyrs,
they headed deeper into Afghanistan, stopping along the way to talk
to mujahideen commanders and villagers. As they neared the province
of Wardak, a group of vehicles sped towards them in the shimmering
heat. The bodyguards tensed, unsure what to make of it; then, when
the convoy got closer, they noticed some of their Arab friends. By
sheer coincidence, bin Laden had chosen the first summer after the
Soviet withdrawal to travel into Afghanistan on his own fact-finding
mission. He greeted them warmly and they chatted for ten minutes in
broad daylight, just thirty miles from Kabul, never once thinking that
they were an easy target for the communist regime. Since the Soviet
withdrawal they had all stopped worrying about air strikes.
By the time Hekmatyar and Azzam reached Wardak, Abubakr had
left them for another mission, confident that the Support Group
would keep them safe. Rolling into the district of Chak, their convoy
was greeted by the Hizb commander Toran Amanullah and thousands
of waiting supporters, with cars and bicycles parked along the dirt
road to form makeshift barriers. Children burst into nasheeds, the a
cappella paeans of love and sacrifice that mujahideen enjoyed listening
to instead of music; elders propped themselves up on walking sticks
chanting ‘God is greatest’ and ‘Long live Hekmatyar.’ It was the first
time that most of Chak’s residents had seen the Hizb emir in the flesh
and they greeted him like a jihadist rock star. When the cheers died
down, Azzam gave a speech to the crowd, which Hekmatyar translated
into Pashto, his Arabic now fluent after years of self-disciplined
study. He had yearned to be among his people again and he savoured
their devotion.
Hekmatyar and Azzam pushed through the crowd and returned
to their convoy, driving north to Maidan Shahr on the outskirts of
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Kabul. It was late now and strangely quiet after the excitement of the
morning and afternoon. They left their vehicles and began to walk,
relying on the stars to light their way. Haji Islamuddin and the Support
Group kept watch, peering into the darkness for any signs of trouble.
Once they were deep in Toran Amanullah’s territory, they gradually
began to relax, but just as they thought they were safe, government jets
tore through the sky and explosions erupted all around them. Flames
lit the night as they all ran for cover before the jets could return.
Miraculously, no one was hurt.
Hekmatyar and Azzam slogged onwards, using winding mountain
trails to reach Ghorband in Parwan province. Touring villages, they
canvassed opinion among local mujahideen commanders on whether
Hizb should prepare to attack Kabul in a major ground offensive, or
instigate a military coup inside the Najib regime. A decisive battle
for the city was imminent, they said. Wherever they went, they were
greeted with flowers, prayer and song. Hekmatyar played to the gallery:
at a meeting of 2,000 supporters, he announced that he would change
the name of one local area from Sorkh-e Parsa, Dari for ‘Red Persian,’
to Sabz-e Parsa, ‘Green Persian,’ replacing a colour associated with
communism with a colour associated with Islam. The crowd roared
its approval.
The Hizbis who accompanied Hekmatyar to Ghorband had rarely
seen him looking so happy. At one point he wandered off into the
mountains with Azzam and Haji Islamuddin and shot a Stinger missile
into the air as if it were a firework. A family of Hizbis gave him a rare
copy of the Qur’an once owned by Nadir Shah, father and predecessor
to king Zahir Shah, the MuslimYouth’s foe.The book had huge historical
significance: in 1929, Nadir had been overthrown by the Islamist bandit
Habibullah Kalakani, before regaining power less than ten months later.
He arrested Kalakani and gave him the same Qur’an, inscribed with
a handwritten pledge to spare his life, only to renege on his promise
soon afterwards and order the rebel’s execution. To Hekmatyar, the
book symbolised Afghanistan’s tradition of Islamist resistance.
The Hizb emir and Azzam moved east to Jabal-e Saraj, a small
riverside town at the southern entrance to Panjshir, where they met
Engineer Tareq, the commander who had clashed with Massoud earlier
in the war. All the while, Hekmatyar kept abreast of developments
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in the country via a three-man communications team equipped with

a military radio. He was less worried about the communist regime
than he was about Massoud. Vanquishing Najib would count for little
if his old enemy dominated any future mujahideen government. Azzam
had little time for these petty jealousies and continued to exhibit no
overt favouritism towards either man. At one point, he entered into an
animated discussion with an aide of Hekmatyar’s about the hatred Hizbis
felt for Massoud. The takfiri trial in Peshawar had rattled Azzam and he
knew it would not be the end of the matter. Pashtuns were famous
for pursuing blood feuds over generations, handing their grievances
down like family heirlooms, and Hekmatyar nursed his grudges with
particular relish. The aide told Azzam that Massoud could not be
trusted because he was working as a spy for the French government—
another accusation that had become commonplace among the fanatics
in Peshawar. Azzam tried his best to think of an apposite response; he
settled on comparing Massoud to pork, a food that is prohibited in
Islam unless essential to survival. ‘Please eat this pork—it’s necessary,’
he said. ‘We need to bring these two men together; without Hekmatyar
and Massoud there will be no victory over the Najib government.’
Later that same day, after more than two weeks travelling through
the country together,Azzam finally persuaded Hekmatyar to hold peace
talks with his great rival. The Hizb emir agreed reluctantly, saying that
Massoud would have to come to him for the negotiations rather than
vice versa, but it was still a major concession from Hekmatyar, who
rarely gave ground on anything. The next morning he and Azzam sat
under a tree, discussing exactly how the reconciliation process would
work, when Hekmatyar’s aide rushed up with an urgent message
from the radio team. Several of Massoud’s top commanders had been
killed in an ambush in the north of the country, he said, and Hizb
was being blamed. In that brief moment, Hekmatyar’s face seemed to
darken with shock and anger. He ordered the aide to find out more.
Azzam was also stunned, unable to believe what he had just heard.
Minutes earlier he thought he had made a seismic breakthrough; now
he struggled to hold back tears, his hopes of reconciling Hekmatyar
and Massoud shattered.13
***

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 EXIT WOUNDS

In the days that followed, senior figures from all the mujahideen
parties tried to piece together exactly what had really happened in
the north. After years of steadily-worsening internecine conflict, the
rivalry between Hizb and Jamiat had reached a tipping point. They
all knew this latest crisis had the potential to escalate into a full-
blown civil war. It quickly transpired that on 4 July, Massoud had
summoned dozens of his commanders and a few men from smaller
parties to Takhar, near the Soviet border, to discuss a new guerrilla
campaign against the Najib regime. Following the defeat at Jalalabad
which he had cleverly helped facilitate, Massoud wanted to show that
he could succeed where Hekmatyar and Hizb had failed. The Takhar
meeting lasted five days, then a group of the commanders left for
home in three convoys. Precisely what happened next would never
be resolved. Massoud and his lieutenants claimed that the departing
group was ambushed at 3pm on 9 July in the Tangi Farkhar gorge
after being promised safe passage by the Hizbi who controlled the
area. According to this version of events, a barrage of heavy machine
gun fire rattled into the lead convoy. As one Jamiati hauled himself
from his jeep and staggered towards safety, he was shot dead. When
the two other convoys entered the gorge that evening, they were also
ambushed. Some of the passengers were killed immediately and others
were taken hostage. Jamiat claimed that a total of thirty men were
killed within forty-eight hours—most of them executed at point blank
range. The bodies were then dumped by the roadside, with some of
them displaying signs of mutilation.14
Massoud wanted to head straight to the scene but was persuaded
otherwise, in case he was being lured into a trap. It took another ten
days for news of the bloodshed to reach Peshawar. When it did, two
of Massoud’s brothers rushed to the house of the US consul, bursting
in at 2am shouting that a massacre had taken place and Hekmatyar
was to blame. A fortnight later one of Jamiat’s newspapers repeated
the accusation: ‘Without encouragement by [the] Hizb leadership in
Peshawar this incident could not have happened,’ the article said. It
implied that the killings were linked to the takfiri trial, which was part
of an ‘extensive propaganda campaign’ run by Hizb in conjunction
with ‘some Arab volunteers who did not like Massoud because of
his independent policies.’ The US embassy in Pakistan called for an
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 NIGHT LETTERS

urgent inquiry, as did Don Ritter, a Republican politician in charge

of a congressional task force on Afghanistan. Sibghatullah Mojaddedi,
the mujahideen’s interim president, held Hekmatyar responsible and
set about assembling a tribunal to investigate the case. He appointed
Azzam to its board.15
Confronted with this firestorm of criticism, the Hizb leadership
knew it could neither remain silent—as it had over the assassinations
of writers and opposition activists in Peshawar—or issue a curt
denial and return to business as usual. Hekmatyar had been with
Azzam at the time of the ambush and even some of his critics doubted
that he would have sanctioned such a clumsy operation. The Hizb
emir responded by saying one of his senior commanders had indeed
carried out the attack; he named a notoriously intractable rebel,
Sayed Jamal, as the culprit but denied that he had been acting on his
orders, or the instructions of anyone else in the party leadership.
Hekmatyar said the true number of dead was eleven, not thirty.16
This was as close as he ever got to apologising for anything. The
Hizb emir criticised the US for drawing unnecessary attention to the
killings, claiming that it was spreading ‘poisonous propaganda.’ He
also said Massoud’s recent tactics of ‘occupation and expansion’ in
the north of Afghanistan had provoked the ambush. When a Jamiat
official visited him in Peshawar, asking that Sayed Jamal be brought
to justice, Hekmatyar replied that Massoud should also come. ‘We
will put them both on trial because before this incident Massoud was
killing our people,’ he said.17
Back in Takhar, Massoud’s forces began to sweep the area near
Sayed Jamal’s headquarters, unwilling to wait for Mojaddedi’s
committee and the US government to take decisive action. As they
closed in on their target, they blocked a Hizb search team sent to find
and safeguard him. On 18 August, Massoud’s men finally rousted the
fugitive commander: dirty, emaciated and bleeding from a leg wound.
They took him away to be interrogated. That same day Massoud made
it clear to a group of Western journalists that he held Hekmatyar
personally responsible for the bloodshed. ‘Hekmatyar cannot tolerate
his rivals,’ he told them. ‘Hizb does not have any programme for the
defeat of the Kabul regime. He [Hekmatyar] opposes those people
who do have a programme, and creates problems for them. Hizb was
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 EXIT WOUNDS

fully aware of the purpose of our meeting in Farkhar and that it would
end the present stalemate on the battlefield. This was the reason for
setting the ambush.’18
***
If there was a faint chance of reconciliation between Hekmatyar and
Massoud before the bloodshed in Takhar, the ambush and reprisals
dealt it a near-fatal blow. But Azzam refused to give up hope. As
soon as he heard about the attack, he left Hekmatyar and travelled
to see Massoud for a second time, riding on horseback from Parwan
to  Takhar. He asked him to ‘leave Sayed Jamal alone at this critical
moment’ and concentrate on trying to capture a city from the Afghan
communist government. Massoud refused, saying that he was under
immense pressure from his own supporters to bring Sayed Jamal and
the other culprits to justice. His answer pained Azzam, who would
go on to openly break with Jamiat’s version of events. Rather than
hold Hekmatyar responsible for the ambush in Takhar, he blamed
Sayed Jamal’s brother, whom he described as a ‘recognised professional
criminal.’ Like Hekmatyar, he disputed the death toll given by Jamiat,
claiming that fewer than fifteen people were killed. This did not,
though, alter his growing respect for Massoud. Despite everything, he
was still unwilling to take sides.19
The Afghans who got to know Azzam during the nine years he
spent rallying support for the anti-Soviet resistance admired his fair-
mindedness. A firm believer in violent global jihad, he nevertheless
served as a calming influence on the short-fused and egotistical leaders
of the Afghan mujahideen. With the Russians defeated, his priority was
to make peace between Hekmatyar and Massoud, and he believed he
could achieve that even after the fateful ambush. His optimism was not
entirely unfounded. In a rare moment of civility, Hekmatyar sent Jan
Baz Sarfaraz, Hizb’s jihadi envoy and its main link to Azzam’s Services
Bureau, to meet Massoud in Chitral, northwest Pakistan. Sarfaraz and
Massoud established an easy rapport and met again at the house of the
Jamiat leader Rabbani in Peshawar. Several rounds of talks later, Hizb
and Jamiat agreed to open an office to initiate formal negotiations to
end their rivalry. Azzam helped finance the project. Bin Laden also
contributed cash in an attempt to ensure that Hekmatyar’s interests
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 NIGHT LETTERS

were well represented. A Hekmatyar-Massoud reconciliation once

again seemed a possibility, albeit slim.20
Before the office really had time to make an impact, however,
Azzam was assassinated. On the morning of 24 November 1989,
he and two of his sons, Mohammed and Ibrahim, were driving to a
mosque in Peshawar when a bomb hidden in a culvert ripped their car
in half, killing all of them instantly. Mohammed’s body was flung into a
tree; Ibrahim was torn apart, his hands landing on one side of the street
while his legs dangled from a set of overhead cables; Azzam’s lifeless
body remained strangely intact, leading his supporters to speculate that
God had intervened to protect him from the full force of the blast.21
The assassination sent shockwaves through Peshawar and
hammered a final nail into the coffin of Hizb-Jamiat relations. Azzam’s
more extreme contemporaries would now decide the future direction
of the international jihad. Some mujahideen blamed the Afghan
communist regime for his murder, while the Palestinian ambassador
to Pakistan implicated Israel. The list of potential suspects grew to
include the CIA, the KGB and ISI, all of whom had good reasons to
want a radical international Islamist dead. Several non-state actors
also found themselves under suspicion. A few people suspected Yasser
Arafat and the PLO. Others whispered that bin Laden or Zawahiri
were responsible. Hekmatyar’s name was inevitably added to the list
of potential culprits. Although he did not attend Azzam’s funeral,22
he always denied any involvement in the assassination and seemed
genuinely upset at his friend’s death. A number of investigations were
launched to find the killers, only to peter out with no result.
In Azzam’s absence, Massoud and Hekmatyar resumed their
hostilities. On 24 December 1989, exactly a month after the
assassination, the pent-up tension over the Takhar ambush erupted.
Ignoring pleas for mercy even from some of his allies, Massoud
convened a makeshift trial in which a group of clerics sentenced the
Hizb commander Sayed Jamal, his brother and two accomplices to
death. They were immediately hanged, with their bodies left swinging
in Takhar’s central market for days afterwards. The message to
Hekmatyar was clear.

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 15

‘THE CENTURY OF ISLAM’

On 27 February 1990, Hekmatyar addressed a huge rally in Hayatabad,

on the southwest outskirts of Peshawar. By turns eloquent and
menacing, hopeful and vindictive, humble and arrogant, he was at
the peak of his powers. ‘This is the time for condemned nations to
seek their freedom,’ he proclaimed. ‘God willing, this will be the
century of Islam…one after another Islamic movements will form
Islamic governments in their own lands.’ Before the rally he had heard
that more than 150,000 people might attend and, although fewer
than that turned up, the crowd stretched out as far as he could see.
Standing on a podium, he declared that Hizb-e Islami would stick to its
principles, even it meant facing ‘the enmity of the world.’ He boasted
that, inspired by the example of the Afghan mujahideen, Muslims in
Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan were pushing for independence,
causing the Soviet Union to break apart. The people of Kashmir were
also rising up and they too would claim their freedom.
Hekmatyar railed against America and the Soviet Union, whom
he accused of conspiring together to restore the monarchy to power
in Kabul. ‘As Russia was disgracefully defeated, so Washington will
face the same fate,’ he said. It was clear for everyone to see that
Hizb’s mujahideen rivals had been wrong to befriend the US. ‘A
communist government is more preferable for America than an
Islamic government,’ he said. Hekmatyar had recently quit his post
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 NIGHT LETTERS

as foreign minister in the mujahideen’s interim administration and he

now mocked it as an irrelevance. His rival leaders were ‘lecherous and
debauched,’ and ignored the wishes of ‘poor and oppressed’ Afghans.
He called for an election in areas liberated from the Najib regime,
certain that the nation wanted to be ruled by Hizb. ‘In each house
there are orphans and widows. They did not surrender to the enemy;
the enemy was not able to deceive them; the enemy was not able to
scare them; the enemy was not able to buy them,’ he said. A steady
drumbeat of rain accompanied his closing remarks: ‘Let’s once again
promise almighty God that we will continue our armed Islamic jihad
until Afghanistan is freed and the infidel government falls from the
hands of the KGB, and an Islamic government is established by the
hands of the mujahideen.’1
That same winter, a new batch of Hizb night letters appeared
across Peshawar. They ordered Afghan women working in schools
and hospitals, or employed by Western aid organisations, to quit
their jobs, and threatened anyone who opposed the continuation of
the jihad. Meanwhile, an Afghan journalist known for his sympathetic
coverage of the former king, Zahir Shah, vanished without a trace after
becoming embroiled in a heated argument with one of Hekmatyar’s
aides.2 Reeling from the brutal retribution meted out by Massoud’s
forces in Takhar, Hizb could have paused in its violent quest to seize
power and taken time to reflect on the dangers of igniting a full-blown
civil war. Instead, it went on the offensive.
***
After consulting the Palestinian scholar Abdullah Azzam during his
tour of Afghanistan the previous summer, Hekmatyar pressed ahead
with his plan to foment a coup inside the Najib regime. Rumours of
the plot quickly begun to circulate, however, and three months before
the Hayatabad speech Najib ordered the arrest of 127 military officers
suspected of sedition. Hekmatyar was undeterred; since the Soviet
withdrawal, the old divisions between the Khalq and Parcham factions
of the communist party had resurfaced and the Hizb leader was intent
on exploiting them. His key link inside the regime was Asif Shoor, an
officer and former classmate of his at the military academy in Kabul.
They exchanged messages to gauge each other’s intentions via the Hizb
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 'THE CENTURY OF ISLAM'

commander General Muzaferuddin, who led the mutiny of communist

forces in Zabul years earlier. Shoor then sent an intermediary to meet
Hekmatyar, confirming that he was interested in launching a coup.
They agreed that the operation would be communist-led. Hekmatyar
was wary about offering practical support, but promised that Hizb
would publicly back the coup if it paved the way for an interim Islamic
government, followed by elections. Shoor enlisted the help of his
fellow Khalqi, the defence minister Shahnawaz Tanai, one of the few
people in government with a proven track record of standing up to the
Parchami Najib.3
Trained in the Soviet Union, Tanai was a highly decorated soldier
who had led the commando forces that stormed the presidential
palace in the communist revolution of 1978. Known for his extreme
discipline, he had gone on to fight up close against the mujahideen in
some of the toughest battles of the Soviet occupation. Tanai had no
love for the Islamists in Hizb but regarded Najib as nothing more than
a gangster. The president’s thuggish brand of political populism was
anathema to Tanai’s strict military upbringing and he had been a thorn
in Najib’s side for months, openly clashing with him on policy issues.
He had no doubt that the coup would succeed.
Tanai and Shoor rushed through the operation on 6 March 1990,
just as their co-conspirators were due to go on trial. The seditious
defence minister established his command centre at Darulaman in
the southwest of town. As fighter jets streaked over Kabul, bombing
the grounds of the presidential palace, Sulaiman Layeq hurried to the
scene only to find Najib sitting in his office, smiling as gunfire erupted
outside and sirens blared in the distance. ‘If a bomb is going to kill us,
what’s the point in running?’ the president asked. Layeq persuaded
Najib to take refuge in an underground shelter before being evacuated
to a secret bunker.4
Although the fighting lasted for two days, Najib seemed to know
from the start that the regime was not going to fall. Most of the plotters
had been arrested beforehand and those who remained at large were
unable to persuade enough of their comrades to rise up against him.
Shoor was killed by the regime’s forces on the southern outskirts of
the city. Tanai escaped to the air base at Bagram, north of Kabul, where
he boarded a helicopter destined for Pakistan. Soon after taking off,
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 NIGHT LETTERS

the helicopter was hit by gunfire from mujahideen who routinely

took pot shots at passing aircraft. Lurching and bumping onwards, it
continued to the border, narrowly avoiding another attempt to shoot
it down, this time when a rocket whizzed past the cockpit. When the
helicopter safely reached the frontier, a squad of Pakistani F-16 fighter
jets escorted it into land at Jamrud, near the Khyber Pass.
Hekmatyar wanted to see Tanai immediately but the renegade
defence minister was exhausted and asked to meet the next morning
instead. Convinced there was still a chance the coup might succeed,
the Hizb emir refused to let the matter lie. He learned that Tanai had
been taken under the protection of the Pakistan government and at
1am that night his son-in-law and Hizb party secretary, Ghairat Baheer,
telephoned Mirza Aslam Beg, Pakistan’s chief of army staff. Baheer told
Beg that Hekmatyar wanted Tanai to return to Afghanistan to rally the
anti-Najib forces in Kabul. ‘Please, tell him that he should not expect
everyone to be like himself,’ Beg replied. ‘This man is very scared
and needs to rest for a few days.’ A week after the coup Tanai finally
arrived at a Hizb base in Logar, deep inside Afghanistan, escorted into
the camp in a truck guarded by Hekmatyar’s fighters. Still wearing his
government-issue uniform, he tried to sound defiant: ‘With the help
of the mujahideen, the struggle against the regime is continuing,’ he
declared. In reality, he knew it was a lost cause.5
Hekmatyar was phlegmatic about the disastrous outcome, apparently
content to have at least stirred up trouble within the Afghan army. It
was the fourth time since his days in the MuslimYouth that he had tried
and failed to stage a coup. The US embassy in Pakistan described the
partnership between Hekmatyar and Tanai as a ‘step towards peace,’
even as the CIA reported that the putsch attempt was funded by the
still relatively unknown Osama bin Laden—a claim denied by Tanai.
Najib, meanwhile, accused Hekmatyar of being prepared to commit
genocide in the name of establishing a radical Islamist state.6
The coup’s failure was not simply a matter of Hizb overreach.
Najib’s continued survival was in no small part due to Hekmatyar’s
great rival Massoud. Once again, just as during the mujahideen’s
siege of Jalalabad, he had stepped in to prop up the regime. ‘The
Tanai coup d’état was not defeated by Najib, but by our people in the
army,’ Massoud later bragged.7 This was not a last-minute decision or
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 'THE CENTURY OF ISLAM'

an accident of circumstance, but the culmination of years of inter-

mujahideen feuding and skilful intelligence work, much of it subtly
encouraged by the government. In the build-up to the putsch attempt,
Najib had confided in friends that he was not worried about Massoud
trying to topple him; his sole concern was Hekmatyar. Throughout
his presidency he had been running a cleverly orchestrated campaign
to pit the two rivals against each other and his comments were the
latest salvo in a strategy designed to antagonise the one man he feared,
Hekmatyar. They also hinted at a deeper truth.
Prior to appointing Tanai as defence minister, Najib made the
extraordinary decision to offer the position to Massoud, keeping
it open for two months in an apparent gesture of reconciliation.
Although the ‘Lion of Panjshir’ had no interest in joining the regime,
he did have increasingly frequent backchannel contacts with senior
communist officials. Massoud now regarded Hizb and its Pakistani
sponsors, rather than the government, as his main enemy, and
he was prepared to do anything to stop Hekmatyar establishing a
radical Islamic state, including cooperating with Najib. Mujahideen
colleagues recalled him ordering sleeper cells he had built inside
the regime not to come to Hizb’s aid during the putsch. ‘We don’t
want to help the ISI or Hekmatyar,’ he told his intelligence chief.
Another senior Jamiati claimed that Tanai initially wanted to work
with Massoud rather than Hekmatyar in trying to overthrow the
regime. Massoud consulted with the party leadership then turned
the offer down, knowing that Hekmatyar would be less discerning. If
the whole operation was indeed part of an elaborate trap to damage
Hizb, it worked.8
The coup’s failure triggered the first signs of open dissent within
the party since Mohammed Amin Weqad had tried to oust Hekmatyar
as leader years earlier. Under Hizb’s internal protocols, all major
decisions were subject to consultation among senior party members.
No one, including the overall emir, was meant to act unilaterally.
Hekmatyar therefore faced intense criticism from colleagues who
were disgusted at his willingness to support a coup attempt by the
very communists they had devoted their lives to fighting. He had talked
to a few friends and colleagues about the plan, without opening up the
discussion for wider debate. Many Hizbis only found out about it via
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 NIGHT LETTERS

news bulletins on the radio. At the offices of the Shahadat newspaper

in Peshawar, a letter arrived from Hizb’s head of intelligence, Haji
Ehsanullah, confirming that the coup was taking place with the party’s
agreement.9 While some Hizbis were willing to topple the regime by
any means necessary, others were furious. No matter how Hekmatyar
tried to rationalise his actions in the months and years that followed,
they found his reasoning facile and insincere. It was the first time they
began to question his judgement.
As a direct result of this ill feeling, seventeen members of Hizb’s
executive council—a majority of its now streamlined shadow cabinet—
resigned from their posts. Among them was Abdul Basir, Engineer
Habib-ur-Rahman’s high school friend, and Dr Hanif, the military chief
who claimed lineage to the Prophet Mohammed. Mohammed Zaman
Muzamil, a lifelong Hizbi who had accompanied Hekmatyar on his trip
to Turkey, also quit. Several of the executive council members first
heard rumours about the coup two weeks before it began and warned
Hekmatyar not to go ahead. When he ignored their wishes and pressed
on regardless, they were stunned. In the months that followed, they
continually urged the Hizb emir to unite with the other mujahideen
parties, but Hekmatyar refused. Eventually, their patience snapped. At
a meeting in Hayatabad, they agreed to resign in protest at Hekmatyar’s
behaviour. ‘He destroyed himself and us,’ recalled Muzamil. Looking
back in years to come, many Hizbis came to regard it as the moment
their party’s spine was broken.10
***
One person Hekmatyar could still count on was Kashmir Khan, who
remained a firm believer in the righteousness of Hizb’s endless jihad
and the ability of its leader to make radical Islam a global force. Since
he first took up arms against the Daoud regime in 1975, his reputation
had grown exponentially. He was now one of the most famous rebel
commanders in Afghanistan, revered as much for his asceticism as his
courage in battle. While other senior Hizbis embraced the relative
comforts of their lives in Peshawar, Kashmir Khan spent most of
his time in Kunar, roaming the mountains. He wore a pakol hat and
shalwar kameez, with high-top trainers and a Russian military belt.
His favourite weapons were the Kalashnikov and the PKM machine
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 'THE CENTURY OF ISLAM'

gun that he lugged around with him as he bounded through the pine
forests. When he wasn’t fighting communists, he liked to relax by
playing volleyball with his small team of bodyguards.11
By 1991, however, the situation in Kunar was again starting to
worry him. The jihad was becoming a war between Muslims, in which
friends killed friends and brothers killed brothers. The Qur’an’s
repeated injunctions against internal strife, or fitna, had been
replaced by radical doctrines that encouraged excommunication and
fratricide. In the north and around Kabul, Hizbis fought Massoud’s
troops for the right to lead the insurgency, but in Kunar they faced an
opponent who had the potential to cause them just as much trouble.
There, in Kashmir Khan’s stronghold, a friend and co-founder of the
party had gone rogue and established his own fiefdom, drawing in the
kind of Pashtun and Arab fighters who had previously looked to Hizb
for inspiration.
Raised in Pakistani seminaries, when he was known as Mohammed
Hussein, Jamil-ur-Rahman had worked as an intermediary between
the MuslimYouth and an older generation of scholars in Kunar. He was
something of a mentor to Kashmir Khan, who admired his religious
knowledge and the depth of his devotion. After Daoud’s forces caught
Jamil-ur-Rahman’s nephews smuggling night letters into Afghanistan,
alerting Hizb to a possible spy network in its ranks, he was among the
mujahideen who sat transfixed as Jan Mohammed’s taped confession
was played to them at a hotel in Peshawar. He attended Hizb’s founding
meeting in June 1976 and later became its provincial emir in Kunar.12
Three years later, when Hizb captured the communist garrison at Asmar,
he and Kashmir Khan hosted a TV documentary crew to publicise their
success. They looked friendly and relaxed in their mountain hideout,
radiating a confidence and warmth not normally associated with
Hizb. Jamil-ur-Rahman talked with a gentle persuasiveness about how
the jihad would free Afghans from man-made laws.13 It was only as
more financial aid poured in from the US and Saudi Arabia, and the
mujahideen’s leaders argued over the spoils, that he decided his old
friends were veering from God’s path. Jamil-ur-Rahman adhered to
the austere Salafi strain of Islam, which seeks to return the faith to its
origins in the seventh century and shuns scholarly attempts to adapt
it to the modern world. In 1980 he left Hizb to form a new militant
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 NIGHT LETTERS

organisation, Jama’at al-Da’wa ila al-Qur’an wal-Sunnah (Society for the

Call to the Qur’an and Sunnah).14
Lacking official support from the Pakistani government, it took
time for Jamil-ur-Rahman’s group to develop. But foreign fighters
and Saudi money gradually began to swell its ranks, threatening Hizb’s
monopoly on the Arab volunteers flooding into the region. When
the Afghan communist regime abandoned Kunar in October 1988,
the provincial capital, Asadabad, descended into chaos. Mujahideen
looted government offices, spraying buildings with celebratory gunfire
and burning communist books in the street, until Hizb and Jamil-
ur-Rahman entered into a power-sharing agreement with the other
parties. Two years later, Hizb and the Salafi leader agreed to hold an
election to see who should be in sole charge of the local government.
Whoever won would have the right to declare itself the government of
a new Kunar-based emirate, or mini-state.
When ballot boxes from the region of Nuristan in northern
Kunar—later a province in its own right—failed to turn up before the
agreed 4pm deadline on voting day, the deal broke down. The boxes
were finally delivered that evening, too late to be counted; the men
carrying them reported that Salafi fighters had refused to let them
pass in time, but their complaints were ignored. On 7 May 1990, a
transitional mujahideen council declared Jamil-ur-Rahman head of the
new emirate.15
By early 1991, the Salafi leader was strong enough to challenge
Hizb’s supremacy over the one province that had always been its
stronghold. He even succeeded where Soviet troops had failed, forcing
Kashmir Khan out of Kunar to Bajaur in northwest Pakistan.The fighters
of Jama’at al-Da’wa established their own courts and schools, tore
down shrines, hijacked aid convoys and daubed the emirate’s name on
boulders and government buildings. When one Hizb commander went
to see Jamil-ur-Rahman in an attempt to smooth over relations, the
Salafi leader said that he must remove the green flag of Hizb wherever
it was flying and replace it with Jama’at al-Da’wa’s white banner.When
the commander refused, Jamil-ur-Rahman sent a delegation of elders
to him bearing the same demand. Again the commander refused: ‘This
is the first flag that was flown in the name of jihad in Afghanistan,’
he said. ‘All other groups learned from this flag.’ It was a brave but
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foolhardy response. Fearing for his life, the commander contacted

Kashmir Khan, who told him to come to Pakistan.
The commander’s name was Haji Sultan Sayed. He had led the
victorious mujahideen into Asadabad when the communists withdrew
and, while he fled across the border as instructed, he was not to be
easily deterred. Several months later, in the summer of 1991, he
returned to Kunar as the head of a squad of Hizbis tasked with retaking
control of the province. Kashmir Khan had asked for volunteers to
launch the counter-attack and he was the only commander to raise
his hand. He did it with some trepidation; Sayed was terrified of the
Salafis, who seemed far more ruthless and professional than the young
Russian conscripts he had fought during the Soviet occupation. But
Jamil-ur-Rahman had been his first local leader in Hizb and he now felt
obliged to confront him.
With just forty-five men, he set off for the border. They travelled
at night, when the worst of the heat had burned from the land and
the moon bathed the mountain forests in a luminescent glow. Moving
swiftly over scree and fallen trees, they spoke in hushed tones and
barely paused to rest, knowing that come sunrise they would be
visible for miles around. Picking up pace, they reached Sirkanay, near
the provincial capital of Asadabad, skirting past the Salafis’ defensive
lines and hiding in small clusters amid rocks and thickets. Two enemy
outposts were situated on either side of them; another enemy position
was stationed on the mountain above. In a forest below they could just
about see the faint outline of their target, a Jama’at al-Da’wa base.
Kashmir Khan had instructed them to attack at the dawn call to
prayer and they waited for the early morning summons to ring out
across the mountains before letting loose a volley of rocket and gunfire.
They barely had time to duck for cover before Jamil-ur-Rahman’s men
hit back with bursts of artillery. Sayed let off another few rounds but
it was impossible to aim clearly. He soon stopped even bothering to
shoot, petrified that the Salafis would pinpoint his fire and hunt him
and his men down. ‘If any of us die, that’s fine,’ he thought to himself.
‘But if anyone is wounded I won’t be able to get them out.’
Over a military radio Kashmir Khan demanded that he resume the
offensive, but Sayed stayed quiet. Outnumbered and miles from any
back-up, he had lost his nerve. Thirty minutes later Kashmir Khan
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again called and urged Sayed forward; deciding that he had nothing to
lose, he prepared his men for one last assault. The Hizbis crawled into
position and launched five rocket-propelled grenades at the massed
Salafis below, catching them by surprise. Machine gun fire did the rest,
tearing into the Salafis and preventing them from regrouping. Jamil-
ur-Rahman’s troops began to scatter.
When Kashmir Khan heard that the advance squad was back on the
offensive, he ordered more than 1200 Hizbis from the neighbouring
provinces of Laghman and Nangarhar to go in as reinforcements.
Engineer Ghaffar, the mujahid who fired the first US-supplied Stinger
missile in the jihad, was among them. With help from Pakistan’s
military, the Hizbis pushed on towards Asadabad, deploying mortar
teams to target the remaining Salafi positions. Saudi Arabia tried to
mediate an end to the carnage but it was no use; by the time Hizb
had retaken Kunar, hundreds of corpses were strewn across the
picturesque landscape.16
Jamil-ur-Rahman hid out in Pakistan during the fighting, but
Hekmatyar had sent a spy to track him. The spy reported back that
Jamil-ur-Rahman had more Arabs in his ranks ‘than there are hairs
on my head.’17 With the emirate now crushed, Hekmatyar would
make sure the Salafi leader never challenged his authority again. Like
Kashmir Khan, Jamil-ur-Rahman had a home in Bajaur and on Friday
30 August 1991, a delegation of Arabs met him there in an attempt to
broker a peace deal with Hizb. Jamil-ur-Rahman lived beside his cousin
in a residential complex typical of large Afghan clans, with two houses
for their respective families, a shared library and a visitors’ quarter for
hosting meetings. While Jamil-ur-Rahman and the delegation chatted
in the cousin’s guest room, a journalist who had previously worked
for Al-Jihad magazine, an Arabic publication affiliated with Abdullah
Azzam and bin Laden, turned up asking to see him. It was unclear
to Jamil-ur-Rahman’s guards whether the journalist was with the
delegation or there alone, but they let him pass and told him to wait
his turn. For two hours he sat in the library, repeatedly asking to meet
the Salafi leader.
At around midday, Jamil-ur-Rahman left the meeting and headed
towards his own house to change his clothes. He saw a group of Afghan
elders sitting on chairs outside the library and paused to talk to them,
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when the journalist, an Egyptian named Abdullah Rumi, emerged into

the sunlight. He carried a Qur’an and, discreetly, a pistol. Rumi caught
Jamil-ur-Rahman’s attention. ‘Oh sheikh,’ he said. ‘Peace be upon
you.’ As Jamil-ur-Rahman turned around, he drew the pistol and shot
him three times in the face. With the cleric bleeding on the ground,
Rumi ran for his life, shooting and wounding one of the guards. Before
he could escape, the other guards grabbed him. They detained him for
a brief period then shot him dead, well aware that keeping him alive
would only invite more of Hekmatyar’s wrath upon them.18
***
It had been a difficult two years for Hizb since the Soviet withdrawal.
The humiliating vote in Rawalpindi that made Hekmatyar the
mujahideen’s foreign minister, the defeat at Jalalabad, the fighting with
Massoud’s forces in the north and the failure of the Tanai coup were all
major setbacks for the party. But the reconquest of Kunar promised a
resurgence. Further south, Hekmatyar’s men had also helped capture
the town of Khost, near Paktia and Paktika. A small pro-monarchy
mujahideen faction Mahaz-e Mili-ye Islami-ye Afghanistan (The National
Islamic Front of Afghanistan) and the former Hizb commander
Jalaluddin Haqqani led the offensive, backed by ISI operatives and
commandos from Pakistan’s military. In defeating 3,000 communist
troops and militiamen, they were the first mujahideen to capture a major
urban centre. Hizb had a relatively minor role in the battle, supported
by platoons of Arab fighters. Hekmatyar, however, quickly recognised
the propaganda value of the successful campaign and claimed that his
men were the main force behind Khost’s liberation.19 Accompanied
by Qazi Hussain Ahmad, the leader of Pakistan’s Jamaat-e Islami, he
toured Khost triumphantly. Returning to Pakistan, Qazi Hussain told
Hizbis that the town’s fall proved it was unnecessary to hold peace
talks with the communists. ‘Until an original and clear Islamic regime
is established in Afghanistan, you should not drop your guns,’ he said.20
The US had consistently ignored signs that Hizb was a strategic
threat to its short-term interests and an existential threat to its long-
term survival as a world power. This naivety had continued into the
presidency of George H.W. Bush, elected just before the Soviet
withdrawal from Afghanistan.Yet with Khost now in the mujahideen’s
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hands and Hizb back in control of Kunar, Hekmatyar was closer

than ever to establishing his radical Islamist state. Peter Tomsen,
Washington’s new special envoy to the mujahideen, was one of the
few Americans who understood the threat posed by Hizb. Building on
the work of his much-maligned predecessor, Edmund McWilliams, he
repeatedly tried to warn his superiors that the US was playing with
fire. He had first met Hekmatyar in the spring of 1989, at a reception
in Beijing hosted by Pakistan’s ambassador to China. Hekmatyar was
there in his capacity as the mujahideen’s interim foreign minister, and
on being asked to pose for a photograph with Tomsen he remarked
disdainfully that the American’s red tie was inappropriate because of
the colour’s association with communism. The comment, said without
a trace of irony, set the tone for their relationship.21
In September 1989 Tomsen wrote a cable to an Afghan policy
group within the State Department warning that Hekmatyar ‘can be
counted on to act unpredictably, and in ways that further alienate him
from other Afghans, who fear and deeply mistrust him.’22 To isolate
Hizb, Tomsen created a national council of mujahideen commanders,
including Massoud and Haqqani, that could coordinate military
operations inside Afghanistan. Tomsen hoped there might be a political
solution to the gestating civil war but he knew that such an outcome
was unlikely. In the event that the Najib regime collapsed before a deal
could be struck, he wanted to make sure Massoud was in a position
to capture Kabul ahead of Hekmatyar, who he feared was intent on
waging ‘violent international jihad.’23
Tomsen was not the only American to identify Hizb as a serious
threat to American and international security. When the Task Force
on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare in the US House of
Representatives produced a series of reports on the rise of Islamic
extremism in the Middle East and North Africa, Hekmatyar featured
heavily in its investigations. On 1 March 1990, more than eighteen
months before the murder of Jamil-ur-Rahman, the task force devoted
twenty-one pages to the threat posed by Hekmatyar and Hizb. The
‘cooperation of Gulbuddin’s men in anti-US international terrorism
should have made him ineligible for any US assistance, let alone the
bulk of it,’ read the report. ‘Yet ISI and the CIA steadfastly shielded,
promoted and propped [up] their man.’
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 'THE CENTURY OF ISLAM'

While Hekmatyar had never felt the need to hide his anti-
Americanism, he began to lash out with increasing vitriol against
the ‘ancient enemy.’ Each political and military setback only stoked
his fanaticism, convincing him that he was surrounded by infields
and apostates. On 5 June 1990, he issued a statement calling on all
mujahideen groups to stop any aid programmes financed by the West
or the UN. When the Iraqi army invaded Kuwait that summer, setting
in motion the first Gulf War, Hekmatyar raged not at Saddam Hussein
but at his erstwhile supporters in Washington and Riyadh. Saudi Arabia
had responded to the invasion by allowing US forces to deploy to
the kingdom to protect its oil fields. For Hekmatyar, the decision to
let Christian, Jewish and atheist soldiers defend Islam’s holiest sites,
Mecca and Medina, was an unforgivable betrayal. ‘We have fought
against alien troops in Afghanistan for more than ten years,’ he said.
‘How can we now support alien forces in the Gulf?’ He called for
the mutual withdrawal of US soldiers from Saudi Arabia and the Iraqi
military from Kuwait, in a process supervised by Islamic countries. All
governments in the region should focus instead on attacking Israel,
he said.24
The Saudis were furious at his impudence. Hekmatyar had visited
the kingdom on numerous occasions, and his disciples, including Hizb’s
international jihadi envoy Jan Baz Sarfaraz, had made huge amounts of
money for the party there. Until the emergence of Jamil-ur-Rahman,
Riyadh had regarded Hekmatyar as its closest ally in the mujahideen.
Its ambassador to Pakistan even kept a framed photograph of him in
his living room—the only picture on display. The Saudi government
responded to Hekmatyar’s pro-Iraq stance by closing Hizb’s offices
throughout the kingdom. Hekmatyar doubled down on his rhetoric,
lending his support to a statement by Islamist groups in Pakistan
warning that an ‘alliance of crusaders and Zionists headed by the USA
is striking at Muslim lands.’25
Beneath the bravado, Hekmatyar’s usually impenetrable facade
showed signs of cracking. The Gulf  War came at a delicate time for
him; he knew victory in Afghanistan was close and that he would then
have to prove himself not just as a guerrilla leader but as a statesman.
For years he had built himself up to be the saviour of radical Muslims
across the world, and his acolytes would soon expect him to put his
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words into action. There were fleeting moments when this burden
became impossible to bear. In April 1991 Hekmatyar addressed
recruits at Hizb’s Jihad University in Warsak, recalling how he had
been left distraught watching TV pictures of American soldiers
searching Iraqis. ‘I swear by God, that my hair stood on end,’ he said.
‘These are my Iraqi brothers and infidels were disrespecting them in
this way. How can a man who is zealous and has faith in his heart not be
motivated by this to do something?’ Hekmatyar knew that some Hizbis
had begun to question his leadership credentials for the first time. He
told the recruits at the university that he had suffered a personal crisis
of confidence while on a pilgrimage to Mecca before the Gulf War.
As he walked counter-clockwise around the Kaaba—a ritual known
as the tawaf—he remembered breaking down and praying for help.
‘I seek knowledge and wisdom from you, experience that I don’t
have,’ he recalled telling God. ‘I admit my selfishness. In front of you
I confess. Oh my Lord, please find someone who has the necessary
talent. Please give me the chance to be beside him as a soldier.’ It was
one of the few occasions on which Hekmatyar ever displayed any self-
doubt. Before long, Riyadh was quietly working with him again, even
teaming up with the CIA to equip Hizb with captured Iraqi artillery
and T-55 tanks.26
Hekmatyar could not afford to dwell on his shortcomings.
Back to his old self, he visited Khartoum in the same month as his
emotional speech at Warsak. Hassan al-Turabi, the scholar who had
pledged allegiance to him in the late 1980s, was now one of the most
powerful people in Sudan and a growing force on the international
Islamist scene. He had invited Hekmatyar to attend a conference with
some of the world’s most notorious guerrillas. The guest list included
Imad Mughniyah, the chief military strategist of the Lebanese group
Hezbollah, Khaled Mashal, a senior Hamas member,Yasser Arafat, the
PLO chairman, and Carlos the Jackal, a Venezuelan freelance terrorist.
The meeting, dubbed the Popular Arab and Islamic Congress, was
meant to unite opponents of the Gulf War and provide an alternative
to the Saudi-dominated Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. In
the short term it achieved nothing practical; in the long term,
Hekmatyar’s improving ties with Sudan would prove crucial to his
global ambitions.27
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Osama bin Laden shared Hekmatyar’s view of the Gulf War. The
Al-Qaeda leader had returned home to lobby the Saudi government to
allow his renegade band of Islamist volunteers to defend the kingdom,
rather than rely on US troops. It was an outlandish proposition given the
size of Iraq’s army and the paucity of Al-Qaeda’s forces, yet bin Laden
was infuriated when his offer was rejected.28 Until then, he had been
reluctant to speak out against the decadence and corruption prevalent
in the House of Saud. Now he began to view the Saudi royal family as
a cancer within Islam that was holding Muslims back. It was another
watershed moment in his burgeoning relationship with Hekmatyar.
Drawn ever closer by their mutually portentous world views, they
were soon at the centre of a plot to assassinate Afghanistan’s exiled
king, Zahir Shah.
Since his overthrow in 1973, the ageing monarch had settled in a
luxurious villa situated on a private estate on the outskirts of Rome,
Italy. Even in semi-retirement he remained a deeply divisive figure.
To some Afghans his chaotic but progressive reign had come to be
remembered as a time of optimism and peace, while the most radical
groups within the mujahideen continued to see him as the source of
the nation’s ills, blaming him for allowing communism to take root.
Hekmatyar was convinced he was agitating to return to the throne. To
carry out the assassination, Al-Qaeda recruited Paulo Jose de Almeida
Santos, a Portuguese convert to Islam. After travelling to Pakistan in
late 1989 or early 1990 Santos had joined bin Laden’s organisation
with no clear purpose in mind other than a yearning for adventure.
He inevitably found himself drawn into the internecine world of
the Afghan mujahideen, and his attention was captured by a speech
of Hekmatyar’s in which the Hizb emir vowed to wage war against
anyone who wanted to restore the monarchy to power. Inspired to
take matters into his own hands, Santos approached bin Laden with a
proposal to murder the Muslim Youth’s old enemy, Zahir Shah. Posing
as a journalist—just as Jamil-ur-Rahman’s assassin had done—he
arranged to meet the elderly monarch at his villa. Santos waited until
the end of their interview on 5 November 1991 before pulling out an
ornamental dagger he had brought with him, claiming that he wanted
to give the knife to the king as a gift. He stabbed Zahir Shah three times,
wounding him in the face, chest and hand. The king survived, saved by
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a tin of cigarillos in his breast pocket that stopped the knife penetrating
his heart, and Santos was arrested. No one, however, recognised the
significance of the incident. The first known Al-Qaeda attack to occur
on foreign shores had been directly inspired by Hekmatyar.29

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PART THREE

CIVIL WAR
1991–1996
 16

THE FALL

Freed from the shackles of the Afghan war, the Soviet Union careened
towards oblivion. Throughout 1991 social and economic unrest tore
at the once mighty empire. In August, disaffected communist generals
made a failed attempt to overthrow President Mikhail Gorbachev, their
tanks rolling through town as state television tried to conceal the news
with an impromptu screening of Swan Lake. The Kremlin possessed an
armoury of 25,000 nuclear warheads—enough to annihilate all life
on earth several times over—yet people were destitute. State debts
stood at $60 billion and impoverished Russians lined Moscow’s trash-
filled streets, queuing for bread even as the city’s McDonald’s stayed
open, its walls decorated with images of glamorous American couples
lounging on beaches. The changing times were most apparent at the
first Western rock concert in Soviet history, held on the capital’s
outskirts in September. A crowd of hundreds of thousands of ecstatic
Russians turned out to watch AC/DC, Metallica and Pantera.1
The Afghan war was both a symptom and a cause of Soviet
decline, scarring not just the soldiers who fought in its battles but the
policymakers who sent them there. In the second week of November,
an eleven-man cross-party delegation of mujahideen arrived in Moscow.
The guerrilla leaders, bearded and dressed in their usual shalwar kameez,
had done more than most Western politicians and generals to precipitate
the Soviet fall. Now they were in town for peace talks as guests of the
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Kremlin. Burhanuddin Rabbani, head of Jamiat, led the delegation;

he was accompanied by Shia mujahideen who had fought bravely in
central and western Afghan provinces throughout the jihad, yet had
little international recognition. Among them was a cleric paralysed after
being shot in the back while trying to reach a truce with rival guerrillas;
his twisted body, bent almost ninety degrees at the waist, served as a
vivid reminder of the perils of trying to make peace in Afghanistan.
Although Hizb boycotted the trip, the party had a residual presence in
the negotiating team in the form of its first leader, Mohammed Amin
Weqad. Still scrambling to regain some political credibility after his
disastrous attempt to oust Hekmatyar years earlier, the Islamic law
graduate opted to participate as leader of his own new fringe group.
The mujahideen’s visit to Moscow was the latest in a series of
diplomatic initiatives that had changed the dynamics of the Afghan war.
Six months earlier the UN had issued the outlines of a peace plan, calling
for a ceasefire and a transition to ‘a broad-based government’ that
preserved ‘the Islamic character of Afghanistan.’ Najib had been quick
to accept the proposal as it did not explicitly call for his resignation, but
the main mujahideen parties vowed to continue fighting until he stood
down. Hekmatyar described the plan as ‘complicated, ambiguous and
impractical.’ While the insurgents were determined to stay the course,
however, Washington and Moscow were not. Neither superpower
could see any long-term strategic benefit to becoming entangled in
an interminable struggle between warring Afghan factions. On 13
September 1991, they signed an agreement to stop supplying weapons
to their respective proxies—the Najib government and the Islamist
insurgents—from 1 January the following year.
The mujahideen arrived in Moscow less than two months after this
deal was struck. In the most poignant episode of the trip, they met the
mothers of missing Soviet soldiers desperate for news of their sons. It
was Armistice Day and the mothers and the mujahideen broke down
in tears. For the first time in more than a decade Weqad found himself
acknowledging that the grief of the Soviets was no different to that of
bereaved Afghans. ‘What sin did we commit to deserve this?’ he asked
the room.
Weqad would come to reflect on his stay in Russia with a sense of
melancholic wonder at what he and his estranged friends in Hizb had
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achieved. Even when he was in Moscow, he could not quite believe

that the Soviet Union was crumbling before his eyes. Everywhere he
looked, there were signs of its imminent collapse, as if the state was
a living organism destined to die like everything else. Surviving on a
diet of boiled eggs because most of the shops were low on supplies,
he toured the city that had been the source of so much suffering in
his life; wandering the stores, he looked for a packet of biscuits to
satisfy his hunger, only to find nothing but hats, gloves and socks lining
the shelves where the the food used to be. Late one night, he joined
some of the Shia mujahideen in a spontaneous visit to the Kremlin.
They boarded a minibus and drove through the deserted Moscow
streets, the eerie quiet of the Soviet empire’s ailing heart causing even
the most hardened among them to reflect on the enormity of their
achievement. At the Kremlin’s gates, a friendly local politician guided
them inside. Wandering freely, they gazed at the huge red brick walls
of the citadel. The paralysed cleric shuffled up to a statue of Lenin
and poked it in the nose with his walking stick, holding the pose for
a photograph while Weqad looked on, a complex jumble of emotions
flickering across his face.
The delegation left Moscow on 15 November with a commitment
from the Russians to work towards establishing an ‘Islamic interim
government’ in Kabul. A month later, on 25 December, Gorbachev
resigned and the Soviet Union’s famous hammer and sickle flag was
lowered over the Kremlin for the last time. The mujahideen could
claim to have destroyed an empire.2
***
Since withdrawing from Afghanistan, Russia had supplied financial
and material support to Kabul worth $3-4 billion a year.3 Those days
were now over. After decades of economic, political and military
interference, the world’s great powers were leaving Afghanistan to its
fate. While Najib and the mujahideen had more than enough guns to
continue the war, only the Islamists possessed the fanaticism to fight
on indefinitely. The regime had been relying on short-term policies
that amounted to little more than state-sponsored bribery. Afghan
soldiers’ salaries had increased five to ten fold in the final year of the
Soviet occupation and half a million government employees relied
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on handouts of flour and cooking oil—rates that were impossible to

sustain without Russian support. The most lauded aspect of Najib’s
reign had been his reconciliation programme, yet even that relied on
Soviet-style smoke and mirrors economics, with militia commanders
and local bands of insurgents sent shipping containers full of freshly
minted bank notes in exchange for their loyalty.
Now, with the dollar trading at twenty times the official rate on
the black market, Najib knew he faced an economic crisis that could
lead to his downfall. In recent years he had renounced Marxism and
rebranded the communist movement as the more patriotic-sounding
Homeland Party; he had also released thousands of prisoners, including
Faqir Mohammed Faqir, the former bank clerk who played such a
pivotal role as a messenger for Hafizullah Amin in the 1978 revolution.
But Najib was experienced enough to know that these cosmetic
reforms could not save him. He had enemies everywhere, from the
mujahideen to his own inner circle. His fears were exacerbated by the
reemergence of his predecessor, Babrak Karmal, who had returned
to Afghanistan from exile just before the attempted coup in Moscow.
Rumours swept Kabul that Karmal was plotting to oust Najib with aid
from the dissident Russian communists opposed to Gorbachev.4 With
few options left, Najib decided to send Sulaiman Layeq, one of the few
men he could still trust, to Washington, to broker a last-minute deal
with the US.
For so long the communists’ intellectual driving force, Layeq
had grown increasingly despondent since the fall of Khost and most
of southeast Afghanistan to the mujahideen. His beloved Pashtun
heartlands were in the grip of Hekmatyar and he struggled to see a
way to get them back. Yet he retained his faith in Najib, and he did
as he was asked; flying via Delhi and Paris, he arrived at New York’s
John F. Kennedy International Airport in February 1992. The Afghan
intermediary who greeted him did little to alleviate his gloom. Layeq
knew that the man worked for the CIA and it riled him to be in the
company of someone he considered a national traitor. After a short stay
in New York, they drove south together to Washington, the gridlocked
roads made all the more intolerable by the pall of uneasy conversation.
Even as a young man, Layeq had led the way in agitating suspicion
of American involvement in Afghanistan. In 1970 he had organised
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communist protests against US Vice President Spiro Agnew, who

was in Kabul to meet the king. Too astute to get directly involved
in the demonstrations himself, he persuaded Najib and his other
acolytes to pelt Agnew’s motorcade with eggs and rip up an American
flag. He resented having to beg for US help now. In Washington,
the intermediary arranged for Layeq to meet a group of self-styled
businessmen who claimed to have a passing commercial interest in
South Asia. The way the businessmen introduced themselves—almost
smirking as they trotted out their unlikely cover story—made Layeq’s
skin crawl. He felt mocked and humiliated, and was certain that these
absurd, supercilious characters were with the CIA. Casting aside his
annoyance, he launched into an impassioned defence of the communist
regime. He told them that Najib was a nationalist who wanted good
relations with the West and could halt the global designs of Hekmatyar’s
Islamists. His American hosts, however, made no effort to hide their
disinterest in his arguments. The longer the discussion went on, the
more it frustrated Layeq. He pleaded with them: ‘We got very close to
the Soviets once and that damaged us,’ he said. ‘We don’t want to make
the same mistake with you, but we want you to help us honestly.’ It was
no use. No matter what he said, his inquisitors refused to budge. Layeq
realised that he had come to the US for nothing. After little more than
a week, he began the journey back to Afghanistan, convinced that the
Americans’ arrogance was blinding them to the disaster about to befall
his country and the world. Arriving in Kabul, he wrote a report for
Najib summarising his findings. ‘The Americans cannot envisage peace
while you exist,’ it said.5
***
The Najib regime was more vulnerable than ever but the mujahideen
were at war with each other, unable to agree on the make-up of a
new government and consumed by petty jealousies that were turning
increasingly violent. Ahmad Shah Massoud knew it would not be long
before Hekmatyar pressed home Hizb’s advantage. There was no use
trying to prop up Najib again, like he had during the Tanai coup and the
Jalalabad siege; Massoud needed a new plan, and fast.
In 1988, Massoud had tasked his chief political advisor, a trained
doctor named Abdul Rahman, with recruiting disaffected government
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officials in Kabul to his cause.6 Rahman had since developed strong

ties with former president Karmal’s family, as well as several other
senior figures in the security forces. Meanwhile, Massoud had also
established his own semi-autonomous faction within Jamiat, Shura-e
Nizar (The Supervisory Council of the North) in an attempt to exert
greater control over the party’s strategy to combat Hizb. Ever the
chess-playing strategist, he weighed his next move carefully, knowing
it was the most important of his life.
Several obstacles still blocked Massoud’s path to Kabul. Chief
among them was the large zone of farmland and mountain valleys that
stood between his stronghold in Panjshir and the Afghan capital. The
area, which spanned Kapisa and much of Parwan, was dominated by
one of Hizb’s most accomplished and popular commanders, Ustad
Abdul Saboor Farid. Thoughtful and self-effacing, Ustad Farid was, in
the words of his father, ‘a man of the sword and the pen.’ A former
teacher—‘Ustad’ was an honorific denoting his past employment—he
had been recruited into the Muslim Youth by the murdered activist
Saifuddin Nasratyar.As gentle in civilian life as he was violent in combat,
villagers now sought his advice on everything from military tactics to
marriage. He took pride in keeping medical clinics and schools open in
the area under his control and ran his own independent judicial system.
A textile factory just south of Panjshir served as his headquarters.
Although a small contingent of Arab militants were based there with
Ustad Farid, the bulk of his fighters were drawn from a cross section of
the local community. A squad of twenty Afghans guarded him, armed
with four of the US-supplied surface-to-air Stinger missiles.7
Massoud decided that he needed to expand his forces if he was
to dislodge or circumvent Ustad Farid without shifting troops from
territory he had gained elsewhere; he could then strike a decisive blow
against Najib. The political ideologies of Massoud’s new recruits were
irrelevant to him; all that mattered was their willingness to confront
Hizb. His patchwork army started to take shape when a union of Shia
mujahideen factions, Hizb-e Wahdat-e Islami Afghanistan (the Islamic
Unity Party of Afghanistan), contacted him with a view to joining
forces. Made up of eight disparate groups and commonly known as
Wahdat, the union was a relatively new force on the political landscape
with the power to help swing the coming civil war Massoud’s way.
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Wahdat had been present at the Moscow talks, along with another
smaller Shia party, and it was already earning a reputation as a
formidable, Iranian-backed movement run by a mixture of learned
scholars and ruthless fighters.
Tentative links between Wahdat and Massoud were first established
in the summer of 1989, to little effect. But in late January or early
February 1992, five senior Wahdat members travelled to Panjshir to
strengthen the relationship. Another Wahdat delegation went to see
Ustad Farid. The militants of Wahdat were more extreme than their
Shia rivals and regarded themselves as the protectors of ethnic Hazaras,
a minority group that had been persecuted for centuries. But their
leaders understood that they could never govern the country alone
and they wanted to see if Hizb or Jamiat would work with them.While
the meeting with Ustad Farid passed amicably enough, it failed to yield
an agreement. The talks in Panjshir were far more fruitful, with the
Wahdat delegates signing a pact to add thousands of experienced Shia
fighters to Massoud’s ranks.8
Another breakthrough for Massoud came when non-Pashtun
officers in the government’s security forces began to mutiny across
the far north, accusing the Najib regime of discrimination. Massoud
invited one of the mutiny’s leaders, an air force officer, to Panjshir and
told him that the UN transition would not succeed because Hekmatyar
would never share power. They should therefore work together to
prepare the ground for a moderate mujahideen government, without
any role for Hizb. ‘There is one very dangerous problem I am worried
about: What if Hekmatyar captures Kabul before everyone else?’
Massoud told the officer. ‘That is my only concern.’9
Emboldened by Massoud’s support, the mutiny in the north
intensified, causing Najib to finally announce that he would resign
as soon as a UN-backed transitional authority was formed. A day
later, the communist rebels seized Mazar-e Sharif, once home to the
Muslim Youth leader Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman and long considered
the de facto capital of northern Afghanistan. Massoud’s plan was
working. On 14 April he seized the Soviet-built air base at Bagram
and the town of Charikar, undercutting Ustad Farid’s dominance over
the surrounding countryside and giving him control of all the major
military installations between Mazar and Kabul. He was now ready
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to send his new patchwork army into the capital with the help of his
communist agents there. All he needed was someone bold enough to
spearhead the operation. That man was a notorious warlord named
Abdul Rashid Dostum.
Barrel-chested, foul-mouthed and fond of vodka, Dostum was
everything the Islamists of Hizb despised. The most charismatic
member of the communist rebellion in the north, he had 40,000
predominantly ethnic Uzbek and Turkmen militiamen under his
command, a force three times bigger than Massoud’s Shura-e Nizar
faction of Jamiat.10  War was a sport to Dostum much like buzkashi,
the Afghan version of polo he loved to play, where horsemen chased
the carcass of a dead goat around a patch of dirt. Tough, ambitious and
with no strong ideological or religious beliefs to speak of, he was just
the battering ram Massoud needed.
Dostum had spent his teenage years working in the gas fields of
the north and brawling with the sons of local khans and maliks. After
being conscripted into the army under the king, he found that military
life provided a more respectable outlet for his aggression. In 1979,
the communist regime let him organise his own militia of 600 men
and told him he would be allowed to expand the force if it proved
itself in combat. Never one to shy away from a challenge, he decided
his band of part-time soldiers and mercenaries would attack a squad
of Hizbis in Dara-e Suf, an isolated enclave in Samangan province.
Riding into battle on horseback, they charged straight for the enemy,
shooting from the hip like cowboys. The daring nature of the assault
made Dostum a household name.11 In the years that followed, he and
his militia developed a reputation for extreme violence.
In the spring of 1991, the defence ministry capitalised on this
notoriety by deploying the Uzbeks to the Hizb stronghold of Logar on
the outskirts of Kabul, knowing that this would stir up a hornet’s nest
of ethnic and religious hatred. Hizb’s Army of Sacrifice, under Haji
Abubakr’s command, was based in the Pashtun-dominated province,
running its operations out of an abandoned government hospital.
Trained to be the bedrock of Hekmatyar’s future Islamist state, it
nevertheless struggled to cope with the sheer ferocity of Dostum’s
offensive. Within two days, the militiamen had captured Abubakr’s
hospital headquarters and sent him into hiding.12 Now, with the Soviet
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Union consigned to history and Hizb launching counter-attacks across

the south and east, Dostum was looking for a new challenge. After
helping lead the communist rebellion in the north, he made himself
available to Massoud as a gun for hire. On 14 and 15 April 1992, more
than 700 of his militiamen flew into Kabul, avoiding Ustad Farid’s
Stinger missile teams, and set up fighting positions around the capital’s
airport, ready to repulse any Hizb offensive.13
The UN still hoped that civil war could be averted. Days earlier
it had rushed through a streamlined version of its transition plan that
would see it fly in an impartial council of elders to take temporary
charge of Afghanistan. Once the council members disembarked
at Kabul airport, Najib was meant to board the plane and leave the
country in a seamless transfer of power. The arrival of Dostum’s militia
cast further doubt on a plan that had already raised objections from
some of the mujahideen parties. Realising that he had lost all control
of the situation and without consulting his own politburo, Najib asked
the UN to evacuate him anyway.
***
It was just after 1.30am on 16 April, a cool spring night that made the
harsh Afghan winter seem like a distant memory. Najib waited at home
for the convoy that would transport him to the airport; from there he
would fly to India, where his wife and three daughters were staying.
Fidgeting anxiously in a dark grey pinstriped suit, he sat with one of his
brothers, a bodyguard and a servant. When the UN escorts arrived, he
greeted them warmly but struggled to hold back his emotions. As his
regime unravelled, Najib had publicly warned that Afghanistan would
be ‘turned into a centre for terrorism’ if it fell into the hands of the
Islamists.14 Now he was about to be banished into exile, a relic of an
international conflict recently finished and a harbinger of one to come.
The three-vehicle UN convoy left at 1.45am. Najib and his brother
sat in the back of the middle car as it eased slowly towards the airport,
each time using a pre-arranged password to negotiate its way through
the checkpoints that lined the route. Then at the final checkpoint, with
the airport in sight, the password failed. The driver of the lead vehicle
uttered it again but again it was refused.The airport was now under the
control of Dostum, and his forces would not let Najib go any further.
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In the otherwise deserted streets, tempers frayed. Najib’s bodyguard

stepped from the front vehicle with a Kalashnikov and demanded
an explanation from troops manning the checkpoint. As he shouted
and gestured at the vehicles, word reached the convoy that the plane
waiting on the runway to take Najib to safety had been surrounded by
Dostum’s militia. Najib was incensed. ‘Let us through, you asshole!’
he yelled at an Afghan officer. ‘Everything has been arranged.’ When
the officer stood his ground, Najib ordered the convoy to turn around
and drive to a nearby UN compound as fast as possible. It was the only
place left that he considered safe.15
Officials close to Dostum and Massoud insisted that the decision
to stop Najib leaving was taken by one rogue commander, acting on
his own. Initially, Najib too hoped that he might be the victim of a
simple misunderstanding. But Massoud himself later boasted that one
of his informants inside the government, the chief guard at the airport,
was responsible for the intervention.16 Whatever the truth, Najib’s
presidency and the UN’s hopes of a peaceful transition were in ruins.
On 17 April the leaders of the northern rebellion and a senior
member of the Shia Wahdat group met Massoud at a military base
in Jabal-e Saraj, near Panjshir. Najib’s foreign minister, Mohammed
Abdul Wakil, flew in from Kabul to join them on the second day of
the talks. A cousin of the former president Babrak Karmal, Wakil was
one of Massoud’s moles inside the crumbling regime. Out of earshot
of the rest of the delegates the communist minister told Massoud,
‘Kabul is collapsing. You should go in there and bring security.’ The
delegates established a new political and military coalition that would
come to be known as the Northern Alliance; Massoud was appointed
its leader and Dostum was put in charge of its military affairs. Speaking
to reporters afterwards, Wakil described the gathering as ‘a practical
step to encourage and motivate all sides in the Afghan conflict.’Yet the
formation of the Northern Alliance took even senior Jamiat officials
by surprise. Privately, Massoud told his political masters in Peshawar
that if the various mujahideen parties could not agree on a new
administration soon, and guarantee him the job of defence minister, he
would form a government himself.17
***

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Throughout this period Hekmatyar remained convinced that

destiny was on his side. Hizb had been preparing for government since
its creation, assembling perhaps the world’s foremost guerrilla army
and building its own parallel bureaucracy and civil service. Now it
had the chance to show that it could not only win a war but run a
country. In February—the same month Layeq flew to Washington—
Hekmatyar had consolidated his power base, re-elected as party
leader for the third time with more than 99 per cent of the vote. The
landslide victory was a mere formality and allowed him to instigate
a reshuffle of Hizb’s executive council, or cabinet, papering over the
cracks left by the Tanai coup. Engineer Salaam, the founder of the
Shamshatu township, was hired as head of Hizb’s military committee;
Jan Baz Sarfaraz, the international jihadi envoy, was put in charge of
promoting Hizb’s ideology domestically; Kashmir Khan was made
party ombudsman, responsible for overseeing its inner workings and
investigating any malpractice.18
After his re-election Hekmatyar resettled in Spin-e Shiga, the frontier
camp that once hosted Osama bin Laden. The base was situated just
inside Afghanistan, in a corner of territory abutting the districts of Jaji
in Paktia, Hisarak in Nangarhar and Azra in Logar. The Pakistani town
of Tari Mangal was situated a short distance away. The demographics of
the local population and the spectacular landscape gave Spin-e Shiga—
meaning ‘white sand’ in Pashto—a natural bulwark against attack from
the communists and rival mujahideen. Since bin Laden’s last visit, it
had assumed a semi-permanent look, with solar panels installed on site
to provide some comfort in the otherwise sparse conditions. The base
was on a strip of land barely one square mile in size, yet it became the
operational command centre of Hizb’s plan to beat Massoud in the race
for Kabul. Situated at the foot of the Spin Ghar mountain, the base was
overseen by four checkpoints; around 1,500 members of the party’s
Fatah Division were stationed there, with a further 4,000 fighters
passing through at regular intervals. Hekmatyar had his own house at
the north end, next to the home of the Fatah Division commander and
bin Laden’s former military escort, Sayed Rahman Wahidyar. At the
opposite end sat a large cave used as a weapons depot. Haji Islamuddin,
the head of Hekmatyar’s Al-Qaeda trained Support Group, watched
over the base with a newly-expanded team of 100 bodyguards.19
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The formation of the Northern Alliance forced Hekmatyar’s hand;

he began to mobilise his troops. Hizbis were outraged by Massoud’s
coalition army, regarding it as proof that he was working in tandem
with communists to form his own government. Engineer Tareq, who
had a history of clashing with Massoud, was now serving as Ustad
Farid’s deputy. He made hastily-sketched plans to attack the Jabal-e
Saraj meeting, only to call off the assault at the last minute because the
area was swarming with enemy fighters. He, and the rest of the party,
would soon get another chance for vengeance.20
Fearing that Massoud was about to outflank him, Hekmatyar drew
up the final blueprint for his Kabul offensive, aided by reconnaissance
photographs and video footage of government buildings inside the city.
The offensive was split into three stages: first, sleeper cells already
living in the capital would make contact with officers in the army
who had secretly defected. Carrying only light weapons so as not to
panic residents, they would fan out across Kabul and raise Hizb’s flag
over administrative offices, ministries and key transport intersections.
These cells would be reinforced by more experienced fighters who
would arrive from the north of the capital to maintain order and hold
a defensive line to stop Massoud launching a counter-attack. Finally,
Hizb’s elite military forces, including the Fatah Division and the Army
of Sacrifice, would surge into Kabul from the east and south, wiping
out any remaining signs of communist resistance. At the same time, a
specially-formed Hizb intelligence unit, The Volunteer Army of Islam,
would deploy undercover operatives across the country to prevent
discord and persuade local communities to support Hizb.21
The plan was designed to catch the Northern Alliance by surprise
and, in theory at least, minimise civilian casualties. But attacking
Kabul, a heavily populated city, was a huge risk. Hizb’s only previous
experience of urban combat had been the battle for Jalalabad, which
ended in disaster. If Massoud hit back in Kabul, as he was likely to
do, innocent people would inevitably be killed. The offensive had
to run perfectly. Accordingly, four of the party’s most experienced
commanders were assigned responsibility for coordinating the assault.
They would each operate out of four distinct geographical zones:
Engineer Tareq would attack from the northeast and Sayed Rahman
Wahidyar from the southeast; Toran Amanullah would lead the attack
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from the southwest as head of a new elite unit, the Sama Division; and
a good friend of Hekmatyar’s, Faiz Mohammed, would take charge of
securing Chahar Asyab, a rural area south of the capital that would act
as a defensive line to stop Hizb getting hit from behind. His fighters
would then filter into the city. By the end of the operation the party
intended to have full control of all government ministries, the national
television station and all foreign diplomatic missions. These would
be protected by Haji Abubakr’s Army of Sacrifice, which would also
provide military support to the other units when necessary. As the
mujahideen advanced, a communications squad would move from
Spin-e Shiga to Chahar Asyab, transporting a mobile radio rigged up
in the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser. The radio, assembled using a tape
deck stolen during the mujahideen’s capture of Khost, would play pre-
recorded propaganda cassettes across the airwaves once Kabul fell.22
On 19 April, fighters from Ustad Farid’s ranks gradually filtered
into Kabul’s eastern suburbs, led by one of his commanders Abdul
Jalil Shafaqyar. Local residents greeted them with cups of tea as they
established their headquarters at a police station in the suburb of
Hootkhil. Soon, 800 Hizbis including Engineer Tareq were camped
out in and around the station, awaiting further orders. On 21 April
they got them; advance squads moved deeper into the city to break
into government offices across the capital with the help of seditious
bureaucrats and officials. One squad seized the ministry of defence’s
publications department, near the Kabul River and the north gate of
the presidential palace.23 While this was happening, the elite fighting
units of the Fatah and Sama divisions left Spin-e Shigar and set up camp
in Sorkh Ab, a desolate part of Logar fifteen miles from the capital.
Thirty five years after Professor Niazi returned from Egypt
preaching the Muslim Brotherhood’s doctrine, Hizb was ready to
make its move on Kabul. Hekmatyar gave the last remnants of the
communist regime until 26 April to hand power to a transitional
council of commanders led by Ustad Farid—or face the consequences.
***
Kabul’s population had swollen dramatically during the Soviet
occupation as families sought refuge from the fighting in the
countryside. Around 1.6 million people now lived in the city, and the
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war was once again closing in on them. A skeleton bus network was
all that remained of the once thriving civil service; the regime had
imposed a 9pm curfew and checkpoints lined all the main roads.24 With
Najib still hiding in the UN compound, the security forces fractured
along ethnic lines: the Tajik-majority Parcham faction aligned itself
with Massoud; and the Pashtun-dominated Khalq faction gravitated
towards Hekmatyar. Both men now had key communist officials in
their ranks. Massoud had the Karmal family on his side, as well as the
deputy defence minister Mohammed Nabi Azimi, the army chief of
staff Asif Delawar, and a senior special forces commander Baba Jan.
Hizb had secured the loyalty of the interior minister Raz Mohammed
Pakteen, the defence minister Aslam Watanjar, and the vice president
Mohammed Rafi, who flew to Sorkh Ab to meet Hekmatyar and
personally pledged to help Hizb capture the presidential palace.
Once uneasy allies in the Muslim Youth, Hekmatyar and Massoud
had been torn apart by their mutual ambition and the execution of the
Islamist activist Jan Mohammed on charges of spying. Their poisonous
rivalry was now reaching its climax: each of them knew that a civil war
would be a disaster for Afghanistan, yet neither of them was prepared
to back down. On 23 April, with Hekmatyar’s deadline for the transfer
of power just three days away, they spoke over a crackling radio line.
Hekmatyar initially did most of the talking, telling Massoud they must
be wary of ‘the enemies of Islam’ who were trying to cause ethnic
strife. Massoud interrupted occasionally to assure him that he was
still listening, but otherwise stayed silent. ‘Our objective is that Islam
should govern,’ said Hekmatyar, now several minutes into his opening
monologue. ‘We are ready to cooperate with all parties and forces who
are committed to this.’
Massoud told Hekmatyar that he had no interest in seizing Kabul
with the help of communists. The regime, he added, was ready to
surrender to the mujahideen, ‘so there is no need to enter the city
and take power by force.’ Hekmatyar grew irritated. He wondered
how Massoud could criticise Hizb for preparing to attack Kabul when
the Northern Alliance had sent Dostum’s militia into the city. Hizb
would only cancel its planned offensive if the Uzbeks withdrew, he
said. Massoud replied that he had sent the militia into Kabul because he
feared Hizb was intent on hitting the city regardless. By the end of the
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conversation, both men were trading thinly-veiled threats. Massoud

warned Hekmatyar that hundreds of people would be killed if Hizb
went to war with the Northern Alliance. Hekmatyar responded that he
was not looking for trouble, but would ‘take action for the good of the
country’ if required. ‘We are not afraid,’ replied Massoud.25
Then, in Pakistan, six of the seven Sunni mujahideen parties finally
agreed on a short-term government, bypassing the UN’s plan. Only
Hizb objected. Under the terms of the deal—known as the Peshawar
Accords—Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, the elderly scholar condemned as
an apostate by the Arab radicals close to Hizb, would serve as president
for two months, after which Rabbani, the Jamiat leader, would take
his place for a period of four months. Hekmatyar was offered the role
of prime minister. In his absence, an aide relayed a message that the
Hizb emir would accept the position only if he was allowed to choose
his own cabinet. The other mujahideen leaders refused the demand. A
Hizb spokesman angrily responded that the party was being ‘treated
like garbage’ by ‘shameless people.’ The time for talking was over.26
***
On the evening of 23 April a group of Massoud’s and Dostum’s fighters
tried to enter Kabul from the north east, only for Engineer Tareq’s
Hizbis based at the police station to block them. After a brief stand-off
the Northern Alliance forces backed down. The next morning, two
representatives of Massoud and Dostum came to see if they could
negotiate their way through. A lieutenant of Ustad Farid’s named
Mohammed Barat Sharafmal met them but refused to address Dostum’s
emissary directly, regarding him as a communist stooge. Turning to
Massoud’s man, he said, ‘I acknowledge you because you have a beard
and a pakol.’ Sharafmal told them he could not let their forces pass
because he was under strict instructions from the Hizb leadership to
maintain law and order in the city. No armed men were allowed into
the capital without Hekmatyar’s approval, he explained. Ten minutes
later Northern Alliance tanks surrounded the area and opened fire.
The first major clash of the civil war had begun.
Sharafmal was killed when shrapnel from a mortar round pierced
his forehead, chest and stomach. By early evening Engineer Tareq was
hiding in a metal shipping container with several of his fighters, praying
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that the Northern Alliance would not find them. They had used up all
their ammunition, except a few bullets for their Kalashnikovs. After
dark, they scurried through enemy lines and took refuge in the house
of a sympathetic resident.27 Elsewhere, mujahideen from Wahidyar’s
Fatah Division were forced to retreat as they reached the Bala Hissar,
an old hilltop fort once occupied by soldiers of the British empire.
Hekmatyar had anticipated some setbacks, however, and he
remained in constant touch with his commanders, urging them to
continue fighting until they reached their objectives. On 24 April the
Fatah Division re-entered Kabul with the help of a communist general
who had defected to Hizb; meanwhile, Toran Amanullah steered
his men into the city from the south-west. The Northern Alliance
scrambled to respond, pounding the advancing mujahideen with heavy
artillery and air strikes. Massoud remained stuck in Parwan, unable to
break the cordon Hizb had formed to the north. For once, he had been
out-thought by Hekmatyar. On 25 April Massoud ordered his political
advisor Abdul Rahman and his head of intelligence to fly into Kabul
from Jabal-e Saraj in a last-ditch effort to salvage the situation. They
flew in separate helicopters in case one of them was shot down by
Ustad Farid’s fighters. Landing safely at 5pm, they tried to claim credit
for the government’s fall, but it was too late: the interior, defence
and foreign ministries were already under Hizb’s control.28 Above the
presidential palace, a green flag fluttered in the breeze.

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THE ISLAMIC STATE

Hizb-e Islami’s haggard but jubilant mujahideen ambled through the

presidential palace, following in the footsteps of all the Afghan leaders
who had walked its rooms before them. Since the Muslim Youth’s
formation, they had outlasted, and ultimately vanquished, a king, an
autocrat and four communist dictators. Now, with bandoliers draped
over their shoulders and assault rifles held casually at their waists,
they were in charge. It was the evening of 25 April 1992. The crimson
carpets on the sweeping marble staircase bore no signs of the terror
that had swept the city just hours earlier. Ming vases and mounted
antelope heads lined the walls near gold brocade couches and antique
French wardrobes. Presidential guard uniforms hung pressed and
clean, their epaulettes immaculate. The Hizbis had never seen such
luxury, yet they were uninterested in the splendour. Beards matted,
feet caked in dirt, eyes heavy with fatigue, they wanted to search every
corner of the vast complex to make sure it was secure for Hekmatyar’s
imminent arrival.1
Three quarters of the palace grounds were under their control.
A group of Massoud’s men lingered at the north end of the complex,
eyeing them warily, waiting for the right moment to strike back. As
well as the palace, Hekmatyar’s troops occupied the headquarters
of the communist regime’s central committee, the defence ministry,
the interior ministry, the foreign ministry, the office of the prime
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minister and several police stations.2 Hizb had made history not
just in Afghanistan but across the Islamic world. For the first time
anywhere, a national capital was in the hands of battle-hardened Sunni
extremists who wanted to wage war with America. Hekmatyar had not
accompanied his men into Kabul, advancing no further than Chahar
Asyab, eight miles to the south, as he waited for the city to be locked
down and secured for his arrival.While his men searched the palace, he
addressed a group of journalists based in Peshawar via a military radio.
‘The collapse of this regime is the result of work by all the mujahideen
and the sacrifice of each individual Afghan,’ he said over the hiss and
crackle of the static. ‘We announce that the war has ended.’
Hekmatyar could afford to sound charitable. With around 15,000
Hizbis now in Kabul and its suburbs,3 he held the city by the throat; his
men roamed freely in the town centre and were dug in to the north,
northeast, south and southwest, forming a security cordon several
miles long and shaped like a crescent moon. Hekmatyar knew, however,
that he needed to tread delicately. Hizb had attacked the capital
against the express wishes of Massoud and the interim mujahideen
government newly formed in Peshawar. He did not want to provoke
them further with ill-chosen words. ‘We should offer a hand to each
other to establish stability and peace,’ he told the journalists. ‘We are
not happy to have a one party government or to hold power by force.
Our plan was that after fourteen years of jihad the mujahideen would
enter Kabul as conquerers, with the green flag of Islam and the slogan
of God is Greatest.’4
Hekmatyar hoped that he would be able to wring political
concessions from his rivals, including guarantees of a national election.
If that failed, he was still in a position of strength: the exiled mujahideen
leaders would have to try to depose him, plunging the country into
a civil war he was confident Hizb could win. Hekmatyar’s macabre
calculation toyed with the lives of the city’s 1.6 million inhabitants,
but he blamed Massoud for forcing his hand. The Hizb emir had no
interest in controlling Afghanistan for the sake of mere power; instead,
he wanted control for the leverage it would give him in his much more
ambitious ideological project to revive militant Islam on the world
stage. If Hizb ran the government in Kabul he would have access to
greater funding, more weapons and stronger international partners,
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 THE ISLAMIC STATE

allowing him to expand his challenge to US geopolitical dominance

across South and Central Asia and the wider Middle East. With Kabul
firmly in his grasp, all he needed to do was hold the city and wait for
his demands to be met.
***
In the hours that followed Hekmatyar’s declaration of victory, fighters
from Hizb and Jamiat mingled happily in parts of Kabul, sharing in
the euphoria of the end of communism. Some hurled flowers in the
air while others broke into chants of ‘Long live Afghanistan.’ Children
waved green flags and in eastern Pashtun neighbourhoods crowds
cheered as Hizb’s armoured vehicles thundered down the streets.
Nevertheless, a hushed sense of foreboding lay beneath the public signs
of optimism. Having lived in relative peace and with a certain amount
of freedom throughout the last decade, many of Kabul’s residents
feared the draconian edicts that would surely come from the fanatics
of Hizb and Jamiat. Within hours, women started to shed their tight
skirts and high heels for baggy Afghan dresses, sandals and headscarves;
men stopped shaving and switched their suits for shalwar kameez,
turbans and pakols. Sporadic incidents of carjacking and looting broke
out, causing shopkeepers to shut their stores and go home early. The
city hung in uneasy limbo, no longer at peace, nor yet at war.
More than 500 Hizbis who had been hiding in the interior
ministry emerged to take up defensive positions around the complex.
Dressed in a mix of traditional Afghan clothing and combat gear, they
resembled soldiers who had time-travelled between conflicts from
different centuries. The radical Islamists wore secondhand khaki army
jackets decorated with patches labelled ‘US Army’ as they fanned out
around the ministry, nervously watching the crowds of onlookers
that had gathered across the street. Elsewhere, Hizbis seized a
government weapons depot and looted its stock, distributing brand
new Kalashnikovs among themselves.
The mujahideen leaders in Peshawar knew that, despite Hekmatyar’s
claim, the war was far from over. He had turned down their offer to
be prime minister; now they feared that if he entered Kabul before
them he would declare himself president, trapping them in exile.5
Hekmatyar’s great enemy Massoud was their only hope. Despite Hizb’s
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success, the Northern Alliance had established important footholds in

the capital amid the chaos of the communists’ retreat. It controlled the
central bank, the television station, the city’s military garrison, the
main armoury and the airport, as well as several smaller compounds
formerly belonging to the Najib regime’s security forces.6 The only
problem was that Massoud remained stuck in Parwan, unable to break
through Hizb’s chokehold on the rural areas north of Kabul. His chief
political advisor, Abdul Rahman, would have to act as his eyes and ears
on the ground in the capital.
Just as Hizb was seizing the palace, Rahman had flown into Kabul
and had since been busy organising the Northern Alliance’s communist
allies, waiting for Massoud’s order to launch their counter-attack.
Using the garrison in the neighbourhood of Shashdarak as a base, he
gathered several former generals from the Najib regime, and together
they poured over maps of the city while listening to the latest news
updates on Voice of America. When their planning was complete,
Rahman invited a Hizb operative to the base to deliver an ultimatum
from Massoud. The unusual summons was typical of his modus
operandi; Rahman preferred the quietly intimidating methods of a
consigliere over the arrogant swagger of his fellow mujahideen. With
the very future of the country at stake, he wanted the Hizb leadership
to know that he and Massoud were prepared to fight to the death.
Ushering the Hizb operative into a side room, Rahman told him
that Hekmatyar must agree to surrender the palace without delay.
When the operative protested, a row erupted; Rahman yelled insults
about Hekmatyar, with the Hizbi shouting back. Just as it seemed that
the two men might come to blows, Rahman simply looked at his watch
and said he needed to call Massoud to give him an update. As he left the
room, the Hizbi slumped into a chair and fell asleep, exhausted from
playing a central role in the military operations of the last few days.
He woke to find someone roughly pulling at him as he was bundled
to the floor by some of Rahman’s men. They bound his arms and legs
and threw him into a damp, cockroach-infested basement. Massoud’s
counter-attack had begun.7
On 26 April, less than a day after Hekmatyar’s triumphant speech,
the Northern Alliance forces Massoud had assembled over the
previous months attacked Hizb with devastating efficiency. The militia
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of the former communist warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum stormed

the palace, killing ten of Hekmatyar’s troops and capturing fifty-eight
more.8 Mujahideen from Jamiat moved through Kabul’s diplomatic
quarter street by street, taking cover behind the walls of once grand
villas as they unleashed bursts from their Kalashnikovs and rocket-
propelled grenades. Dostum and Massoud both remained outside
the capital during the fighting, confident their men had everything in
hand. Heavy artillery and air strikes pummelled Hizb positions on the
city’s outskirts while families fled on foot and bicycle, clutching any
belongings they could carry.9
It took Massoud’s patchwork army just a few hours to obliterate
Hekmatyar’s vaunted soldiers of God. Hizb was not simply defeated,
it was utterly humiliated. Wahdat fighters led the Northern Alliance’s
counter-attack in the west of town. Establishing their own checkpoints,
they captured unsuspecting Hizbis trying to retreat, rounding them up
and shooting them en masse. Another Shia group, Harakat-e Islami-yi
Afghanistan (the Islamic Movement of Afghanistan) joined in the killing
spree. Hekmatyar issued frantic orders for his men to ditch anything
that identified themselves as Hizbis and pretend instead to be friendly
Shia mujahideen, to no avail. His forces were routed; he had led his
men like lambs to the slaughter.10
By 27 April only the interior ministry remained under Hizb’s
control. Even the party’s elite combat units were in disarray. Haji
Abubakr, Sayed Rahman Wahidyar, Toran Amanullah and Engineer
Tareq all retreated under the Northern Alliance onslaught.Throughout
Kabul, young fighters who had followed Hizb’s most revered
commanders into battle, expecting to be welcomed as heroes, lay dead
in the streets. Dozens of others were arrested and taken into Northern
Alliance custody for interrogation. Still yet to advance beyond Chahar
Asyab, Hekmatyar had no choice but to retreat further south to Logar
in case Massoud’s forces pushed on past Kabul. His dream of ruling
Afghanistan lay in ruins.
***
As Hekmatyar fled for his life, Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, Afghanistan’s
official president-in-waiting, drove into Kabul’s eastern outskirts.
The curmudgeonly old scholar had been condemned as an apostate
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by the Arabs in Peshawar and remained convinced that Hizb wanted

him dead. He was not a member of the Northern Alliance, yet he
had made Massoud his prospective defence minister and relied on
him for protection. As his convoy eased towards the city, it pulled to
a stop. Mojaddedi looked into the distance and turned to his small
team of aides for advice. Kabul’s electricity supply had been cut and its
mountains seemed to pulsate with the thud of artillery rounds; tracer
fire flashed overhead. Mojaddedi wondered if it was safe to go on,
wary of entering a war zone at night. Exactly fourteen years earlier,
on 27 April 1978, the communists had seized power and Mojaddedi
wanted to make a glorious, proud entrance, not sneak in under the
cover of darkness. Then there was the very practical matter of his
route into the city. To reach the centre of Kabul he would have to drive
through neighbourhoods still swarming with retreating Hizbis. If they
attacked him, his small security detail would likely be annihilated. He
decided to wait until sunrise.11
Mojaddedi spent the night near the prison at Pul-e Charkhi, in
the house of one of his commanders. The next morning, under grey
skies and a thin layer of drizzle, several communist officials arrived
at the property, moving undetected past Hizb’s fractured positions.
Mohammed Abdul Wakil, the foreign minister who had switched
sides to Massoud, was among them; he assured Mojaddedi that
everything would be okay. When friendly mujahideen began to push
in towards Kabul from Jalalabad, they all agreed to press ahead into
the city together.12
Driving into town in an ivory-white Mercedes, past gawking
children and weather-beaten elders, Mojaddedi was sworn in as
Afghanistan’s new president in a ceremony at the foreign ministry
later that day, 28 April. The palace was still not secure enough for
the swearing-in to take place there. Mojaddedi immediately declared
Afghanistan to be an Islamic Republic and announced a general amnesty
for all former communists except Najib, whose fate he said would be
decided by popular opinion. Of more concern to him was Hekmatyar.
He appealed to the Hizb emir to stop fighting other Muslims: ‘It is not
allowed for him according to religion, according to Afghan tradition,
to do this,’ he said. Hekmatyar was in no mood to be lectured and
responded with a barrage of rockets that crashed into central Kabul.13
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 THE ISLAMIC STATE

He was not alone in his bitterness at Mojaddedi’s success. Even the

other mujahideen leaders who had joined the new government had
their own misgivings about the president, but for the time being they
preferred to grumble in private. Prone to speaking his mind regardless
of the consequences, Mojaddedi led a militarily weak party that had
few members of national renown. His only assets were his age, which
gave him a natural gravitas in the eyes of Afghans, and his theological
knowledge. He was due to serve as president for two months before
handing power to the Jamiat leader Burhanuddin Rabbani for four
months, after which elections would be held. The short-term nature
of his tenure was meant to quell any discord, but it only served to
undermine what little authority and respect he had.
Massoud was the real kingmaker in Afghanistan now. As minister
of defence and the most powerful mujahideen commander in the
country, he alone would decide how to deal with the problem posed
by Hekmatyar. On 28 April he finally broke through Hizb’s lines
in Parwan, rolling into Kabul in a tank with one of the communist
generals who had led the rebellion against the Najib government
in the north.14 Later that week, he huddled with his advisors at the
intelligence headquarters in the centre of town. It was 9pm and the
drizzle of recent days had turned into a torrential downpour. Massoud
knew Hekmatyar better than anyone and understood that he would
never accept defeat; embarrassed in front of the entire Muslim world,
the Hizb leader would find a way to hit back. Massoud told his men
that they must hunt Hekmatyar relentlessly, even it meant pursuing
him to Pakistan. 15
***
Massoud’s arrival reverberated through Kabul. With Hizb’s security
cordon smashed open, Northern Alliance fighters flooded into the city,
stalking the streets like avenging angels. Mojaddedi’s declared amnesty
for the communists meant nothing to these men, many of whom were
too young to remember Afghanistan in peace time. When they finally
routed Hizb from the interior ministry, they found a former secret
police officer hiding there under a blanket. They took him outside,
beat him and shot him dead. A few days later they abducted Najib’s
former chief justice, torturing and killing him. These bloody reprisals
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were accompanied by the formal imposition of Sharia penal codes,

with the new government ordering women to dress in ‘Islamic fashion’
and banning the sale and consumption of alcohol.16
The communists who had not surrendered to Hekmatyar or Massoud
did their best to escape or hide, having no faith in Mojaddedi’s promise
that there would be no reprisals. Najib, one of the chief architects of
the nation’s collective trauma, remained at the UN compound, safe
for now. But Sulaiman Layeq shuttled between the homes of friends,
petrified that he was next in line to be shot or lynched. He wore a
shalwar kameez as he moved around the city, knowing that his usual
suit or slacks and shirt would arouse suspicion among the mujahideen.
He had been dismayed with Najib for trying to flee the city ‘like a
thief in the night,’ conduct he viewed as unbecoming of a proud
Pashtun.17 He had even reprimanded the UN for trying to fly Najib
out of Afghanistan without the communists’ permission. Now, though,
he too wanted to escape.
At a safe house near a secluded old cemetery for British soldiers
killed in past imperial wars, Layeq examined his options. He was
desperate to join his wife and children, who had fled to Germany, but
felt certain his name was on a watch list at Kabul airport. Driving to
the former Soviet Union was not possible either because the Northern
Alliance controlled the route. Meanwhile, the highway south ran
through Hizb territory, making it equally dangerous. Deciding he had
no other choice, Layeq boarded a minibus and headed east towards
Jalalabad, riding his luck first through Hizb’s battered lines and then
through ramshackle checkpoints controlled by a variety of mujahideen
factions. In Pakistan, he hid out in a guest house owned by Khan Abdul
Wali Khan, the Pashtun nationalist leader the Muslim Youth had been
accused of plotting to assassinate.18
In the weeks following Layeq’s departure, Kabul strained to get
back to a semblance of normality. Shops and restaurants reopened,
children flew kites, and men returned to the roofs of their homes
to release their flocks of pigeons into the sky, directing the birds
to swoop and circle with a simple wave of a stick. But this new
normality was haunted by violence. A rocket hit a hospital in the
upscale neighbourhood of Wazir Akbar Khan, destroying two of its
four ambulances; when its remaining two vehicles were stolen, the
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 THE ISLAMIC STATE

hospital stopped answering emergency calls. Another hospital received

a steady trickle of civilian casualties wounded by Northern Alliance
fighters shooting mortar and Kalashnikov rounds aimlessly into the air
in celebration of their victory.19
***
From the safety of Sorkh Ab in Logar, fifteen miles from Kabul,
Hekmatyar watched the last of his men flee the capital. He struggled
to comprehend the scale of his loss. Rather than show humility, he
denounced the new government as un-Islamic because of its ties to
Dostum. The edict was yet another sign of Hekmatyar’s increasing
willingness to embrace the concept of takfir, in which he declared
other Muslims to be outside the religion. For an individual deemed to
have left the faith, takfir was a death sentence. For a state to have done
so, it was tantamount to a declaration of war that made anyone still
inside Kabul a legitimate target—civilian or otherwise. Hekmatyar
demanded that the ethnic Uzbek militia withdraw from Kabul as
a pre-condition of any peace talks. However, he was in no position
to issue ultimatums and his own commanders knew it. Shattered by
their defeat, many inside Hizb wanted the party to concentrate on
recovering and rebuilding; then, and only then, could it force the
government into making concessions. The demand was absurd.
Among the commanders enraged and embarrassed by Hizb’s
failure was General Muzaferuddin, the former communist soldier
who had defected to the mujahideen after leading a mutiny in Zabul
in 1979. Having spent much of the anti-Soviet jihad in the unforgiving
deserts of southern Afghanistan, he had volunteered for the Kabul
offensive expecting to perform a simple clear and hold operation. But
after setting up a firebase at a high school in the area of Kart-e Char,
Northern Alliance fighters had swarmed down on the outpost from
all directions. When he tried to radio for help, he realised that the
communication lines had been cut. He abandoned the base and fled,
vowing to confront Hekmatyar over the shambolic city-wide retreat.
General Muzaferuddin tracked the Hizb emir down in Sorkh Ab
and exploded in anger, scolding him for appointing Engineer Salaam
as head of the party’s military committee. Salaam was a decent man,
he said, but he should never have been entrusted with such a vital job.
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Even before the offensive, General Muzaferuddin and several other

commanders had wanted Jan Baz Sarfaraz to be given the position.
Sarfaraz, a proven military leader, had been serving as deputy head
of the military committee at the time, but Hekmatyar declined to
promote him. It was just one of many grievances Hizbis were nursing.
The real problem, they knew, was Hekmatyar himself; he had taken
personal responsibility for the planning and execution of the Kabul
offensive, leaving Engineer Salaam with only a token role. The failure
was Hekmatyar’s, and his alone.20
While the Hizb emir was a talismanic leader and gifted orator,
he was not a capable military officer. He had only limited combat
experience and lacked the flexibility required of a commander in the
heat of battle. Time and again, dating back to the Muslim Youth’s failed
insurrection, his military decisions on a tactical and strategic level had
proved disastrous. The attack on Kabul—the most important moment
in Hizb’s history—was no different.
If the appointment of Engineer Salaam highlighted Hekmatyar’s
poor judgement, it was compounded by more elemental mistakes.
Together with some of his closest colleagues, he had behaved with a
naive arrogance in the lead-up to the operation, convinced that victory
was certain because God was on their side. The Hizb leadership had
underestimated Massoud, with at least one senior figure deriding
him as a ‘commander of the BBC,’ more interested in publicity than
fighting. Whatever Massoud’s failings, he was a gifted military leader.
Hekmatyar had even dismissed the news that Dostum’s forces were
arriving in Kabul as a trivial matter that could be easily overcome, a
fatal miscalculation that prevented proper contingency planning.21
The Hizb emir thought that his ties with prominent figures in the
Najib regime would give him an advantage over Massoud. In reality,
most of the defectors to Hizb were bureaucrats, politicians and
ageing officers, rather than fighting men. In contrast, Massoud had
the support of troops and generals, and controlled the airport and the
city garrison. Hekmatyar also failed to prepare his forces adequately
enough for Massoud’s inevitable counter-attack. When Hizb’s
defensive line north of the capital broke, he had no Plan B; with more
humility, he could—and should—have anticipated that the breach
might happen. Ustad Abdul Saboor Farid, Hizb’s main commander in
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the area, had tried to hold the line but many of his men had betrayed
Hizb and let Massoud’s forces through. Rumours were already rife
that Massoud had bribed them to step aside, a fact later acknowledged
by his own intelligence chief. Senior Hizbis were convinced that some
of the former executive council members who resigned in protest at
Hekmatyar’s 1990 coup attempt with the former communist defence
minister Shahnawaz Tanai aided the treachery. By refusing to address
their disquiet then, Hekmatyar, imperious as always, had caused them
to seek their revenge in the most damaging way possible.22
Although publicly unrepentant, Hekmatyar was chastened by his
defeat and, in a rare instance of self-reflection, listened to his critics
within the party. With no immediate hope of regaining control of the
capital, Hizb established a new headquarters in Chahar Asyab and began
to reorganise. Kashmir Khan, who had not been involved in the battle
for Kabul, was summoned from eastern Afghanistan to help; Hekmatyar
made him head of the Sama Division in place of Toran Amanullah.23 To
deal with the very specific challenges of what was clearly going to be a
mujahideen versus mujahideen civil war, Hekmatyar also established a
new military council of jihadi commanders. While he was, predictably,
head of the council, he would now be subject to greater oversight
from his top lieutenants. More than a dozen of Hizb’s most prominent
field operatives served on the council, including Kashmir Khan, Toran
Amanullah, General Muzaferuddin, Sayed Rahman Wahidyar, Haji
Abubakr and Engineer Tareq. The council was to meet together once a
week in Chahar Asyab, or the neighbouring district of Bagrami, to plan
operations and strategise.24
These changes were an important step for bolstering Hizb’s military
competence. Yet to get back on its feet Hizb needed to do more than
alter its structure: it needed to change its tactical approach. The
generation of commanders who had served it so well against the Soviets
were too accustomed to waging a conventional guerrilla war; Hizb
needed a new kind of fighter to face the Northern Alliance. Although
it was not explicitly said, there was a quiet consensus that ideological
purity should take second place to success on the battlefield. In a
fateful decision, Hizb enlisted the help of a band of illiterate nomads it
had begun to assemble several years earlier.
***
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Pashtuns from the Ahmadzai tribe were known as shepherds, camel

herders and smugglers by tradition. Their survival instincts were honed
sleeping under the stars, where wolves and thieves roamed. They
traded in everything from livestock to guns as they wandered eastern
Afghanistan and western Pakistan, heedless of the British-drawn border
between the two countries. By the time the mujahideen swept into
Kabul the most famous Ahmadzai of all was the ousted communist
president Najib. But he was also a rare exception, at ease in the city
with the government. Most Ahmadzais were rebels who felt at home in
the mountains, among insurgents, outlaws and freedom fighters.
Their seditious streak was evident during the war against the Soviets
when the majority of Ahmadzais initially sided with the communists,
using their influence to protect the regime’s electricity supply lines
from insurgent attacks. After tiring of doing Kabul’s bidding, they
switched sides to the mujahideen. The smallest of the seven Sunni
insurgent parties was the first to recognise their potential as guerrillas:
Mahaz-e Milli, a moderate pro-monarchy group, recruited hundreds
of Ahmadzais mid-way through the Russian occupation. The leader of
them was a man named Wali Khan. His men quickly lived up to their
reputation as accomplished fighters and he soon established his own
division within Mahaz, known as the Ahmadzai Council. Wali Khan’s
status grew and other mujahideen factions began to court him. Then,
just as his power reached its peak, unknown assailants abducted and
killed him as he drove from Peshawar to Islamabad, dumping his body
in a corn field. With no obvious leadership replacement, the Ahmadzai
Council crumbled and the tribe found itself adrift, casting around for
a new cause. Hizb sensed an opportunity.25
Hekmatyar’s party had always had a few Ahmadzais in its ranks,
but their numbers were small and they were not organised into their
own unit. This changed after Wali Khan’s death. Looking around for
ways to strengthen, the party viewed the Ahmadzais as a sleeping
giant—a readymade group of hundreds of dedicated mujahideen who
fought like they were born with guns in their hands. It came up with a
strategy to identify and recruit the best of them, confident the others
would follow.
The architect of this plan was Waheedullah Sabawoon, an old friend
of Kashmir Khan’s. Sabawoon had been at the Kunar meeting in 1978
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 THE ISLAMIC STATE

when Kashmir Khan captured Hizb’s first Kalashnikov. More recently,

he had served as deputy of the military committee during the siege
of Jalalabad, before moving on to his current job as the party’s head
of intelligence. In 1990, two years before the mujahideen’s entrance
into Kabul, he started receiving reports that one particular Ahmadzai
was embroiled in a violent, long-running feud with the most powerful
warlord in eastern Afghanistan, a man named Haji Abdul Qadeer.
The nomad was proving to be more than a match for his formidable
opponent. Some said the wild young man had a courage that could
only have come directly from God; his detractors claimed he had the
personality traits of a psychopath. Sabawoon wanted to find out more.
With an impenetrable gaze and long, thick curly hair spilling out
from beneath a pakol, Zardad, as the Ahmadzai rebel was known, cut a
striking figure. Tall and wiry, he had a stooped posture that made him
appear weighed down with the burden of some invisible load, but he
fought with carefree abandon. Like most of the other mujahideen from
his tribe, Zardad had spent the jihad against the Russians on the side of
the mujahideen group Mahaz-e Milli. It was a pragmatic choice based
on clan fealty rather than a love of the party. After W
  ali Khan’s death left
the Ahmadzai Council rudderless, Zardad became more unconstrained
in his rebellion. He didn’t take much persuading to join Hizb. Of all
the mujahideen parties, Hekmatyar’s was perhaps best placed and most
willing to unleash his dark talents. Two other Ahmadzai commanders,
known by similarly laconic names, agreed to work under him.Together,
Zardad, Qalam and Chaman would become the most notorious Hizbis
of the civil war period, a triumvirate of carefully-managed chaos.
While more famous commanders fled the Northern Alliance
onslaught in and around Kabul in the spring of 1992, the Ahmadzais
went on the attack. Based out of an empty hospital and a school in the
village of Shewaki, east of Kabul, they began to push Dostum’s Uzbek
militiamen back towards the city centre, pursuing them as they went.
Despite being vastly outnumbered, they retook the eastern suburbs
around the Bala Hissar fort and Tapa Maranjan, areas Hizb had just
abandoned. The astonishing turnaround made everyone in the party
leadership sit up and take notice.26
***

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Re-energised by the Ahmadzais’ success and the formation of the jihadi

military council, Hizb launched a new offensive on Kabul in May.
Under the command of Kashmir Khan, its mujahideen advanced from
Chihil Sutun, in the city’s south, and fanned out towards a popular
picnic spot, Bagh-e Babur gardens. Catching the Northern Alliance by
surprise, they raided a local directorate of the Mojaddedi government’s
intelligence service, looting its armoury. With a ridge line to the right,
Kabul River to the left, and Hizb’s headquarters at Chahar Asyab to
the rear, they were able to dig in and hold their ground. The slither
of territory didn’t look like much on a map, but it was an important
psychological marker:27 Hizb was back in the fight and Hekmatyar
knew it. On 10 May he addressed a crowd of around 5000 supporters
in Jalalabad. The death toll from the Soviet occupation was just the
start, he warned. ‘We have already had one and a half million martyrs,’
he declared. ‘We are ready to offer as many [again] to establish a true
Islamic government. We are ready to remain in the mountains for
another fourteen years.’28
Hizb’s mobile radio station, Payam-e Azadi (Message of Freedom)
made sure such pronouncements were heard in Kabul, its small crew
of sound engineers speeding around the capital’s outskirts in their
battered Toyota Land Cruiser, trying to avoid enemy fire. Sitting in
the back of the jeep, they pulled curtains across the windows and
frantically worked the dials in their mini-studio, spreading Hizb
propaganda to a tired, war-weary population.29 People were sick of
the party’s rocket attacks and frustrated by its refusal to negotiate,
but they were also angry with the government for failing to strike a
compromise with Hekmatyar. Hizb’s belligerent strategy was working.
While the Northern Alliance was strong enough to retain hold of much
of Kabul, Massoud did not have the manpower to follow through on
his plan to push Hekmatyar’s troops back towards Pakistan. They were
stuck in a bloody stalemate. Only when Hizb’s former commander
Jalaluddin Haqqani intervened as an unlikely peace broker did the
violence ease. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, also keen to see some order
in fraying, post-communist Afghanistan, then persuaded Hekmatyar
and Massoud to meet face-to-face. On 25 May, after seven hours of
talks, the two old rivals formally agreed that national elections should
be held within six months. Most significantly of all, Massoud called
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for the withdrawal of Dostum’s militia from the capital—caving to

Hekmatyar’s principal demand.30
Mojaddedi had mixed feelings about the truce, fearful that Hizb
and Jamiat were out to sideline him. Swinging wildly from one mood
to the next, just prior to the deal he described the hard-drinking gun-
for-hire Dostum as ‘a great Islamic warrior.’31 Now, exasperated by his
own fragile position, he publicly speculated that he might try to stay
in office beyond his two-month term limit. In his first trip abroad as
president, he went to Pakistan, where he immediately undermined the
peace agreement by ridiculing the chances of holding an election in the
near future: ‘After one and a half or two years it may be possible,’ he
said. Massoud and Hekmatyar were furious.32
Mojaddedi flew back to Kabul on 29 May, expecting a hostile
reaction but prepared to stand his ground. One of around seventy
passengers on board, his plane was just preparing to land when three
rockets hurtled towards it. Mojaddedi was sitting at the front of the
cabin, on the right-hand side, and glanced out the window to see a
‘ball of fire’ heading straight for him, he later recalled. The first rocket
passed underneath the plane and the second was too high, but the third
hit its target, smashing into the nosecone and injuring the co-pilot.
Miraculously, with the plane’s nosecone destroyed and bits of fuselage
hanging off, the one fit pilot brought the aircraft safely into land.
Unable to taxi into the terminal because its control panel had stopped
working, the plane juddered to a halt on the runway, where Mojaddedi
and the rest of the relieved passengers staggered out.
Hizb had threatened to shoot down Mojaddedi’s plane in the past
and it seemed like the obvious culprit now. The president accused
Hekmatyar of organising the attack and both sides traded insults. ‘If
we had done it, we would have used at least twenty missiles and left no
chance for survival, but we would never do that,’ said Abdul Qadeer
Karyab, who had been part of the Hizb negotiating teams in Iraq and
Libya. Only later did Mojaddedi realise that he had made a mistake.
The rockets had been fired by the Northern Alliance, on the orders of
Massoud, investigators told him. His own defence minister had tried
to kill him.33

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‘VICTORY OR MARTYRDOM’

The attack on Sibghatullah Mojaddedi’s plane convinced the president

that Jamiat and Hizb were prepared to do anything in their quest for
power. Fearful that he would be killed if he clung to office, he stepped
down as originally scheduled on 28 June 1992. Burhanuddin Rabbani
replaced him as head of state for the next four months, in keeping
with the springtime agreement Hizb’s rivals had struck in Peshawar.
For a country accustomed to revolutions and coups, this counted as
an orderly transition, and a glimmer of hope. The short-term nature
of Rabbani’s tenure seemed to focus his mind on the urgency of the
task at hand. ‘We have only one condition in our programme—that
of unity,’ he declared.1 Equally pleased to see the back of Mojaddedi,
Hizb built on the collective goodwill created by the recent ceasefire
with Massoud and nominated its commander Ustad Abdul Saboor
Farid to serve as prime minister in the new government. Cheering
crowds lined the streets as he drove into town from his factory base
in Kapisa.2
Ustad Farid was cautiously optimistic that peace would prevail. He
was close to Hekmatyar and, although he didn’t trust Massoud, he
knew him well enough to think he could reason with him. But it would
not be easy; skilled diplomats had tried and failed to bring Hizb and
Jamiat together in the past, and huge sticking points remained. The
presence of thousands of Hizbis to the south and east of the capital
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unnerved Ustad Farid’s new Northern Alliance colleagues inside the

government, who feared he had been sent by Hekmatyar to undermine
the regime from within. Hizbis had their own concerns, with Dostum’s
Uzbek militia still refusing to leave Kabul. In his favour, Ustad Farid
was admired by prominent figures in all the mujahideen factions
and enjoyed rare cross-party support. He was erudite and genial,
with a natural inclination for compromise rather than confrontation.
Crucially, he was also an ethnic Tajik, like Massoud and Rabbani. Hizb
hoped that his appointment would be seen as a positive gesture rather
than an attempt to infiltrate the regime. As the weeks passed, however,
the doubts grew and they were strongest within Hekmatyar himself.
The Hizb leader began to wonder if the power-sharing deal was a
mistake that had emboldened his rivals and made him look desperate.
With Rabbani as president and Massoud as defence minister, the two
people he had never forgiven for betraying the Muslim Youth almost
twenty years earlier now occupied the most important offices in the
land. All Hizb had in return was a consensus candidate in the position
of prime minister—a symbolic post at best in its current form. As July
moved towards August, Hekmatyar worried that irreparable damage
might be done to his chances of establishing a radical Islamic state.
His growing unease turned into violent anger when Ustad Farid
reported back to Hekmatyar that Rabbani was trying to persuade
him to defect to Jamiat. He said the president claimed that he had
a ‘historic chance’ to help dismantle centuries of Pashtun political
dominance over Afghanistan. The anecdote infuriated Hekmatyar.
Already paranoid, he became convinced that Jamiat was secretly
working with the US and Russia to turn Afghanistan into a federalist
state.3 When the government claimed it was unable to remove
Dostum’s Uzbek paramilitaries without sparking further conflict, he
snapped. After two-and-a-half months of relative calm, Hizb launched
a wave of artillery and rocket attacks on Kabul, hitting the presidential
palace, Massoud’s house, the airport, the headquarters of the Red
Cross and at least two hospitals. After several shells crashed into the
Russian Embassy, killing one staff member, the building was closed and
its last remaining diplomats evacuated. Some days the attacks lasted
for hours, from dawn deep into the night. Amid the devastation, water
supplies into the city were cut off, sparking fears of a cholera outbreak.
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Despite this, Hekmatyar vowed to continue the assault until Dostum’s

militia was evicted from the city and an ‘Islamic army’ was created.
Desperate civilians began to shelter in Pul-e Charkhi, the prison
that had been a slaughterhouse for the communist regime and which
now lay abandoned inside Hizb territory. The UN started to evacuate
non-essential staff. A furious Rabbani called Hekmatyar ‘a dangerous
terrorist who should be expelled from Afghanistan.’ By the end of
August, 1,800–2,500 people had been killed. Ustad Farid had been
dismissed from his job.4
The tactic of bombarding the Afghan capital did not originate with
Hizb, nor was it new. Whether Hekmatyar realised it or not, the CIA
had planted the seeds of the idea during the Soviet occupation. In 1985
it bought 700 Katyusha rockets for the mujahideen from the Egyptian
government, well aware that the weapons were notoriously inaccurate.
The fact that the rockets—which had a range of over six miles—made
a terrifying screeching sound as they tore through the air was part of
their appeal; the noise alone would petrify civilians and undermine
confidence in the communist regime.5 Hekmatyar perfected this
method of psychological warfare to devastating effect. Content to
have made his point, he established a ceasefire committee to negotiate
another truce; he hired Abdul Qadeer Karyab and Jan Baz Sarfaraz to
try to broker the deal, but it was no use.6 Kabul was in flames. The
August blitz marked the start of a pattern that would endure for years:
Hizb tantalising its mujahideen rivals with rounds of dialogue, then
hitting them hard on the battlefield to extract more concessions.
***
Never straightforward, the Afghan political scene had become an
unfathomable tangle of short-term coalitions and routine backstabbing.
By mid-1992, factions that were meant to be part of the Rabbani
government had turned the city into a grotesque tapestry of warring
ethnic enclaves. Dostum’s militia was based around the airport and the
apartment blocks where the communist leadership used to live. People
referred to its fighters as ‘carpet thieves’ because they looted anything
they could get their hands on, from rugs and air conditioning units to
TV sets and electrical wiring. On the west side of town, Ittehad, the
mujahideen party of Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf, dominated the Pashtun
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neighbourhood of Khushal Khan and the district of Paghman. It was

locked in a vicious territorial struggle with Wahdat, the powerful Shia
group that had helped push Hizb from the capital just months earlier.
The clashes had begun during Mojaddedi’s presidency but were now
escalating to a frightening new level, with Massoud providing military
support to Ittehad.
While ethnic and sectarian hatred motivated Sayyaf, the reasons
for Massoud’s involvement were more prosaic. As defence minister,
he resented the presence of thousands of Wahdat’s fighters in Kabul,
accusing them of trying to hold the government hostage in exchange
for greater political power. In the past he had always picked his battles
carefully, but this time he miscalculated the resilience of his opponent.
Rather than back down, Wahdat’s uncompromising and inspirational
leader,Abdul Ali Mazari, dragged Massoud and the Rabbani government
into a torturous conflict that played right into Hekmatyar’s hands.
It was easy to see why Massoud might underestimate Mazari. With
his long grey beard, high forehead and youthful smile, he resembled
a kindly ageing scholar. But his beatific appearance told only half the
story: he was, in fact, a stubborn guerrilla commander and tough
negotiator. While Shias had never been a major political or military
force in Afghanistan, Mazari regarded it as his national and religious
duty to protect the rights of ethnic Hazaras, no matter the cost to
those around them. Friends of Hekmatyar claimed that as a young
man he was one of a small number of Shia who had joined Hizb and,
although this could not be proven, it said much about their grudging
respect for him.7
Mazari’s rivalry with Massoud could be traced back to Mojaddedi’s
time as president. Expecting to be given a sizeable share of the
government for helping the Northern Alliance seize Kabul, he felt
that Wahdat had been cheated. His main grievance concerned the
government’s intelligence department, which was promised to his
party in exchange for support in the successful military campaign
against Hizb. Mazari had wanted a former Khalqi communist general
to fill the role, a choice he knew would anger the other mujahideen
factions but which was firmly in keeping with his ethnocentric approach
to politics. The general was a Hazara who had spent years serving as
a special forces commander for the communists in Panjshir, giving
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him a unique insight into Massoud’s tactics and thinking. However,

Massoud vetoed the appointment and gave the position to one of
his own lieutenants instead. This effectively left Jamiat in control of
the government’s entire security apparatus—a distinct advantage in
its war against Hizb. Betrayed, Mazari began to cast around for new
political allies. All Hekmatyar had to do was wait.8
When Rabbani became president, the ill feeling between Mazari
and Massoud turned into visceral hatred. On one occasion, Massoud
refused to visit Mazari for negotiations at Wahdat’s headquarters in the
Academy of Social Science, next to the polytechnic where Engineer
Habib-ur-Rahman had studied. In his place, he sent his consigliere
Abdul Rahman, together with the man who had usurped Wahdat’s
candidate as head of intelligence. Mazari sat at a desk talking to
colleagues when the officials walked in. Noticing that Massoud was
not among them, he made no effort to stand up to greet his guests
as they went around the room shaking hands. When Rahman finally
reached the Wahdat leader, Mazari still refused to get up. Fingering a
set of prayer beads in one hand, he looked away and continued talking
to a colleague, contemptuously holding out his other hand behind
him for Rahman to shake. Only after several awkward seconds did
he turn to address Rahman directly. ‘Didn’t Massoud come?’ he said.
‘No,’ Rahman replied, ‘he has some work to do.’ Mazari made no
effort to hide his displeasure. ‘Oh, Massoud must be the only person
in the whole country who’s busy,’ he said, sarcastically.9 Massoud’s
unwillingness to placate Mazari was a rare lapse of judgement that
would cost both him and the country dearly. Already engaged in a war
of attrition with Hizb, he was now on the brink of waging another
conflict, leaving him and the government vulnerable on two fronts.
By the autumn, half a million people had fled Kabul as a result of
Hizb’s rocket attacks, the fighting in the west of the city and mass
looting in areas under Dostum’s control.10 Come winter, the capital was
a shattered landscape of bullet-scarred walls, barbed wire checkpoints
and vacant streets stalked by packs of rabid dogs. The worse the
situation got, the more belligerent Hekmatyar became. When Saudi
Arabia’s leading clerical authority, the grand mufti Abdul Aziz ibn
Baz, denounced the fighting as fratricide between Muslims and said
that the culprits should be considered murderers under Islamic law,
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Hekmatyar warned his former patrons in Riyadh to stop interfering in

Afghanistan’s affairs.11 Kashmir Khan also spoke up in defence of Hizb’s
tactics, calling the Rabbani government a ‘communist plot.’ Only an
‘Islamic army’ spearheaded by Hizb could bring peace to Afghanistan
and ‘resist the internal and external enemies of this land,’ he said.12
***
From the moment Jamiat was created to bring order and discipline
to the Muslim Youth in the final year of the monarchy, through to the
creation of Hizb-e Islami in 1976, Rabbani had been obsessed with
the idea that he was the rightful leader of Afghanistan’s Islamists. His
rivalry with Hekmatyar was less intense than Massoud’s, but he was
a shrewd politician more than capable of holding his own. Under the
terms of the agreement struck with the other mujahideen parties
in Peshawar as the communist regime collapsed, he was meant to
relinquish the presidency after four months and not lengthen his
tenure ‘even by a day.’13 But in late October he received approval from
the government’s leadership council to extend his presidency for a
further forty-five days, claiming that the insecurity in the city made it
impossible for him to transfer power any earlier. Then, at the end of
December, he invoked an ancient Islamic procedure, Ahl al-Hall wa’l-
Aqd, more commonly used to select or depose a caliph, to convene a
council of some 1,300 carefully-selected elders for a stage-managed
election. Though not averse to political trickery of its own, Hizb was
outraged at this blatant power grab. It was not alone; four of the seven
Sunni mujahideen parties that Pakistan had officially recognised as the
Afghan resistance during the anti-Soviet jihad boycotted the event.
Mazari also stayed away.14
After three days of speeches and debates within the safety of the
interior ministry, the delegates cast their votes into a ballot box made
from an empty container of cooking oil. Rabbani—the only official
candidate—was elected president for a further eighteen months.‘After
this, if one drop of blood falls in our country unjustly, God’s divine
throne will shake,’ he said, adding that he was now ‘saying goodbye to
Jamiat’ and no longer considered himself a member of any particular
party or ethnic group. ‘I want Afghanistan to be the home of all of us,’
he declared, with a theatrical flourish that was soon forgotten.15
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Rabbani’s coronation only exacerbated Kabul’s growing ethnic and

political divisions. Even as he was being anointed, the government
arrested Hekmatyar’s stepson-in-law and advisor Humayoun Jarir
in west Kabul, accusing him of ferrying secret messages to Mazari’s
Wahdat group. The arrest enraged and embarrassed Hekmatyar, who
promptly threatened to shoot down any plane flying over the city if
Jarir was not released.16  The war intensified. In January 1993 at least
800 people were killed and thousands wounded in the latest round of
fighting;Turkey, China and India evacuated their embassies.17 Embroiled
in some of the fiercest combat of their lives, Kashmir Khan and Haji
Abubakr just managed to hold off an assault by Massoud’s forces. When
Hekmatyar looked at their faces afterwards—aged beyond their years,
haunted by what they had seen and done—he felt a pang of remorse.
But sacrifice, he reminded himself, was an underlying component of
jihad. There were two simple choices in war: ‘Victory or martyrdom.’18
***
Massoud regarded the bloodshed in Kabul, and Afghanistan’s
international isolation, as a personal slight. He had predicted the chaos
but was unable to stop it; now the nation’s capital was falling apart on
his watch. For a man proud of his own military discipline and prowess,
there was no greater shame. His weakness in the face of the emerging
Hizb-Wahdat alliance was thrown into sharp relief when he travelled
to a military base in Qargah, on the city’s western outskirts. On the
way, Wahdat militants pulled him over at a checkpoint and demanded
to search him.19 Convinced he had been deliberately insulted, Massoud
began drawing up a plan to storm Wahdat’s headquarters and capture
Mazari. Sayyaf’s Ittehad party offered its support. The operation
would become known as the Afshar campaign, named after the densely
populated mountainside that bore the brunt of its savagery.
To prepare the ground for the attack, the government’s intelligence
service—the same department denied to Wahdat—bribed several
commanders from another Shia faction, Harakat-e Islami-yi Afghanistan,
to let Jamiat fighters pass their guard posts at the top of the mountain.
They then set up positions to the rear of Mazari’s headquarters. For
four days Massoud’s troops rained artillery and rocket fire down onto
Afshar. Then, on 11 February, Ittehad and Jamiat forces moved in on
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foot. Sayyaf’s gunmen burst into one house, shooting dead a father
and son at close range; another fighter threw two women to the floor
and stabbed them to death with his bayonet. As people spilled out into
the streets, running for safety, Massoud’s forces bombarded them with
rockets fired from the mountain top.
Even in a city accustomed to barbarity, the operation stood out for
its methodical cruelty. One elderly man was decapitated and castrated,
his severed penis shoved in his mouth. A woman watched as Ittehad
fighters executed her eleven-year-old son. Three of the attackers
then pinned her down while a fourth man raped her. In the days that
followed, the corpses of several women were spotted in an adjacent
neighbourhood, stripped naked and tied to olive trees. Massoud did
not go to Afshar himself; he did, however, hold at least three meetings
before and during the operation to discuss its progress. Rabbani
attended one of them at the Intercontinental Hotel, which had a good
view of the area from its upper floors. The government later agreed
to investigate the massacre and, though the findings were not officially
released, it is believed to have concluded that 70-80 people were killed
in the streets, while a further 700-750 were missing, presumed dead.
Mazari escaped the slaughter. Once the fighting was over he ordered
his men to track down the commanders of the rival Shia group who
let Massoud’s forces into Afshar. They captured three of them and took
them to a makeshift prison; Mazari then ordered their execution.20
The Afshar campaign was both a humanitarian catastrophe and a
strategic failure. It hardened Mazari’s resolve and pushed him closer
to Hekmatyar. Wahdat fighters had captured and killed a number of
Hizbis at the start of the civil war, but both sides were now united by
a common enemy: Massoud. Hizb took advantage of the government’s
preoccupation with the fighting in west Kabul to settle an old score to
the east. Nasrullah Mansour, the cleric who had executed the Muslim
Youth activist Jan Mohammed now served as governor of Paktia and
a vocal supporter of Rabbani. Hizb had detained him the previous
year, only to free him after mediation from neutral mujahideen
commanders. Upon his release, Mansour further riled Hekmatyar by
acting as secretary at the controversial Ahl al-Hall wa’l-Aqd meeting
that cemented Rabbani’s presidency. This was one indiscretion too
many. On 9 February, as the Afshar operation was unfolding, Mansour
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was killed by a bomb rigged to his car. Hekmatyar neither confirmed

nor denied responsibility.21
***
After twenty years of oppression, insurrection, invasion and
occupation, Afghanistan seemed locked in a downward spiral of
collective madness, with Kabul as the epicentre of this psychosis. The
city’s avenues had become borders between feuding communities, the
river a slurry of excrement and trash. The mountains that once held
the capital in a warm embrace now squeezed it of life. Children spoke
of jinn—evil Islamic spirits—haunting certain streets, while snakes
and scorpions crawled through the ruined cityscape. No longer able to
afford traditional building materials, people used ammunition crates to
reinforce the walls of their homes. In Khair Khana, the neighbourhood
in which Professor Niazi once lived, families dug shelters beneath
their houses to withstand Hizb’s rocket attacks. Across the city, people
were afraid to gather in public lest they be raked with errant gun
or mortar fire. To bury loved ones, they crawled on their hands and
knees at the cemetery to avoid being shot. Under the king, Afghans of
all ethnicities and faiths had lived side by side. Now Sikh and Hindu
temples were ransacked, and members of the small Jewish community
forced to flee.22
In a sign of just how confused and desperate the situation had
become, the Rabbani government paid Russia—the mujahideen’s
sworn enemy—to print a new national currency for Afghanistan. The
exchange rate had initially fallen when the mujahideen entered Kabul,
with one dollar worth 400 Afghanis. Since the advent of the new
currency, it had risen uncontrollably; the dollar now traded at such
a high rate that people carried huge stacks of bills around in bags just
so they could buy even the most basic items. Hizb and Wahdat banned
the currency in areas under their control and continued to use money
leftover from the Najib regime instead. Dostum’s militia printed its
own currency.23
Afghanistan was the epitome of a failed state. The US had closed
its embassy in Kabul in 1989 just weeks before the Soviet withdrawal,
hanging up a sign saying ‘Extended holidays for all staff—date of
return not fixed.’ Anticipating that the Najib regime would quickly
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fall, it hoped to reopen the compound soon afterwards, but more than
three years later the embassy remained vacant. After being looted
early on in the mujahideen’s rule, it was now secured by Massoud’s
forces and stood as a symbol of Washington’s indifference. The few
American officials who were still interested in Afghanistan feared that
this diplomatic disengagement was exactly what Hekmatyar wanted.
Terrorism thrived in ungoverned spaces, and the Hizb leader had made
it clear that he longed for a war with America.24
Peter Tomsen, the former US special envoy to Afghanistan,
remained a staunch critic of Hekmatyar. Now the ambassador-
in-waiting, he had yet to take up the role because of the embassy’s
continued closure and the chronic insecurity in Kabul. In October
1992 he persuaded the State Department to issue a rare condemnation
of Hizb’s rocket attacks. ‘These actions, taken in pursuit of personal
ambitions, were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent
people,’ it said. But with the CIA reluctant to push back against its
former client, and the White House no longer regarding Afghanistan
as a strategic priority, there was no follow-through. In November the
State Department decided to keep the embassy closed, enshrining a
policy of withdrawal that would continue long into the administration
of the newly elected US president Bill Clinton. Hizb’s response to the
American criticisms was unequivocal: ‘Afghanistan is the graveyard of
the British and the Russians and, God willing, it will also become the
graveyard of the arrogant Americans,’ the party said in a statement.
Vowing to ‘rub the American pigs’ snout in the ground,’ Hizb called
upon ‘all Muslim nations’ to challenge the US, ‘the number one enemy
of Islam.’25
Britain remained largely silent on the unfolding Afghan tragedy.
Its embassy had also been closed since 1989 and was still no closer
to reopening. The UK had hoped its ambassador to Pakistan, Nicholas
Barrington, would transfer to Kabul once the Najib regime collapsed,
but gave up on the idea as violence surged. It was Barrington who once
confronted Hekmatyar about the murder of a British journalist and he
had no desire to get dragged back into Hizb’s murky world. ‘If people
are killing each other like that, what can you do?’ he said years later.26
While Kabul’s fate was not a Western concern, its location at the
heart of central and South Asia made it a regional one. Pakistan’s ISI
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intelligence agency continued to provide Hekmatyar with a steady flow

of weapons, manpower and logistical support, though not at the same
levels as before. Qazi Hussain Ahmad, leader of Pakistan’s Jammat-e
Islami party, acted as a proxy envoy for Islamabad during frequent
visits to Chahar Asyab. Iran was similarly engaged with Wahdat; its
deputy foreign minister, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, made frequent stops
at Mazari’s new headquarters in Kart-e Se, west Kabul.27 But even as
they stoked the violence in the vain hope of breaking the stalemate,
Afghanistan’s neighbours worried that it would soon spill into their
territory, fears shared by Saudi Arabia. Riyadh was expected to act
as an arbiter in disputes in the Muslim world, yet its main role in
Afghanistan until now had been as a source of arms, funding and
recruits for the mujahideen against the Soviets. The grand mufti’s
denunciation of the bloodshed earlier in the civil war was a sign that
its patience was wearing thin.
By early 1993 all three countries appeared to have reached a
consensus that the situation was dangerously out of control. On 7
March, Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia persuaded the rival mujahideen
leaders to sign another peace deal. Under the terms of the agreement,
struck in Islamabad, a ceasefire was to take effect immediately.
Hekmatyar would step into the role of prime minister he had been
promised a year earlier; Rabbani would stay on as president until June
1994, after which an election would be held.
As prime minister, Hekmatyar wielded his newfound power with
undisguised glee. To the shock of Rabbani, he exploited the ambiguity
surrounding his exact responsibilities to dissolve the entire cabinet,
declaring, ‘This is my authority and I have done it.’28 The new cabinet
he put forward in its place was a masterwork of political provocation.
To ensure that Jamiat had no control over the government’s armed
forces, he nominated the weak and ineffective Mojaddedi as defence
minister. Mohammed Amin Weqad, Hizb’s first emir, was proposed as
interior minister. Ustad Farid would be one of three deputy prime
ministers, alongside Massoud and the Ittehad leader Sayyaf. Massoud
would also serve as foreign minister, a prestigious job but one with
no military power. Jalaluddin Haqqani was nominated as minister of
education.29 Predictably, Rabbani refused to countenance the removal
of Massoud as defence minister and blocked the formation of the
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new cabinet. Hekmatyar retorted that Jamiat’s forces ‘are preparing

themselves for another round of fighting.’30 In the end, after more
negotiations in Jalalabad, a fragile power-sharing deal held.
***
Until Hizb established its headquarters there, Chahar Asyab was
a picturesque but unremarkable way station. The main road that
connected Kabul to Logar and southeast Afghanistan ran through the
area, flanked by mottled grey hills and a chequerboard of green and
brown fields. For generations, families had survived off the apricots,
apples, potatoes and onions they grew; men tended to the crops,
worked in stone quarries dug into the nearby mountains or headed to
Kabul to seek more gainful employment. Under Najib’s communist
regime, however, security deteriorated and the local economy
stagnated. Jobs were scarce and police combed villages searching for
boys to conscript into the demoralised and fractured army. The fields,
laced with unexploded ordnance, stayed empty. Chahar Asyab only
began to recover in the spring of 1992, when Hekmatyar set up base
in the district. While much of Afghanistan was being torn apart under
mujahideen rule, this once quiet outpost eight miles from Kabul began
to thrive.
The road leading towards Chahar Asyab from the city was now
smashed and rutted, with metal shipping containers and empty
oil barrels littering the landscape as it headed east. A sandbagged
checkpoint marked the start of Hizb territory. Amid these dystopian
surroundings were the makings of Hekmatyar’s Islamic state. Hizb
ensured that local civil servants were paid, and that boys and girls
attended school; there was a hospital, a judicial system and a traffic
police force; and the thousands of fighters passing through the area
gave local shopkeepers, farmers, engineers and labourers plenty of
work. Hizb operated its own religious police, the Al amr bil ma’ruf wa
nahy an al-munkar, named after an injunction in the Qur’an to ‘be a
community that calls for what is good, urges what is right, and forbids
what is wrong.’31 There were few complaints over its strictly enforced
edicts from Chahar Asyab’s traditionally conservative Pashtun
residents. Women had to wear headscarves but burqas or niqabs were
not obligatory.
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Hizb held regular leadership meetings in a 15 x 8 metre cave to the

north side of the highway, safe from air strikes and rocket attacks. The
party resettled its mobile radio station in Chahar Asyab and established
a sister TV station, setting up the network using equipment a Hizbi had
purchased in Germany. The entire layout of the headquarters added to
Hizb’s continued sense of itself as a government-in-waiting. Hekmatyar
lived locally with his young family in an old two-storey house; even
after the house was hit by mortar fire from Dostum’s troops, injuring
one of his sons, he refused to leave the area. Instead, he had a new
house built a short distance away, where the mountains offered more
protection. This property was smaller, with a kitchen, bathroom and
two bedrooms. He had his children homeschooled there and, even as
prime minister, somehow found the time to decide what they should
eat each day. It was always a variant of basic Afghan food: flatbread,
stew, rice, a few lumps of fatty lamb still clinging to the bone. Other
Hizbis thought he was unnecessarily frugal, but Hekmatyar took
strength from his privations.32
Reluctant to travel into Kabul while Dostum’s forces remained
there, Hekmatyar held his first cabinet meeting as prime minister in
Chahar Asyab from 11am to 2pm on Sunday 6 June 1993. The large
number of absentees underscored the tenuous nature of Hekmatyar’s
premiership, with just nine of the nineteen ministers turning up,
together with dozens of the commissioners for various ministries.
Jamiat claimed that none of its representatives were able to attend
because they were busy elsewhere. A second meeting in late June
was even less successful; this time, Hekmatyar accused Massoud of
ordering the detention of several cabinet members as they tried to
make their way to Chahar Asyab. The endless cycle of reconciliation
and betrayal, peace and war, hope and despair, continued.33
Hekmatyar was convinced that Jamiat wanted him dead. Hizb
detained one of its own members, a military trainer, after receiving
a tip-off that he had been sent to Chahar Asyab armed with a remote-
controlled bomb made from Russian equipment. The prisoner blamed
the government’s deputy head of intelligence for organising the
plot.34 In reaction to the increased threat, Hekmatyar’s chief security
officer tightened the protective cordon around the Hizb leader. Haji
Islamuddin’s team of bodyguards was already unrecognisable from the
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disorganised, poorly-equipped rabble of ten men it had been when he

first took charge. At the start of the civil war the Support Group was the
size of a battalion, divided into four companies. One of the companies
was equipped with five helicopters and assigned responsibility for
defending Hekmatyar from the air. Haji Islamuddin’s men had also
acquired two armoured vehicles kitted out with Russian surface-to-air
missiles. As the fighting dragged on and the threats to Hekmatyar’s life
became more acute, he again expanded the Support Group to 1500
mujahideen. All recruits were vetted by Hizb’s intelligence service to
weed out potential spies. Previously trained by a Syrian founder of
Al-Qaeda, Abu Burhan Al-Suri, the bodyguards were now taught by
an Algerian who went by the nom de guerre Abu Abdullah. Described as
a ‘very educated man’ by Haji Islamuddin, Abu Abdullah was a senior
security official for the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria, popularly
known as the GIA—an acronym derived from the French version of
its name.
The GIA was fast earning a reputation as the most brutal of Hizb’s
offspring to emerge in the Arab world since the anti-Soviet jihad. It
rose to prominence after an Islamic party, the Islamic Salvation Front
(FIS), won parliamentary elections in Algeria in December 1991, only
for the army to annul the ballot. Hizbis living in France had built up
a good relationship with a founding member of the FIS, Abdelkader
Hachani, and when the FIS was robbed of its election victory, that
bond extended to the GIA. ‘The forming of the Islamic Group of
Algeria came as a result of Hizb-e Islami and our mujahideen,’ boasted
one Hekmatyar aide years later.35 It was no coincidence that the two
parties had almost identical logos.
The GIA had responded to the Algerian government’s oppression
by waging a savage guerrilla war in the name of jihad. Up to 150,000
Algerians would be killed in the 1991–2002 conflict, with both the
insurgents and the state security forces deliberately targeting civilians.36
The violence spilled over into Europe, thanks in part to militant cells
in the Algerian diaspora that felt a deep ideological affinity with Hizb.
From July to October 1995 the GIA waged a bombing campaign
against public infrastructure in France. In the first attack, carried out
using an explosive device made from a gas cylinder packed with nails
and bolts, eight civilians were killed when a blast ripped through a
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Paris train. Hekmatyar’s lifelong ambition to ignite a war between

radical Islam and the secular West was finally being realised.
Hizb’s GIA trainer, Abu Abdullah, showed his commitment to
Hekmatyar’s cause by moving his family with him from Peshawar to
Chahar Asyab. He taught the bodyguards in groups of twenty, two
months at a time. Haji Islamuddin made sure the Algerian had anything
he needed for the drills: cars, tanks, heavy artillery and mortars. In
return, Abu Abdullah taught Haji Islamuddin’s men everything they
needed to know to keep Hekmatyar safe in the years ahead, from how
to search houses for bugging devices to shooting accurately from the
back of a motorbike while travelling at high speed.
By the early 1990s, between 1,200 and 2,000 Algerians had fought
in Afghanistan, the vast majority of them allied to Hizb.37 A young
militant named Mokhtar Belmokhtar was among them. Belmokhtar
had learned his trade at Hizb’s Jihadwal camp, when Najib was still
in power. During the civil war he was briefly detained by Massoud’s
forces in Kabul.38 He left Afghanistan soon afterwards and joined the
GIA, before going on to become a leading figure in Al-Qaeda in the
Islamic Maghreb. In 2013 he orchestrated an attack on an Algerian gas
facility part run by the multinational energy giant BP. At least thirty-
nine foreign hostages, one local guard and twenty-nine militants were
killed in the four-day siege. The US government eventually placed a $5
million bounty on Belmokhtar’s head.
Algeria was not the only Islamic country touched by Hizb’s
influence. Even as he fought for control of Kabul, Hekmatyar remained
focused on his long-term goal to make radical Islam a global force. In
extremist circles across the Islamic world, his name was a byword for
a new kind of puritanical fanaticism. As conflict tore at the former
Yugoslavia, Bosnian and Arab mujahideen who had once fought in
Afghanistan drew on their experiences with Hizb for inspiration.
Closer to home, unrest was spreading across Central Asia, exactly as
Hekmatyar had predicted, with a civil war raging in Tajikistan thanks in
part to the Hizb-inspired Islamic Renaissance Party.39
Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s future deputy, kept in
regular touch with Hekmatyar throughout this period. The Egyptian
had been drifting through the jihadist eco-system since the Soviet
withdrawal—even travelling to the US to preach in mosques and
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raise money under a false identity—but Afghanistan remained close

to his heart. During one visit to the country he met Jan Baz Sarfaraz
in Jalalabad and handed him a note handwritten in Arabic. He wanted
the message passed directly to Hekmatyar. Zawahiri, who had not
yet joined Al-Qaeda, wrote that he considered himself to be emir-ul
mu’minin, leader of the faithful, a religious title historically bestowed
on a leader of the world’s Muslims. He asked Hekmatyar to work under
him as the emir of Khorasan, a term used by the Prophet Mohammed
to describe parts of central Asia and Afghanistan. Hekmatyar did not
take the note seriously, as Zawahiri lacked the clerical standing to
make such an appointment and was still a relatively obscure figure.
Weeks later the Egyptian met the Hizb emir in person in Chahar Asyab
and repeated the request. Again, Hekmatyar sidestepped the issue. He
still believed it was possible for Hizb to recapture Kabul and for him,
not Zawahiri or anyone else, to lead Islam’s revival.40
Hekmatyar was well aware of his fame among foreign militants
and took every opportunity to stoke their radicalism. In December
1992 he issued a stinging rebuke to the Indian government after
Hindu extremists destroyed the sixteenth-century Babri mosque in
Uttar Pradesh. ‘This act shows that in India, Kashmir, Bosnia, Burma,
Palestine, Tajikistan and Afghanistan, all the infidels are united against
us,’ he said in a statement released to the Hizb newspaper Shahadat,
emphasising his sense of jihad as an international armed struggle.
He called on Muslim states to forcefully expel any Hindus living on
their territory; Indian Muslims should consider declaring their own
independent state if attacks on them continued, he said.41
During an official visit to Pakistan as prime minister in August
1993, Hekmatyar announced that he would gladly shelter Sheikh Omar
Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric who once travelled with him
into Afghanistan. The sheikh had been granted residency status in the
US but was now being threatened with deportation. Just six months
earlier one his followers had tried to blow up the World Trade Centre
in New York with a truck bomb. While the attack failed in its main
objective, six people were killed and more than 1000 injured. Unable
to find firm evidence linking the sheikh to the blast, the US hoped to
expel him for lying about his marital status on his asylum application.
‘He is a respected religious scholar and he has done nothing wrong,’
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said Hekmatyar. His offer to host the blind sheikh led nowhere but it
did elicit another letter from Zawahiri, thanking him for trying to help
a fellow Egyptian.42
There were about 100 Arab mujahideen in Chahar Asyab during
the height of the civil war. On 20 November 1993, they were briefly
joined by Sudan’s most prominent Islamist leader, Hassan al-Turabi,
who had pledged allegiance to Hekmatyar in Peshawar a few years
earlier. Although exactly what he and Hekmatyar discussed is not
known, the subject of bin Laden surely came up. Stripped of his Saudi
citizenship, the Al-Qaeda leader was now residing in Khartoum, and
Hekmatyar still regarded him as a valuable asset who might yet prove
to be the ace up his sleeve.43
***
Looking back on this time, Hekmatyar would gloat about how the
White House received repeated intelligence briefings that ‘the result
of the Afghan jihad has been very dangerous for American [interests] in
Islamic countries.’44 There was some truth to his claim; on 1 February
1993, the US Congress’s Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional
Warfare released a report entitled The New Islamist International, which
described Hizb as ‘the spearhead of the Afghan jihad.’ The report
highlighted the party’s links with Kashmiri separatists and claimed that
Hizb had given unspecified help to ‘some 30-35 Libyan expert terrorist
trainers’ who arrived in Peshawar in late 1991. It even claimed that
Hizb was helping Sikh extremists carry out a ‘terrorist campaign’
against India as part of its broader effort to keep Pakistan on side and
destabilise the Hindu-majority country.45
Six months later, the US State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence
and Research issued a report with its own stark warning: ‘The
perception that the US has an anti-Islamic foreign policy agenda raises
the likelihood that US interests increasingly will become targets for
violence from the former mujahideen,’ it said. The document went on
to explain that a ‘close working relationship reportedly exists’ between
Hekmatyar, the Sudanese scholar Turabi, the blind Egyptian Sheikh
Omar Abdel Rahman and the Yemeni extremist cleric Abdul Majeed
Zindani. ‘This circle of mutual admiration nurtures the network of
safehavens, bases and logistical support’ that enables Islamist militant
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groups to operate, it said. In one extraordinary passage, the report

drew a clear link between bin Laden and Hekmatyar—an early and
rare confluence of the two men in a US government document.
Describing the Al-Qaeda leader as ‘a Saudi businessman,’ it said that
bin Laden was ‘particularly famous for his religious zeal and financial
largesse.’The report added that he ‘maintains financial and ideological
ties to Sheikh Abdel Rahman, Sheikh Zindani and Hekmatyar.’ Just
as presciently, the report seemed to predict the kind of lone wolf
attacks that would become the hallmark of ISIS operations in the West
more than twenty years later. ‘Beyond the Middle East and South
Asia, small numbers of Afghan war veterans are taking up causes from
Somalia to the Philippines,’ it said. ‘Mujahideen connections to the
larger network heighten the chances that even an ad hoc group could
carry out destructive insurgent attacks.’ America was not alone in
worrying about Hizb’s global reach. That summer, Indian intelligence
officials estimated that around 200 of the party’s mujahideen had
infiltrated into Kashmir—a claim also made in the 1 February US
Congress report.46
Although Hizb was undoubtedly interested in sending fighters
abroad to wage jihad, it did not regard such missions as a priority. Until
it was able to establish an Islamic state in Kabul, the party leadership
believed that the best way it could encourage international extremism
was to serve as a conduit for other groups and individuals. Hekmatyar
in particular recognised that a new geopolitical era was dawning in the
post-Cold War world. The conflicts of the future would not be wars
between superpowers or even conventional insurgencies, but dirty
insurrections and terrorist campaigns. To prepare for this next phase
in his never-ending jihad he opened up a new base on the western
edge of Jalalabad, known as Darunta. There, Algerian followers of
Hekmatyar ran a set of training camps for Kurdish, Kuwaiti, Yemeni,
Saudi, Egyptian and Kyrgyz fighters, among others. They were taught
weapons handling, battlefield tactics, counter-surveillance, counter-
interrogation, how to identify potential spies in their ranks and the
most effective ways to torture prisoners into confessions. An American
jihadist of Moroccan descent ran a course on hostage taking, and an
Egyptian scholar, Abu Abdullah Al-Muhajir, gave recruits theology
lessons. Muhajir would go on to become one of Al-Qaeda’s most
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extreme ideologues and among the first Sunni theologians to sanctify

the use of suicide bombings.
A third Hizb-controlled camp at Darunta was situated on a steep,
barren hill. There, another Egyptian, Abu Khabab al-Masri, taught
carefully-selected recruits how to make dirty bombs that could be
used against civilian targets. Testing out the poisons on rabbits, they
experimented with mustard gas, botulinum—a potentially lethal
toxin—and cyanogen chloride, a chemical agent that can cause
paralysis and death. Only four or five recruits were allowed to study
there at a time because of the highly sensitive nature of their work.47
Hekmatyar’s links with foreign extremists were well known among
authoritarian regimes of the Middle East. In November 1993 Rabbani
travelled to Egypt to meet Hosni Mubarak, successor to the murdered
president Anwar Sadat.With Hekmatyar now prime minister, Mubarak
said he was worried about Hizb’s ties to radical groups. Rabbani
assured him Afghanistan would not be used a launchpad for Egyptian
militants to attack their homeland, but he had his own concerns about
the foreign fighters massing under Hekmatyar. Massoud’s intelligence
operatives had gathered information that Arab militants were training
Hizb assassins to kill key figures within the very government he was
meant to be serving. Unknown assailants had already raked Rabbani’s
motorcade with gunfire during a rare presidential outing through
Hizb territory, and in the treacherous world of Afghan politics almost
anyone in the president’s retinue could be secretly working for
Hekmatyar. Massoud, who was believed to be one of the targets for
Hizb’s assassins, suspected that Hekmatyar was receiving financial help
from Libya and remained in contact with the Iraqi regime of Saddam
Hussein. Hekmatyar’s global jihad was just getting started.48

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COLLUSION

In the summer of 1993 Hekmatyar received a weary-looking guest at

his headquarters in Chahar Asyab. The middle-aged man had the sallow
complexion and receding dark hair of an Afghan Tajik and might have
passed himself off as such were it not for the unusual gift he carried.
Intent on forging a unique military partnership with Hizb, he handed
Hekmatyar a sword reminiscent of the kind Muslim warriors used in
the Crusades. The guest’s name was Rovshan Javadov and he was not
a fellow mujahid but Azerbaijan’s deputy interior minister. He knew
enough about Hizb and Afghan culture to know that the weapon would
appeal to Hekmatyar. It was the perfect introduction for the sensitive
project he had come to discuss.
Five years earlier, as the Soviet Union was unravelling, local militias
had begun to clash in Nagorno-Karabakh, a piece of territory at the
centre of a sovereignty dispute between Azerbaijan and Armenia. The
clashes had escalated and the two countries were now at war. None of
this would have held any interest for Hekmatyar but for one key fact
his guest was determined to exploit: Armenia was majority Christian
and Azerbaijan majority Muslim. Javadov portrayed the ongoing
fight, which Azerbaijan was in severe danger of losing, not as a grimy
territorial war between two neighbours in the South Caucasus but as
a defensive jihad. He wanted Hizb to lend Azerbaijan some of its best
mujahideen to help beat back the Armenians. The language barrier was
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unimportant; what mattered was that the Hizbis would fight with the
same fanaticism they had shown against the Soviets.1
Hekmatyar had a tough decision to make. He had always believed
that Hizb was most effective as an incubator of violent international
jihad, not as a perpetrator. His reasoning was both logical and cynical;
he knew radical Islam was more likely to spread if it was promoted by
homegrown extremists and so he had sheltered and mentored foreign
militants who had come to Afghanistan, inspired by Hizb’s exploits.
This approach allowed the party to avoid direct confrontation with
powerful enemies, among them the US. However, Javadov’s offer came
at a delicate moment in Hizb’s evolution. Although Hekmatyar was
Afghanistan’s prime minister, he remained politically weak and was
still no closer to seizing power in Kabul. His incendiary tactics in the
Afghan civil war had divided opinion in the Muslim world. Pakistan
and Saudi Arabia, once his staunchest supporters, were starting to
distance themselves from him. Meanwhile, the Organisation of Islamic
Cooperation, an umbrella grouping of dozens of Muslim countries,
had just opened an office in Kabul in an attempt to keep the peace.2 In
the Azerbaijan project, Hekmatyar saw an opportunity to strengthen
his position.
Money was a key element in his decision. Jihad was an expensive
business and Hizb’s coffers were running low. Azerbaijan, on the other
hand, was on the verge of signing a $7.4 billion contract to allow a
Western consortium access to its oil reserves. Even a small portion
of that wealth would help Hizb continue its war on Kabul. The more
Hekmatyar thought about Javadov’s offer, the more it made sense
within the framework of his long-term strategic ambitions, as well
as his immediate tactical needs. Azerbaijan bordered Iran, Russia and
Georgia, making it a bridgehead from which Hizb might penetrate
deeper into the Middle East, Central Asia and even Europe. The
prospect of establishing this Islamist peninsula, more than 1000 miles
from Afghanistan, appealed to the vision Hekmatyar had of himself as
a saviour of oppressed Muslims everywhere. Yet the decisive factor in
him agreeing to undertake Hizb’s first and only large-scale military
campaign abroad was the support he would get from Iran. One
of the most powerful countries in the region was underwriting the
entire project.
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From 1980–1988 Iran had been locked in a devastating conflict

with Iraq. More than a million soldiers were killed in squalid pitched
battles reminiscent of the First World War, with no obvious strategic
gain for either country. The conflict did, however, teach Iran a valuable
lesson; rather than directly wage wars, it would transmit its military
power clandestinely, through friendly governments and guerrilla
organisations. When the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict flared up on
its northern border, Tehran sent weapons, advisors and soldiers to
Azerbaijan. This support was organised by the Revolutionary Guard
Corps, the Iranian paramilitary organisation tasked with protecting
the theocratic state’s founding principles and waging its proxy wars
abroad. The Muslims of Azerbaijan were overwhelmingly Shia, and
Tehran regarded the fight there as part of its wider ideological struggle
to spread its particular interpretation of Islam. With Hizb in need
of new allies and Tehran in need of capable insurgent groups willing
to protect its influence overseas, there was a neat convergence of
interests and, on 18 August 1993, Hekmatyar travelled to Iran after
the meeting with Javadov. His trip was the second leg in a regional tour
that also included Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Although he portrayed
it as routine diplomatic work, the Afghan prime minister was in fact
conducting his own foreign policy, one that would destabilise the
region—and the world—for decades to come. Travelling with him
was his stepson-in-law and advisor, Humayoun Jarir, who had been
freed from prison in the spring, together with Hizb’s intelligence chief
Waheedullah Sabawoon, and two senior members of Hizb-e Wahdat,
Hekmatyar’s Afghan Shia allies.
It was not Hekmatyar’s first visit to Iran, as Hizb had been raising
money and publishing propaganda there since the late 1970s. In the
past, he had met Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the now deceased
leader of the Iranian revolution, and he knew powerful people within
the clerical and political establishments.3 During the August 1993
trip, he met the Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and
visited Khomeini’s tomb. Officially, he discussed improving economic
cooperation between Kabul and Tehran; unofficially, he received Iran’s
blessing to start work in Azerbaijan. Hekmatyar appointed Sabawoon to
take charge of the mission, giving him diplomatic cover as Hizb’s new
envoy to Iran, Turkey, Azerbaijan and the Balkans. When Hekmatyar
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left Iran for Saudi Arabia on 20 August, the final leg of his regional tour,
Sabawoon stayed behind to start work.
The first Hizbis to go to Azerbaijan were Engineer Ghaffar—who
had fired the first US-supplied Stinger missile in Afghanistan seven
years earlier—and a colleague named Attaullah Ludin, who had fought
in the battle for Jalalabad. Both men were from Nangarhar province.
Travelling with 500 of their fighters, they assessed conditions on the
ground and judged them to be favourable. Sabawoon then expanded
the operation in accordance with Hekmatyar’s wishes. Around 4,600
Hizbis would ultimately fight in Azerbaijan, most of them during a
period of uneasy calm in Afghanistan. Some flew there from Jalalabad
on military transport planes supplied by the government in Baku. Most
went via Iran, travelling by road from Afghanistan to Peshawar and then
to Quetta in southwest Pakistan, where they were kept in safe houses.
From there they went to Taftan in Pakistan’s Balochistan province,
before moving on to the Iranian frontier town of Zahedan, then flying
to Azerbaijan. A small number travelled the entire route by road.
The Azerbaijan operation was so sensitive that decades later
Hekmatyar continued to deny it ever existed.4 Sabawoon played a
hands-on role in the entire logistical process, picking the Hizbis for
recruitment, organising their travel arrangements and often greeting
them on their arrival at Nasosnaya Air Base on Azerbaijan’s east coast.
One recruit recalled landing there and being put up at the Aspheron
Hotel in Baku, ten men to a room. After two nights Sabawoon loaded
him and dozens of other mujahideen onto four or five buses and
transported them to the frontlines.
Many of the Hizbis were deployed near Ganja, Azerbaijan’s second-
largest city, where they stayed at a base formerly used by the Soviet
104th Guards Airborne Division. Some of them wore uniforms, others
preferred to fight in their shalwar kameez and pakols, undermining
Hekmatyar’s attempts to keep the project secret. General
Muzaferuddin, the commander who confronted Hekmatyar following
Hizb’s disastrous April 1992 retreat from Kabul, was one of the most
prominent recruits to serve in the campaign. During his eight-month
tour he even established his own special military unit, the Maiwand
Division, named after a famous battle of the second Anglo-Afghan war.
General Muzaferuddin led the division’s operations in and around the
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town of Agdam and the city of Zardab, where some of the heaviest
fighting took place.
Hizb did not generally pay its mujahideen in Afghanistan but in
Azerbaijan its foot soldiers and commanders received $250 and $350
per month respectively, given their money in a lump sum at the end
of their tours. Many of the Hizbis who served there left with fond
memories. General Muzaferuddin recalled Azeri diners standing up
and offering to pay for his food whenever he walked into local tea
houses. Sabawoon took his family to Baku, settling in a luxurious
house overlooking the Caspian Sea. Another Hizbi spent his spare
time distributing copies of the Qur’an and talking to people about
the Hadith.
Roughly 100 Hizbis died in the war and eight of them were buried
in a cemetery in Baku. This was a fraction of the wider death toll:
more than 25,000 soldiers and civilians were killed and a million
people displaced by the time a Russian-brokered ceasefire came into
effect in 1994. Armenia had the greater claim to victory, controlling
most of the disputed territory that triggered the unrest. But that was
irrelevant to Hekmatyar; he had succeeded in strengthening Hizb’s
military capabilities at home, made new international allies and, most
importantly, opened up a new front in his global jihad.5
Azerbaijan may not have been a cause célèbre for international
jihadists, but it attracted foreign fighters who were part of the same
global network as Hizb and Al-Qaeda. Chechen militants served there
in separate military units to Sabawoon’s men, and Osama bin Laden’s
future deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri would later visit the country during
his own travels through the Islamist underground.6 In 2002 the US
Department of Justice indicted a Syrian-born American citizen, Enaam
Arnaout, for using the Baku branch of his charity, the Benevolence
International Foundation, ‘to provide financial assistance to Al-Qaeda
and other organisations engaged in violent activities’ in Chechnya and
Bosnia. As evidence, it cited several Hizb documents from the early
1990s found in his possession, including a weapons inventory and
video footage showing him with Hekmatyar in Afghanistan. Arnaout
denied links to Al-Qaeda but admitted funnelling donations to fighters
in Chechnya and Bosnia. After reaching a plea deal with prosecutors he
was sentenced to ten years in prison.7
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For the Rabbani government, Hizb’s involvement in Azerbaijan was

proof that Hekmatyar had never been serious about making peace. The
Azeri deputy interior minister, Javadov, had asked Rabbani for military
help during the same visit to Afghanistan in which he met Hekmatyar,
but the Afghan president had deemed the request to be a diplomatic
minefield and refused. Jamiat claimed that Hizb was paid $2 million
for its services and supplied with light weapons and ammunition to
bring back to Afghanistan, while the children of Hizbis were granted
special dispensation to study at university in Azerbaijan.8
None of this would have been possible without the help of Abdul
Ali Mazari’s Wahdat party. It had long-standing ties to Iran and played
a key role in facilitating the agreement. Early on in the negotiating
process a close aide of Mazari’s spent two days in Jalalabad at the
headquarters of the Hizb commander Fazel Haq Mujahid, where he
met representatives from the Azeri government. Wahdat would go
on to send 500 of its own fighters to Azerbaijan, but its primary role
was as an intermediary between Tehran, Baku and Hizb. The success of
the arrangement encouraged Hekmatyar and Mazari to step up their
cooperation back in Afghanistan.9
***
For more than a year, Hizb had used the presence of Dostum’s militia
in Kabul to justify its indiscriminate rocket attacks on the city. By mid-
1993, however, Hekmatyar was losing patience. At around the same
time as he was throwing caution to the wind in Azerbaijan, he made
a similarly seismic decision domestically. Desperate to oust Rabbani
in any way he could, he asked Dostum for help. He was well aware
that most Hizbis despised the former communist warlord, so initially
kept the plan a secret even from many of his closest aides. But he was
confident that Dostum—a man of limited intellect and no discernible
political ideology, but who craved power—would take his side for one
reason and one reason alone: they both hated the government.
Dostum had expected the Jamiat-led regime to reward him
handsomely for his pivotal role in forcing Hizb from Kabul in 1992.
Instead, he felt that Rabbani and Massoud had treated him as nothing
more than a useful idiot who had served his purpose and could now be
kept on the political sidelines. For the past year Dostum had nursed these
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 COLLUSION

grievances in his stronghold of northern Afghanistan, unwilling even to

set foot in the capital despite the presence of his Uzbek militia there. As
time went by, he felt an increasing kinship with Mazari and the Hazaras
of Wahdat, another ethnic minority with Turkic origins who harboured
a sense of betrayal. Officials from Hizb and a political party established
by Dostum held a number of clandestine meetings—including one in
Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan—to discuss forming an alliance
with Wahdat. Then, on 2 July 1993, Dostum came to Kabul for the
first time since the fall of the communist regime. At a house owned
by a businessmen colleague of Mazari’s, he met the Wahdat leader, the
Hizb intelligence chief Sabawoon, and Hekmatyar’s stepson-in-law and
advisor Humayoun Jarir. Soon afterwards he travelled to Qalacha, on
Kabul’s eastern outskirts, to meet Hekmatyar.10
The coalition between Hizb, Wahdat and Dostum would come to
be known as the Supreme Coordination Council. It received token
support from the former president Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, who,
with typical unpredictability, had decided he loathed Massoud even
more than he despised Hekmatyar. Once again, for the Hizb emir
the ends justified the means; if Dostum and Mojaddedi could help
him establish his radical Islamic state, he was willing to overlook his
personal animosity towards them both. He had no such problems with
Mazari, whom he genuinely liked and admired. The two of them had
known each other as young men and, whether or not Mazari had ever
been a member of Hizb, they had stayed friends. As the new coalition
began to take shape, they exchanged gifts that said much about their
mutual respect and contrasting political philosophies: Hekmatyar, the
radical Islamist, gave Mazari a replica of a Kalashnikov made in Egypt;
Mazari, the Hazara nationalist, gave Hekmatyar a thick handmade coat
traditionally worn by his people in Afghanistan’s central highlands.11
***
The mission to Azerbaijan and the coalition with Mazari and Dostum
showed that Hizb was starting to regain its confidence after the
setbacks of the previous year. Being forced from the palace, losing
Ustad Abdul Saboor Farid as prime minister and seeing Rabbani
extend his presidency far beyond its scheduled four-month tenure had
all been hammer blows to the party’s ambitions. But with Hekmatyar
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and Kashmir Khan at the helm, the Hizb leadership had refused to
accept defeat. The start of the party’s recovery could be traced back to
its use of the Ahmadzai nomads it had recruited earlier in the war, led
by Zardad, Chaman and Qalam. A unique mix of fearless soldiers and
violent criminals, their reputation struck fear into rival mujahideen
and civilians alike.
The Ahmadzais were happiest operating independently of the
party’s usual military structure, and Hizb initially let them do as they
pleased. While they petrified some of Jamiat’s best mujahideen, they
paid little heed to orders from more senior Hizbis. Zardad was the most
effective of the nomadic fighters and the most troublesome. His 1000
militants regarded him as a brave, good-humoured and proud man who
encouraged them not to feel inferior to anyone, including him. But, as
his cook recalled, they also thought he was ‘cursed by God’ to act as a
kind of gatekeeper for the hell that was Kabul’s civil war.12
Zardad was based at an old communist encampment in Surobi,
a district located between the Afghan capital and the Arab training
centres at Darunta. A chain strung across the broken and rutted
highway linking Kabul to Jalalabad marked his territory, and travellers
dreaded being stopped there. Zardad’s fighters searched passing civilian
vehicles, demanding money from drivers in the guise of a tax. They
randomly hauled people out of their cars and into the base, where
they were beaten with guns and electric cables.13 Zardad’s troops did
not care who they upset; on one occasion they stole a new pickup
truck, not realising that its Afghan driver was looking after the vehicle
on behalf of an Arab friend of Hekmatyar’s. When Hekmatyar heard
about the theft, he demanded that Zardad return the truck. Zardad
did so, but only after he stripped it of anything valuable, including the
upholstery and the radio. It was a vivid reminder to Hekmatyar of the
limited control he had over some of his best troops.14
To instil more discipline in the Ahmadzais’ ranks, the Hizb
intelligence chief Sabawoon organised them into a distinct special
forces unit under the command of a former communist soldier named
Hassan Khan. Hassan was serving as the head of a military division in the
Rabbani government when he secretly swore allegiance to Hekmatyar
at a meeting in Chahar Asyab in 1993. The new force under his
command was dubbed the Ahmadzai Jihadi Council, and it would go on
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to control much of eastern Afghanistan. Zardad was its military chief,

and Hekmatyar took personal charge of organising its operations.15
Like the recruits who served in Azerbaijan, the Ahmadzais were
paid by Hizb. Building on their tribal contacts, they persuaded local
Jamiat commanders in Logar, Nangarhar and rural Kabul to disarm. If
the Jamiatis resisted, they were killed or forced to flee.16 In October
1993 Zardad seized control of a hydroelectric dam near his base in
Surobi, giving him the ability to sabotage Kabul’s electricity supply at
will. Hizb denied any involvement in the operation and claimed that
the Ahmadzais were acting of their own accord, but Massoud let it be
known that he had a voice recording of Hekmatyar ordering Zardad’s
troops into battle. It was yet another example of Afghanistan’s prime
minister plotting against the government. After capturing the dam,
Zardad stormed into Tagab, a district in Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman’s
home province of Kapisa. As Jamiat commanders dug in to defend the
territory, he taunted them over his military radio. Backed by Kashmir
Khan, Zardad withstood artillery and air strikes as he laid siege to the
area. He estimated that some 250 civilians and 300 members of Jamiat
were killed within the first two weeks of the operation.17
***
The attack on Tagab marked the start of another escalation in the civil
war. By late 1993 Rabbani and Massoud knew that Hizb was planning
a major offensive with Dostum’s militia, they just didn’t know when
or how it would proceed. Fearing that other officials might side
with Hekmatyar, they opted to keep their information quiet while
they tried to plan a response. Their silence left much of the regime
woefully unprepared for what happened next. As darkness fell on 31
December, Hizb night letters appeared across Kabul, claiming that
the government had already collapsed. Hours later, the attack began.
The first some ministers knew of the plot came early on 1 January,
when Hizb artillery rounds crashed into the centre of town. Dostum’s
troops streamed into the diplomatic quarter around the abandoned
US embassy; before government forces could react, they were at the
eastern gate of the presidential palace. Meanwhile, gunmen from
Wahdat moved through the Old City, green ribbons tied to the barrels
of their rifles, ordering residents to stay inside their houses.18
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As smoke spilled from the palace grounds and Dostum’s militia

tried to break through Jamiat’s defences, Rabbani’s bodyguards rushed
him to safety. First, he was taken to an emergency bunker dug into
a mountain in northern Kabul. Then he was whisked out of Kabul
entirely, hiding in the house of a friend in the Koh Daman area of
Parwan.19 Massoud repulsed the attack on the palace and ordered air
strikes on Hizb’s Chahar Asyab headquarters, but he knew the coup
had come worryingly close to succeeding. The pattern for the year had
been set, with Hekmatyar hitting out in vain at Kabul, and Massoud
counter-punching with equal ferocity. In February, Hizb imposed a
food and medicine blockade on the capital, and soon the Red Cross was
warning that tens of thousands of civilians were at risk of starvation.
UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali wrote to Hekmatyar
asking him to ease the siege, to no avail. The fighting continued into
the summer. By June an estimated 2,000 people had been killed and
20,000 wounded in Kabul since the start of the year.20
Only the most dedicated journalists were willing to risk their
lives covering the bloodshed. Ettore Mo, an Italian correspondent for
Corriere Della Sera, was among them. In July he travelled to Afghanistan
determined to interview Hekmatyar. Mo had years of experience as a
war reporter and had interviewed the Hizb emir in Peshawar during
the late 1970s. Unsure of how to reach him now, on arriving in Kabul
he took the unusual step of asking Massoud for a government escort
to Chahar Asyab. Massoud explained that any help he provided would
only antagonise Hekmatyar and warned Mo not to go to the area at
all. The diminutive Italian was undeterred; he asked Mirwais Jalil, an
Afghan reporter for the BBC Pashto and Farsi language services, if he
could accompany him to see Hekmatyar instead. Jalil agreed, hoping
for a scoop himself.
The two journalists hired a part-time driver and headed to Chahar
Asyab on 29 July. When their car broke down halfway there, they took
a taxi for the remainder of the journey. After passing Hizb checkpoints
and artillery batteries, they reached their destination. Hekmatyar
insisted on talking to them one at a time. Mo went first and received
run-of-the-mill answers to his questions in a brief interview. Jalil then
spoke to Hekmatyar for around forty minutes. At the end of Jalil’s
interview, Hekmatyar asked Mo to wait outside so he could talk to the
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BBC reporter alone and off the record. A short while later, Jalil left the
room looking shaken.With no one else around, Hekmatyar had angrily
accused him of being biased towards Massoud and taking bribes from
the government.
Unnerved but with few alternative options, Mo and Jalil waited for
their driver to arrive—his car now fixed—and headed back towards
Kabul; Mo sat in the front, with Jalil in the back. Just as they reached
the suburb of Chihil Sutun a jeep roared past them, coming from the
direction of Chahar Asyab, and jackknifed to a stop in the road ahead,
forcing them to pull over. Five armed men were inside, their faces
covered; two of them got out, yanked open the journalists’ rear car
door, grabbed Jalil and dragged him away. Jalil pleaded for help but Mo
was worried the gunmen would turn on him if he tried to intervene.
They bundled the twenty-five-year-old into their jeep and sped off
back towards Chahar Asyab. Mo and the driver returned to Kabul,
where they reported Jalil missing. His mutilated corpse, punctured by
numerous stab and bullet wounds, was found dumped on the edge of
town the next morning. In the past, Hekmatyar had publicly denounced
the BBC’s coverage of Afghanistan as ‘fake and poisonous propaganda.’
As usual, though, there was no definitive proof that he had ordered the
murder of another one of his critics.21
Hekmatyar continued to run Hizb as if it was both a government-
in-waiting and an organised crime network. In Chahar Asyab and the
township in Shamshatu, Pakistan, Hizb operated jails where detainees
were routinely tortured. As well as blocking aid convoys, its fighters
confiscated food and cooking oil from any civilians who might be
bringing the goods into Kabul to sell. The Ahmadzai Jihadi Council
remained Hizb’s most effective weapon. On 14 September Hekmatyar
sent Zardad to capture the government’s stockpile of Scud missiles in
west Kabul. The mission was part of a wider Wahdat-led operation,
intended to purge the capital of Mazari’s foes. Several hundred Shia
fighters belonging to the pro-regime party Harakat-e Islami guarded
the weapons, but they were no match for Zardad and his men.
Hekmatyar coordinated the raid from a nearby hill. As he did so, he
still found the time to admonish the main Harakat commander in the
area in a conversation over their military radios. ‘Please be scared of
God,’ the Harakat commander implored him. ‘How many people have
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we killed? How much fighting have we done? What you are doing
is illegal.’ Hekmatyar was unmoved. ‘This government is illegal,’ he
replied. Zardad secured the Scuds and killed more than forty of the
Harakat fighters.22
Hekmatyar was taking on an increasingly dominant role in
everything Hizb did at ground level, frustrated that his great gamble
to side with Dostum had failed. He kept in constant touch not only
with his own commanders but with Mazari as well. On at least two
occasions he even visited a Red Cross hospital to meet injured Wahdat
fighters. Mazari seemed to draw inspiration from his example, leaving
the relative safety of his headquarters in Kart-e Se to prowl the
frontlines with a PKM machine gun. In spite of all his misadventures
and catastrophes, Hekmatyar still had the charisma to instil a fanatical
devotion to the cause in his followers. During a heavy battle near Deh
Mazang square, where he had been imprisoned as a student activist,
one Shia commander watched stunned as a Hizbi stood out in the
open, heavy machine gun held at the waist, shouting ‘God is greatest’
as enemy fire kicked up around him.The Hizbi seemed to welcome the
prospect of death and, sure enough, a mortar exploded at his feet and
killed him instantly. As the smoke cleared, other fighters scurried to
scrape up his body, collecting the lumps of flesh like sacred objects.23
***
While Hekmatyar’s hopes of ruling Afghanistan alone were slowly
being buried in the rubble of Kabul, he remained as determined as ever
to fight on. The Afghan capital was not the only place to suffer from
his hubris in 1994; across the country, Hizb and its coalition partners
clashed with the government in a spasm of violence that displaced
hundreds of thousands of people. The bloodshed was the climax of two
years of mayhem and murder that had changed the country forever,
destroying not just people’s lives but the nation’s history, social fabric
and culture. Although Hizb was the most obvious culprit, all of the
factions bore some responsibility.
Ever since Massoud’s forces first established control over Kabul
in 1992 they had torn around the city in old Russian jeeps, music
blaring from boom boxes, gesturing obscenely at passers by. From
the vantage points of their mountain outposts, Jamiat gunmen shot
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civilians for sport in the streets below, betting cigarettes on who could
score the most kills. Dostum’s troops were notorious for the Afghan
practice of bacha bazi, a form of pederasty in which effeminate young
boys are made to dress as women and sexually abused. The fighters
of Wahdat hammered nails into the skulls of their prisoners and stole
ancient artefacts from Kabul’s museum. None of the factions were
winning. All they had succeeding in doing was tarnishing the legacy
of the mujahideen’s historic victory over the Soviets. In the south of
the country, a group of rural Pashtuns had finally had enough. A new
revolution was stirring.
Tired of the murderous chaos in their midst, the group took up
arms reluctantly. It was made up of pious former madrassa students—
talibs—from the province of Kandahar, who felt compelled by God to
restore law and order in their community. The Taliban, as the young
villagers were collectively known, were led by Mullah Mohammed
Omar, an insignificant mujahid who had lost an eye fighting for one
of the smaller parties during the anti-Soviet jihad. Claiming to have
no interest in political power, they said their aim was straightforward:
to secure the highway that passed through Kandahar to the western
province of Herat so civilians could travel without fear of being robbed
or kidnapped.
The Taliban first found fame locally with an operation against a
notorious criminal known for raping and murdering women travelling
the road.24 After attacking his checkpoint and forcing him to flee, they
turned their attention to the warring mujahideen who had wrought
so much chaos. Hizb was first in their sights. On 12 October, a force
of 200 Taliban overran a Hizb garrison at Spin Boldak, a border town
east of Kandahar, seizing 18,000 Kalashnikovs and several armoured
vehicles.25 Their victory shocked and embarrassed Hekmatyar, who
soon began to speculate that they were the creation of a British
and American conspiracy. Yet it was the involvement of his old ally,
Pakistan, that should have concerned him the most. The Taliban’s
rapid ascent quickly attracted the support of Islamabad, which needed
security on Afghanistan’s roads to open up lucrative new trade routes
into the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. To Pakistan’s security
establishment, the Taliban seemed like a trouble-free alternative
to Hizb. Pashtun-led, with a conservative but insular view of Islam,
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Mullah Omar’s troops had the potential to be the political and military
force Islamabad needed to realise its long-held regional ambitions,
without the global jihadist pretensions of Hekmatyar.
Kandahar was not an easy place to conquer, however. While the
Muslim Youth had established a foothold there in the early 1970s,
Hekmatyar’s internationalist outlook had struggled to win over local
tribal networks. Jamiat’s less divisive approach to jihad had proved
more fruitful despite its ethnic Tajik leadership at a national level.
The Taliban’s attack on the Hizb base at Spin Boldak gave Rabbani and
Massoud pause for thought. It was clear to them that the mysterious
new group was growing in confidence. They realised that they faced a
simple choice: fight the Taliban, and open up yet another front in the
civil war, or try to join forces with Mullah Omar’s young student army
against Hizb.
As theTaliban closed in on Kandahar city, Rabbani privately admitted
that he welcomed their progress.‘These are madrassa students who have
emerged to fulfil their religious duties,’ he told one minister. ‘People
are being oppressed, there are a lot of checkpoints and looting, so they
are trying to solve these problems. We should all be glad.’26 Rabbani
subsequently ordered a senior Jamiat official, Abdul Ghaffar Sayeem—
popularly known as Modir Ghaffar—to go to Kandahar to assess the
situation. Massoud approved the mission. After several trips, Modir
Ghaffar reported back that the most powerful Jamiat commander in
Kandahar, Mullah Naqibullah, was corrupt and unpopular; if he did
not step down voluntarily, the Taliban would remove him by force
and be welcomed as heroes. Sensing an opportunity to curry favour
with the Taliban, Rabbani quietly ordered Mullah Naqibullah to hand
control of Kandahar over to the new movement rather than face it
on the battlefield.27 The Taliban entered Afghanistan’s second largest
city without a fight on 5 November and immediately imposed a strict
interpretation of Islamic law. Women could only leave their homes
accompanied by a male relative and men were required to grow fist-
length beards. No longer content just to secure the highway, the Taliban
added more tanks and guns to their armoury, together with six Mig-
21 fighter jets, and pushed on towards the neighbouring province of
Helmand.28 It fell to them on 25 November.With a swathe of southern
Afghanistan now under their control, the Taliban leadership felt
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confident enough to formalise their ties with the Rabbani government.

As their intermediary they appointed a Jamiat commander who had
defected to them.
Rayes Abdul Wahid was in his late thirties and from the district of
Baghran, in northern Helmand. Well known locally for persuading a
Soviet prisoner of war to convert to Islam and join the mujahideen,
in 1991 Jamiat had published a glowing account of him in one of
its newspapers. Even then he possessed the rigid discipline and
unscrupulous honesty that Afghans initially associated with the Taliban’s
founders. ‘Wahid is famous for his personal courage and desire to
implement Sharia in the areas he controls,’ the newspaper said, adding
that he had captured criminals and secured local roads, making them
‘safe for travellers day and night.’29
In late 1994 Wahid sent one of his sons—still just a teenager—to
Kabul to meet officials in the Rabbani government. The son requested
financial help for the Taliban in exchange for an offer to ‘cooperate
in the peace process.’30 Intrigued, Rabbani, Massoud and the rest of
Jamiat’s inner circle formed a delegation to travel to Helmand and
open talks with the Taliban leadership. Jamiat’s team was led by Modir
Ghaffar, who had made the earlier trips to Kandahar on Rabbani’s
behalf. Its other members were Mohammed Sediq Chakari, who had
studied Islamic law alongside Modir Ghaffar in Saudi Arabia, and Sakhi
Dad Fayez, an ageing scholar from Wardak. All three were members of
Jamiat’s executive council, its highest decision-making body. Rabbani’s
close friend Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf was informed of the plan, his
Ittehad party still a small but influential stakeholder in the Jamiat-
dominated government. Other figures from minority factions in the
government were deliberately kept out of the loop. As Modir Ghaffar
himself admitted years later, the regime in Kabul was effectively a two-
man autocracy at this point. ‘The only decision makers for the whole
country were Rabbani and Massoud,’ he said.31
The delegates flew by plane from Kabul to the western city of Herat,
where they were joined by three subordinates of the most powerful
Jamiat commander in that part of Afghanistan, Ismael Khan. Together,
the six men boarded two helicopters and flew to Helmand. Their
summit with the Taliban took place in Gereshk, on the highway leading
to Kandahar. They spent three days in the hardscrabble town, staying
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in a guest house of the Jamiat defector Wahid. They had cordial talks
with Mullah Mohammed Ghaus, foreign minister in the future Taliban
regime, and Mullah Borjan, a revered military commander. When
Wahid introduced them to Mullah Omar, they were unimpressed; the
Taliban leader looked like a poor villager rather than the head of a
pioneering political movement. Aged in his mid-thirties, his beard was
ragged and he sat on his haunches, chewing tobacco. He wore a loosely-
wound turban and covered his thin, almost frail physique with a pair
of traditional Afghan trousers and two long baggy shirts to keep out
the winter chill. All he said was the formal Islamic greeting, ‘Peace be
upon you,’ and the traditional Pashto welcome, ‘May you not be tired.’
For the remainder of the three days he hardly uttered another word.
While the Jamiatis considered his eccentric behaviour uncharacteristic
of a leader, it was precisely this austere humility that appealed to Afghans
who were tired of the corruption and arrogance of the mainstream
mujahideen parties. When the Jamiatis went to pray in a local mosque
they were struck by the love that worshippers there had for the Taliban
and its timid leader. Overcome with emotion, one man stood up and
declared, ‘Oh people, I saw the Prophet Mohammed in a dream. He
told me, ‘Mullah Omar is leader of the faithful in Afghanistan. All of
you need to obey him.’
As the negotiations unfolded, the Taliban explained that they had
no problem with Massoud or Rabbani but felt compelled ‘to fight
Hekmatyar, Dostum and the Shia’ Muslims in Wahdat—exactly what
the Jamiat delegates wanted to hear. The Taliban asked for money
and tanks, and stressed that the aid should come from the central
government rather than one single party. While this condition was a
point of principle for the Taliban, it was a matter of semantics for the
Jamiatis. The delegates agreed to provide dozens of armoured vehicles
and regular financial support worth several million dollars. As they
prepared to leave after three days of talks, Mullah Omar finally spoke
again. ‘God bless you,’ he said.32
This backing would prove crucial, allowing the Taliban to grow
into a much larger, ruthlessly effective fighting machine. The
fledgling movement now had support from the Afghan government
and Pakistan, which transformed it into an unstoppable force. Over
the next two months the Taliban conquered much of southern and
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western Afghanistan and their ranks swelled with madrassa students

from Pakistan. Jamiat financed them throughout this period, handing
over millions of dollars on the understanding that they would use the
money to fund their campaign against Hizb, not wage war against
the government. On one occasion, Chakari flew to Kandahar in a
plane loaded with hard currency to aid the group’s relentless march
northwards. The Taliban still claimed to have no interest in seizing
power in Kabul, and Rabbani and Massoud believed them.33
Hekmatyar watched the success of this powerful new force with
alarm, and resolved to stop it. His moment came when the Taliban
reached Ghazni, some ninety miles south of Kabul. Sensing that this
was a make or break moment, Hekmatyar travelled to the province
to oversee its defence. He was joined by the Ahmadzai commanders
Zardad, Qalam and Chaman, whose ruthlessness in battle matched the
Taliban’s. Wahdat deployed around 1000 Shia fighters to help Hizb.
Hekmatyar spent four weeks in Ghazni, ignoring rumours that the
Taliban had pinpointed his whereabouts and were planning to capture
him. His efforts stemmed the Taliban’s advance, with Hizb establishing
a defensive position in a historic part of the provincial capital and
taking new ground in the district of Dih Y   ak. This success was short-
lived. Hekmatyar summoned a senior intelligence operative to the
province to sure up Hizb’s defences, only for him to become embroiled
in a needless dispute with a local mujahideen commander. While the
Taliban were united, Hizb was suddenly disorganised and distracted;
Hekmatyar’s men were overrun and he was forced to retreat.Yet again,
at a crucial moment, Hizb’s military strategy had failed.34
After Ghazni the Taliban moved even closer to Kabul, attacking
Wardak. Hekmatyar tried to organise a new line of defence, but before
he could he found himself surrounded in the picturesque Tangi valley,
scurrying through wheat fields and apple orchards to avoid being killed
or captured. He narrowly escaped and returned to Chahar Asyab. As
he trudged into base he was exhausted, his feet swollen, his trousers
pulled halfway up his legs; his clothes were filthy and his beard was
covered in dust. His bedraggled appearance reflected the way many
Hizbis felt. ‘Throughout the nation there was propaganda that the
Taliban were holy men,’ remembered the Ahmadzai commander
Qalam later. ‘It was said they carried Qur’ans in their hands and if
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you killed them you would go to hell; if they killed you, you would
still go to hell. This propaganda broke our morale.’ Hizbis had gone
from regarding themselves as righteous holy warriors to questioning
their own motives and actions. The Taliban had stolen the mantle that
Hekmatyar had held since the Muslim Youth’s days as the leader of
Afghanistan’s puritanical Islamic vanguard.Years of civil war had fatally
wrecked Hizb-e Islami’s sense of purpose, and the way it was seen
by Afghans.35
Not everyone gave up. Hizb sent a large contingent of its Arab
recruits into battle in Wardak, among them Abu Khabab al-Masri,
the Egyptian chemical weapons expert from the Darunta training
camp.36 Kashmir Khan also rushed to the scene to confront the Taliban
and fought for two days before retreating. Hizb’s hopes now rested
with its commander Toran Amanullah, who had grown up locally and
was adamant that he would stay and fight. While he was unafraid of
the Taliban, his men were not; their spirits were low and, after the
moral certainty they felt fighting the communists and the Rabbani
government, they could not bring themselves to kill religious students
who seemed to want to bring law and order to the country. In a
desperate final effort to rally Hizb’s forces, Toran Amanullah gathered
his commanders together for a pep talk. They looked embarrassed as
they refused to fight, but they remained determined not to use their
weapons against the Taliban. ‘You will all remember this moment and
come to regret it,’ Toran Amanullah told them.
The Taliban surged through Wardak and into Maidan Shahr. Toran
Amanullah fled to the neighbouring district of Nurkh; for the next
twelve days he was missing, causing the Hizb leadership to suspect that
he had been killed. In his haste to leave, he left behind the jeep that
defined his status as one of the party’s best commanders: a black SUV.
The Taliban stole the vehicle and murdered his driver; they also seized
a huge cache of weapons he had been stockpiling for Hizb. But despite
not being able to make contact with headquarters, Toran Amanullah
was still alive. Hiking through Taliban lines with the help of a few of his
most loyal troops, he made his way safely to Peshawar.37
While Hekmatyar suspected that Jamiat was colluding with the
Taliban, he did not know the full extent of their cooperation. In a last
roll of the dice, he wrote to Rabbani, warning him that he was playing
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with fire by cooperating with Mullah Omar, and urging him to work
with Hizb. His plea was well timed. As the Taliban edged ever closer
to Kabul, Rabbani had started to doubt the wisdom of his strategy.
Hekmatyar’s letter led to a passionate debate within Jamiat’s political
committee. One member pointed out that at least they knew Hekmatyar
and understood his motives, whereas the Taliban remained an almost
mythical force, one they feared could yet prove more dangerous than
Hizb. Another member wanted Jamiat to double cross Hizb and the
Taliban by pretending to support them both and encouraging them to
destroy each other. Massoud rejected each of these ideas out of hand.
Instead, he urged his colleagues to stay the course and use the Taliban
to defeat his old enemy Hekmatyar. His opinion held sway.38
Hekmatyar and the rest of the Hizb leadership fled Chahar Asyab on
the night of 14 February 1995, hurtling down a dirt back road towards
Zardad’s base in Surobi. It was the middle of Ramadan, ordinarily a time
of peace and contemplation in the Islamic calendar. Planes from the
Rabbani government strafed the column of jeeps and armoured vehicles
as they bumped and swerved through the moonscape. Massoud had
correctly guessed Hekmatyar’s escape route and was already attacking
Surobi from Kapisa, to the north.When Hekmatyar realised that he was
in danger of being boxed in, he ordered the convoy to stop in a secluded
area and wait. Eventually, he received the all clear: the Hizbis at Surobi
had pushed Massoud’s troops back. The convoy continued on.39
For once, Hekmatyar was right to think his enemies were conspiring
against him. The US did not support the Taliban, but American
officials were watching their progress with interest. At this stage the
Taliban had not expressed anti-US views, nor were they linked to
Al-Qaeda and other foreign extremist groups. As far as Washington
was concerned, Hizb was the sponsor of terrorism and Hekmatyar
the threat to regional peace, rather than the parochial mullahs from
Kandahar. The Taliban remained a curiously local phenomenon: young,
puritanical religious students from impoverished villages who melded
ancient Pashtun honour codes with an interpretation of Islam that
seemed better suited to the seventh century than the post-Cold War
new world order.
In November 1994 the US consul in Peshawar sent a confidential
cable to the US Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, reporting that
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Pakistani sources claimed the Taliban were surrogates for Rabbani.

‘All observers agree that they appear to be anti-Hekmatyar,’ the cable
added. The consul had heard that both Pakistan and elements of the
Afghan government were supporting the Taliban, and warned that this
strategy could yet backfire. They ‘may find that they have created a
tiger that is more than willing to take independent action and not be
anyone’s tool,’ the consul wrote. Another cable to the US Secretary of
State, this time from the American embassy in Tajikistan, described a
meeting in which a Jamiat official talked to American diplomats about
the ‘eclipse of Hekmatyar’s power.’ The Jamiati outlined the draconian
policies the Taliban were already implementing in areas under their
control, from closing girls’ schools to banning innocent pastimes like
the playing of music. Despite this, he admitted that Massoud’s forces
had entered Chahar Asyab, seized any weapons Hizb had left behind,
then withdrawn ‘at the request of the Taliban.’The official, who was the
acting head of Afghanistan’s national bank, ‘pronounced Hekmatyar a
spent military force,’ the cable said.40
***
Jamiat’s expectation of imminent victory thanks to its cynical alliance
with the Taliban was premature; Hekmatyar was down but he was not
yet out. As he was preparing to leave Chahar Asyab, he had sent an
aide to the house of the Wahdat leader Mazari, his coalition partner,
to warn him of Hizb’s imminent evacuation. Mazari couldn’t hear
too well—his senses dulled by a mixture of encroaching old age and
the unrelenting pounding of artillery and rocket fire—so he shuffled
closer to the aide to make sure he fully understood Hekmatyar’s
message. The aide told him that Hizb was surrounded and would
have to leave its headquarters; he invited Mazari to join Hekmatyar
in eastern Afghanistan, where they could regroup together. Mazari
politely declined the offer and asked the aide to give Hekmatyar a
short message in return: ‘You were a man of your word,’ he said. ‘You
should go because you have a choice, but I can’t leave because I don’t
have a choice.’ The aide asked for an explanation. Propaganda posters
emblazoned with slogans from Mazari’s speeches lay scattered on the
floor around them. The Wahdat leader picked one of the pictures up
and asked the Hizbi to read it. ‘Oh my Hazara tribe, I swear until my
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last drop of blood is shed I will not leave you alone,’ it said. Mazari then
added simply, ‘I made an oath to my people.’ All he asked of Hekmatyar
was for Hizb to send him some of Dostum’s militiamen who were
based in Chahar Asyab. He might need the extra firepower. 41
Mazari was worried about the Rabbani government attacking
him, not the Taliban. Mullah Omar’s troops had yet to express openly
sectarian views and the Shia leader still believed that he could persuade
them to work with him. Mazari sent a six-man team to talk to Taliban
commanders camped out at Hizb’s old headquarters in Chahar Asyab.
The delegates met Mullah Borjan, one of the Talibs involved in the talks
with Jamiat in Helmand. Mullah Borjan asked them to order their men
in Kabul to disarm so that the Taliban could filter safely into the city.
When the request was relayed back to Mazari, he reluctantly agreed.
The Hazaras had fought hard to hold the capital against Jamiat. They
meekly opened the door to the Taliban.42
By now it was clear to the Jamiat leadership that the Taliban
had deceived them. The Rabbani government had intercepted
communications between Hekmatyar’s old envoy to the Arab fighters,
Jan Baz Sarfaraz, and Mullah Omar, discussing a possible alliance
between Hizb, the Taliban and Wahdat.43 Alarmed, Massoud rushed
to come up with a new strategy, calling senior government officials
and an Iranian diplomat to a meeting in the neighbourhood of Kart-e
Parwan to discuss their options. The diplomat urged Massoud to show
Mazari mercy and entice him back into the government’s fold. Massoud
realised that he had little choice; he agreed to offer the Wahdat leader
safe passage from west Kabul, and in exchange, he expected Mazari
to hand control of the area over to the government so it could block
the Taliban’s advance. The diplomat relayed the offer to Mazari, fully
expecting him to be grateful for the lifeline. Mazari, however, had
never forgiven Massoud for their past disagreements. ‘I’ll surrender to
the Taliban and I’ll even surrender to a dog, but I will not surrender to
Massoud,’ he replied.44
As Mazari let the Taliban filter into Kabul, Massoud ordered
a devastating counter-attack. It proved a surprisingly easy fight.
Unfamiliar with the city’s maze of rubble-strewn streets, the Taliban
were slaughtered. Mazari was now alone; his forces had been disarmed,
and his allies either killed or exiled. On 12 March, he fled towards
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Hizb’s old headquarters at Chahar Asyab, hoping to find refuge with

the Taliban. Exactly what happened next remains a mystery. Perhaps
suspecting that he had lured their fighters into a trap, the Taliban
arrested him. The following day they forced him onto a helicopter
bound for Kandahar. The helicopter landed abruptly in Ghazni, with
later reports suggesting it had crashed after Mazari and other detainees
on board tried to wrest control from the pilot. Mazari escaped and
headed towards Jaghatu, a predominantly Shia area, only for a passing
Taliban patrol to come upon the downed aircraft and realise he was
missing. Mazari was just thirty minutes from safety when the patrol
caught up with him. This time the Taliban made no mistake. They shot
him dead.

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 20

THE GREAT GAME

Hekmatyar spent most of 1995 drifting around eastern Afghanistan. For

several months he settled in Jalalabad, the city that had delivered his first
catastrophic defeat six years earlier. Hizb had never fully recovered from
that loss to the communists. The dead rebels from the siege were now
commemorated as martyrs beneath roadside shrines of slate and rock,
but the city had moved on; Jalalabad’s languid evenings and bustling
streets felt a world away from the devastation of Kabul. The cross-party
coalition of mujahideen commanders who peacefully ruled the city
welcomed Hekmatyar not as a statesman in exile or the great Islamic
warrior he still imagined himself to be, but as a fellow Pashtun in need
of shelter. They did not want to take sides in a civil war that had only
become more duplicitous and complex with the rise of the Taliban.1
Of the three Hizbis on Jalalabad’s ruling council, Fazel Haq Mujahid
was the closest to Hekmatyar. He had remained steadfast in his
devotion to the party’s domestic and international agenda, facilitating
its troop deployments to Azerbaijan, helping ferry Arab fighters to the
Hizb training camps at Darunta and providing support where needed
for Hekmatyar’s forces at Chahar Asyab. Even rival commanders in the
city held him in high regard. Fazel Haq vacated his own house so that
Hekmatyar could live alone on the premises with his first wife and
children. The Hizb leader’s second wife—the widow of his murdered
brother—stayed in a military base under Fazel Haq’s control.2
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After three years living on edge in Chahar Asyab, constantly

vulnerable to attacks from Massoud’s forces, the months in Jalalabad
came as a relief to Hekmatyar. He held court in Fazel Haq’s house,
hosting a wedding for one of his sons, Salahuddin, and welcoming
old friends. Mohammed Amin Weqad, the only other person to have
led Hizb, came to see him. They had reconciled earlier in the civil
war, but then resumed their feud when Weqad voiced disapproval of
Hekmatyar’s alliance with Dostum. At Fazel Haq’s house they again
patched up their differences. Another visitor was a former university
professor from Hekmatyar’s Muslim Youth days. Neither a communist
nor an Islamist, the old teacher urged him to make peace with the
Rabbani government: ‘You did not do jihad alone,’ he reminded him.
‘The nation of Afghanistan supported you.’ Hekmatyar resented the
professor’s tone and snapped back. ‘You teachers brought Afghanistan
to this destiny,’ he said. ‘Do not advise us now.’ Hekmatyar’s years
in the Muslim Youth had defined him and he was not about to take
instructions from someone who had let the communists operate freely
on the university campus.3
When Hekmatyar was not busy with visitors he used his time in
Jalalabad to think. The Taliban had yet to penetrate eastern Afghanistan
and the city was one of the few places in which he felt safe. His most
important Afghan ally, Abdul Ali Mazari, was now dead, and his decision
to work with Dostum had backfired disastrously. The movement
Hekmatyar had devoted his life to was at its lowest ebb in years.Yet he
refused to give up: jihad lasts forever, he told himself, defeats do not.
After much soul searching, he agreed to meet representatives of the
Taliban leadership in Do Bandi, a remote part of Logar in the district
of Khushi. Worried that the summit might be a trap, he travelled there
from Hizb’s base in Spin-e Shigar with 300 mujahideen. Haji Islamuddin,
his Al-Qaeda-trained bodyguard, kept watch at his side.
The historic Taliban-Hizb meeting, which neither group would
publicly acknowledge, took place in a dank two-storey hotel once
popular with mujahideen heading from Pakistan to northern
Afghanistan during the war against the Soviets.The Hizbis arrived first,
in mid-afternoon. Just as they were settling in, the Taliban’s convoy
pulled up, and at least 200 of their fighters clambered down from
trucks and jeeps in a hubbub of chatter and cries of ‘praise be to God.’
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 THE GREAT GAME

Some had kohl painted under their eyes and henna decorating their
hands; many wore their hair long and tucked behind their ears, like the
Prophet Mohammed. The Hizbis had stopped for the ‘Asr prayer on the
way to the meeting and saw no need to go through the ritual again, so
they stood respectfully to one side as the Talibs placed their rifles on
the floor and prayed. Mullah Ehsanullah Ehsan, a future head of the
state bank under the Taliban regime, was the most senior among them.
He finished his prayer, then retired to one of the hotel’s rooms to talk
to Hekmatyar, joined by a few select colleagues.
Mullah Ehsanullah told Hekmatyar that if he took an oath of loyalty
to the Taliban, the movement’s leader, Mullah Omar, would treat
him fairly and not seek retribution for his past mistakes. Hekmatyar
responded that Hizb was ready to form a military alliance with the
Taliban, and to discuss any political issues facing Afghanistan, but
neither he nor his men would swear allegiance. The response irritated
Mullah Ehsanullah and tempers soon frayed. The Hizbis vented their
anger at the remarkable events of recent months, which had seen the
Taliban wipe out their headquarters in Chahar Asyab and their footholds
throughout southern Afghanistan. One Hizbi angrily rebuked Mullah
Ehsanullah for turning up to the meeting in the black SUV—a Toyota
Land Cruiser—stolen from Toran Amanullah during the battle for
control of Wardak and Maidan Shahr. After two hours, it was clear that
the talks were going nowhere and, tired of arguing, both groups headed
up to the roof for a final prayer. As Hekmatyar emerged into the open,
some Taliban foot soldiers dropped their guard and clambered around
him excitedly. Most of them were from Kandahar or Helmand and had
only heard about the Hizb emir through secondhand war stories. They
cried out his name, hugging him and kissing his hands. Despite their
vastly contrasting fortunes, they still saw themselves as simple students
and Hekmatyar as a famous mujahid who had freed Afghanistan from
Soviet occupation. The commotion only stopped when a young Talib
took it upon himself to lead the prayer, his voice ringing out above
the din as he called the faithful into line. The Talib’s actions said much
about the iconoclastic new movement. As the most experienced and
learned man there, Hekmatyar would normally have assumed the role
of imam; now he was just one of many in the congregation. In belated
recognition of his stature, the other Taliban ushered him towards the
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 NIGHT LETTERS

front so he could stand in the first row of worshippers, but there was
no disguising his waning influence. He still had to bow down behind
the young man leading the prayer.4
***
Later that year Hekmatyar decamped from Jalalabad to Surobi, some
fifty miles west, where he moved into one of the king’s old winter
palaces. The spectacular riverside setting kept him near to the Arabs at
Darunta but put him closer to Kabul, in one of Hizb’s few remaining
strongholds. Surobi was still under the control of the Ahmadzai
commander Zardad and Hekmatyar felt at home there, surrounded
by people he trusted; Kashmir Khan and Waheedullah Sabawoon now
lived nearby, close to the local bazaar; Ustad Abdul Saboor Farid and
Engineer Tareq also spent much of their time in the area.5 Hizb was
not yet a redundant force but it was no longer the dramatic agent
of change it had once been, driving events in Afghanistan; now that
mantle had been seized by the Taliban. Hematyar had few options left
other than to wait and see how events played out. With the Rabbani
government and the Taliban at war, he hoped both sides might look
to him as a kingmaker, able to swing the conflict in their favour. This
was more than just another delusion of grandeur: although Hizb was a
shadow of its former self, it still had thousands of well-trained fighters
in its ranks. Hekmatyar knew that the Taliban were prepared to give
him almost nothing in return for his support. All he could do now
was hope that the government—which he despised and which he had
fought so hard against—came up with a better offer.
Sure enough, Massoud sent his consigliere Abdul Rahman to talk
to Hekmatyar in what would turn out to be the first round of months
of negotiations between the Rabbani government and Hizb. Two days
later, Hekmatyar sent a Hizb representative to meet Rabbani at the
president’s secret mountain cave complex north of Kabul. More than
three years into a tenure that was initially meant to last just four
months, Rabbani lived in permanent fear. Increasingly temperamental
and prone to explosive outbursts of anger, he was in perpetual
hiding—scared to set foot in his palace lest the Taliban or Hizb attack
it. Nevertheless, he was reluctant to loosen his grip on power, and
said that Hekmatyar could rejoin the government on three conditions:
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 THE GREAT GAME

Rabbani must be allowed to retain the presidency, Massoud must be

allowed to stay defence minister, and Jamiat must keep control of the
state’s intelligence apparatus. If Hekmatyar agreed to those terms,
Hizb-e Islami could run the rest of the regime. The emissary replied
with a demand from Hekmatyar that Rabbani must step down as
president for a neutral candidate acceptable to Hizb and Jamiat. The
game of offer and counter-offer had begun.
That night, Hekmatyar’s emissary stayed as a guest of the
government in a double room at the Intercontinental Hotel, another of
Kabul’s landmark buildings reduced to a bullet-scarred edifice. Under
the king, diplomats and businessmen had lounged by its outdoor
swimming pool, soaking in the sun. Now there was no electricity or
running water and the Hizbi was one of the few guests staying there.
In the distance he could see the western neighbourhoods that had
once been under the control of Mazari’s Wahdat party, reduced to a
flattened no man’s land populated by rabid dogs and a few desperate
civilians. Further on were the mountains that led to Wardak and Taliban
territory. The fight for control of Kabul had reduced the capital to
little more than ruins.
The following evening a Mercedes-Benz chugged up the hotel’s
steep driveway and eased to a stop outside the foyer; the car had
belonged to the communist president Najib but was now familiar
across town as Massoud’s. Hekmatyar’s emissary climbed in, ready
to meet the ‘Lion of Panjshir,’ who was waiting at his home in Wazir
Akbar Khan, near the vacant US embassy. The Hizbi had known him
as a young man and they greeted each other cordially, the ravages of
time left unspoken. Massoud’s good looks had faded; dark bags sagged
under his eyes and deep worry lines were etched into his forehead.
His hair was grey and even his most trivial words seemed weighed
down with exhaustion. Massoud tried to ease the tension by making a
joke about a reputation Hekmatyar enjoyed among his supporters as a
kind of Islamist shaman who could interpret their dreams. After a fitful
night’s sleep they would often come to him, seeking an explanation for
the strange visions they had seen. Massoud thought it absurd and made
what he thought was a good-humoured remark. It didn’t go down well.
The emissary, a Pashtun named Haji Naqib Mohammed Fared, told him
to be more respectful or he would end the negotiations immediately.
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 NIGHT LETTERS

Massoud apologised and they returned to the business at hand. As

they talked into the night Massoud offered a candid insight into the
divisions tearing at the government. He revealed that several Hizbis,
including Mohammed Amin Weqad, had recently approached Rabbani
with a plan to oust Hekmatyar as leader of the party and strike a deal
with Jamiat. Rabbani supported the idea but Massoud said he thought
any agreement without Hekmatyar’s approval would be meaningless.
They finished talking at 1am, happy with their progress. Massoud
drove the Hizbi back to the hotel himself, leaving his bodyguards and
driver behind for the journey through Kabul’s empty streets.6
In the ensuing months Massoud cooled on the idea of striking a
deal with Hekmatyar. Speaking in private to fellow ministers, he
described the negotiations with Hizb as a mistake that would weaken
the government and lead to more bloodshed. He said he was reluctant
to make these concerns widely known because Rabbani would accuse
him of wanting to hoard power for himself.7 Whether Massoud was
genuinely conflicted in his thoughts or told different people different
things to mask his true intentions was uncertain. Everyone in the
government and Hizb knew that he would never trust Hekmatyar;
aside from their decades-long political rivalry, he blamed the Hizb emir
for killing his brother in Peshawar. But Massoud was also a pragmatist
and a realist, not an ideologue, and he recognised that the Taliban were
now a greater threat to Jamiat than Hizb. A short-term compromise
with Hekmatyar, however unpalatable, made strategic sense.
The urgency of the situation facing the government was underlined
in spring 1996, when thousands of elders and clerics gathered in
Kandahar to anoint the Taliban’s Mullah Omar emir-ul mu’minin, leader
of the world’s Muslims—the same title that Ayman al-Zawahiri had
tried to bestow on himself when he wrote to Hekmatyar. To mark the
occasion, Mullah Omar took out a cloak said to have belonged to the
Prophet Mohammed that was usually kept at a shrine in the town and
draped it around his shoulders. For the first time, he openly called
for jihad against the Kabul regime. The Taliban’s growing confidence
and ambition terrified the mainstream mujahideen leaders and seven
weeks later, on 24 May, Massoud, Rabbani and Hekmatyar finally
signed another power-sharing agreement. With encouragement from
Qazi Hussain Ahmad, the leader of Pakistan’s Jamaat-e Islami party,
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 THE GREAT GAME

both sides had diluted their demands.8 Rabbani would now stay on as
president and Hekmatyar would resume his post as prime minister;
Massoud would quit as minister of defence. In a surprise concession,
Hekmatyar agreed to step down as Hizb leader to allay fears that he
might portray the deal as some kind of personal victory. Kashmir Khan
was appointed as the new acting emir—only the third leader in the
party’s twenty-year history.9
***
There was deep-rooted opposition to the power-sharing agreement
within both parties. Haji Abubakr quit as commander of the Army of
Sacrifice in protest at what he regarded as a betrayal of Hizb’s values.
When Hekmatyar went to see him in Mehtar Lam, the capital of
Laghman province, asking him to join the new regime, Abubakr was
incensed. ‘If you are joining a coalition with them you should say all
this fighting was unlawful and we only did it because we are ignorant
people,’ he said. ‘But if all this fighting was right, it means this coalition
is a mistake. I am not going with you to the Northern Alliance. I
consider them to be enemies of this country—not only of Hizb but this
country.’10 It was an answer that Hekmatyar himself would have once
been proud to give: defiant, self-righteous and eloquent. The power-
sharing agreement also damaged Hekmatyar’s standing among the
Arab fighters he had taken under his wing, who began to crack jokes
among themselves about his megalomania. In an effort to keep them on
side, he visited Darunta, where militants from Algeria, Egypt and the
Gulf continued to experiment with chemical weapons. He also hosted
some of the foreign fighters at his Surobi headquarters. Speaking in his
flawless Arabic, he told the recruits of a vivid dream he once had in
which he was holding two swords. ‘With one sword I was fighting the
Russians, but with the other I was fighting the Americans,’ he said.11
Despite his reduced power and the humiliation of his compromise
with the government, Hekmatyar remained committed to the Arabs.
His willingness to foment their insurgencies in the Middle East and
aid terrorist campaigns in the West was the one area of his political
career in which he was unerringly consistent. If anything, the further
he got from being able to establish his radical Islamist state in Kabul,
the more determined he became to spread extremism far beyond
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 NIGHT LETTERS

the nation’s borders: conscious, perhaps, that this would be his most
enduring legacy.
In radical mosques and madrassas the world over, Afghanistan was
renowned as a training centre for armed jihad. There were various
camps in the lawless countryside where foreign extremists could learn
their trade outside of Hizb’s jurisdiction but Darunta remained the
most popular destination, giving Hekmatyar an enduring relevance
on the international stage despite Hizb’s weakened state. Recruits
desperate to study at Darunta invariably stayed at a Hizb guest house in
Peshawar while they were put in touch with Abu Zubaydah, a freelance
Palestinian jihadist and fixer who lived across town. Zubaydah—who
was born and raised in Saudi Arabia—vetted the recruits, weeding
out potential spies and malcontents, then passed them on to a Hizb
commander who escorted them across the border. The secrecy was
necessary not just to avoid Western intelligence agencies; Pakistan had
also begun to crack down on foreign fighters in its territory after a
November 1995 attack on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad.12
Although the camps at Darunta had no formal connection with
Al-Qaeda, the two groups were edging closer, putting Hekmatyar
on course for a direct confrontation with the US. By 1996 the CIA
regarded Osama bin Laden ‘as one of the most significant financial
sponsors of Islamic extremist activities in the world.’13 The Al-Qaeda
leader was still living in Sudan, where he had been joined by Ayman al-
Zawahiri. Bin Laden had ploughed much of his personal fortune into
the local economy, building a major highway, buying up vast tracts of
farmland and investing millions of dollars in a Sudanese bank, business
ventures to facilitate the training camps he ran for Palestinian, Algerian
and Tunisian militants. His ambition and power were rising. Al-Qaeda
was smuggling arms into Africa from Pakistan, had supported a failed
attempt to assassinate the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and was
suspected of plotting to kill the CIA’s Khartoum station chief. While
the US lacked sufficient evidence for an indictment, it wanted Sudan to
expel him.14 Under growing pressure from the Sudanese government,
bin Laden turned to Hekmatyar for advice.
Stripped of his Saudi citizenship, the Al-Qaeda leader could not
return home. Much of the Middle East was equally off-limits thanks
to his burgeoning reputation as a troublemaker out to overthrow the
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 THE GREAT GAME

brutal authoritarian regimes that dominated the region. His ancestral

home of Y   emen was a possible option, but there were few guarantees
that he would be safe there. Hekmatyar told bin Laden that there
was only one solution: to return to Afghanistan. His motivations for
inviting him back were twofold: firstly, he liked and admired the Saudi,
and wanted to keep him from falling into the clutches of his enemies;
secondly, Hekmatyar needed bin Laden if he was to further his own
long-term agenda.
Without consulting Hizb’s executive council—and although he
was technically no longer the party’s leader—Hekmatyar conspired
with the Sudanese regime to smuggle bin Laden into Afghanistan.
Fazel Haq Mujahid made two trips to Khartoum to meet the Al-Qaeda
leader as they plotted the transfer. On both occasions he flew to Sudan
from Islamabad, with the approval of the Pakistani government. The
second, decisive visit came when he was part of a four-man delegation
from Jalalabad’s ruling mujahideen council, invited to Khartoum
under the guise of congratulating Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir
on winning the country’s recent general election. Fazel Haq knew that
the real purpose of the trip was to help bin Laden escape, but the other
members of the team were not informed of his plans. Arriving in the
spring of 1996, the delegates each had a room to themselves on the
fourth floor of the Coral Khartoum Hotel, on the banks of the Blue
Nile. They met Bashir and Hassan al-Turabi, the influential Sudanese
cleric who had once sworn allegiance to Hekmatyar in Peshawar. In
secret, Fazel Haq also met bin Laden, just as he had done on his first
visit to the country. After three days the Hizb commander returned to
Afghanistan on a commercial flight. Bin Laden left Sudan on a private
jet soon afterwards, landing in Jalalabad on 18 May 1996.
After his arrival, bin Laden went to Fazel Haq’s home for lunch.
As he sat there, waiting for the food to be served, he noticed a pile of
woollen Soviet blankets in the room. He pointed them out and asked
for them to be removed, quietly admonishing his hosts for wrapping
themselves in something that had once belonged to the infidel troops
of the 40th Army. To Fazel Haq, using the blankets had been a simple
matter of convenience and resources, but bin Laden’s extremism and
obsession with religious purity had clearly reached a level beyond even
Hizb’s. Hekmatyar hoped that the Saudi’s resolve had been hardened
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 NIGHT LETTERS

by his time in Sudan and he was not disappointed. Satisfied that the
Al-Qaeda leader had settled into his new surroundings, he persuaded
Jalalabad’s mujahideen council and the Rabbani government to let bin
Laden stay in the country. Hizb’s extremist army was compromised
and depleted yet, through bin Laden, Hekmatyar’s dream of an
international jihad remained alive.15
***
Years earlier, soon after the Soviet withdrawal, Hizb night letters
bearing Hekmatyar’s signature had appeared across Kabul.16 They
predicted that he would ride triumphantly into the city on a white
horse, in homage to Islamic conquerers of old, and pray at Pul-e
Khishti mosque, where a memorial ceremony had once been held
for the Muslim Youth leader Abdul Rahim Niazi. On 26 June 1996,
Hekmatyar finally set off for the Afghan capital, his return facilitated
not by military victory but by a political deal borne of weakness. It
would be the first time he had returned to Kabul since his days as a
student activist on the run from the Daoud regime.
Leaving Surobi under blue skies, Hekmatyar rode towards the
city in a silver Toyota Land Cruiser gifted to him by bin Laden. The
expensive eight-cylinder vehicle was fitted with reinforced armoured
doors designed to withstand a bomb blast or heavy machine gun fire.
The vehicle drove steadily, past great slabs of rock that seemed to have
fallen from the heavens and narrow defiles once used as ambush points
by the mujahideen. Large chunks of the road were torn up by mines
and rocket fire. Old Soviet tanks littered the landscape. The Kabul
River glided to the right, not yet clogged by the trash and excrement
that choked its flow in the capital. As the road climbed through a series
of switchbacks and tunnels, the 4x4 began to slow, its powerful engine
labouring under the strain of the ascent and weight of armour. Steam
and smoke began to spew from the bonnet. If the Land Cruiser was a
modern white horse, it was not Hekmatyar’s destiny to ride in such
grandeur into Kabul.
Reluctantly, Hekmatyar climbed into another SUV and continued
his journey, now joined by hundreds of other vehicles carrying Hizbis
who had come from Parwan, Kapisa and Baghlan to participate in the
procession.At the top of the mountain switchbacks the road broadened,
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 THE GREAT GAME

the river now to the left. The great canyon that marked the route
into the city was coming to an end. The convoy approached Kabul’s
outskirts with a tank at its head, a picture of Hekmatyar plastered to
its turret. Then came Hekmatyar’s own SUV flanked by motorcycle
outriders in white tunics. A few people lined the road to welcome
the new prime minister, their arms raised in triumph, though hardly
the jubilant masses about which Hekmatyar had dreamed. Near Pul-e
Charkhi the procession again ground to a halt. The Taliban were firing
hundreds of rockets into the city, one of the heaviest attacks for months,
and dozens of people were killed in the bloodshed. Hekmatyar’s SUV
and a few other vehicles peeled off from the procession and took a
safer back road that passed behind the airport, to the neighbourhood
of Khair Khana and Kabul’s northern foothills; Rabbani and Massoud
were staying in the mountain hideout. The Hizbis joined them there
into the evening.17
Hekmatyar had wanted to return a conquering hero. Instead his
car had broken down, few people had come to meet him and he was
now forced to delay his arrival by the Taliban. It was far from the vision
promised in those early night letters.The swearing-in ceremony at the
Intercontinental Hotel, whereby Hekmatyar would become prime
minister again, had been postponed to 10pm. With the Taliban attack
over, Hekmatyar finally drove through the city wearing his usual black
turban and a tan thigh-length jacket over his shalwar kameez. On the
way to the hotel he was unable to resist his compulsion to catch up
with the latest news, and asked for the car radio to be tuned into
the BBC. When the broadcaster mentioned the upcoming ceremony
one of his guards predicted that the Taliban would now attack it.
Hekmatyar shrugged off his concerns. Nothing would stop him being
sworn in. As he and Rabbani pulled into the hotel, the forecourt was
lit up to greet them—a brief reprieve from Kabul’s nightly power
cuts. Hekmatyar was watching a guard of honour march past when
an incoming rocket sent everyone around him darting for cover.
Dignitaries, ministers and soldiers flung themselves to the floor, their
hands to their ears. In the panic, one of Hekmatyar’s sons was bundled
into a ditch of foul-smelling water.18 The lights went out and the hotel
was plunged into darkness. Hekmatyar remained standing until he
was hustled to the safety of the hotel’s basement with Rabbani. More
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 NIGHT LETTERS

rockets shook the building, killing at least one person and injuring
three others.
Hekmatyar and Rabbani eventually returned upstairs.As Hekmatyar
entered the hotel’s cavernous conference hall—a ballroom under the
Najib regime—a thin smile played across his lips, broadening into a
grin. One of his men tried to whip up the crowd, pumping his fist
above his head; a few people shouted ‘God is Greatest’ in reply.
Hekmatyar’s moment of triumph had become a subdued, tawdry
spectacle, accentuated by a ballroom with a faded red carpet and
tattered gold drapes. Hekmatyar sat on a pink couch at the front to
the far right; Rabbani sat on the far left. Fazel Haq Mujahid watched
from the audience, so did Kashmir Khan, unable to hide his discomfort
at being away from his beloved mountains in Kunar. The Taliban were
the likely culprits behind that night’s attack on the hotel, but when
Massoud turned up after the barrage had ended, even some Jamiat
members wondered if he might have been involved. Wracked with
such paranoia and mistrust, the unity government was doomed from
the start.19
In the days that followed, Hekmatyar formed a new cabinet,
appointing Waheedullah Sabawoon, the Hizbi behind the Ahmadzai
Jihadi Council and the mission to Azerbaijan, as minister of defence
in place of Massoud. He also ordered his policy team to prepare a
document expressing unequivocal support for Islamist insurgents in
Chechnya and Kashmir, and calling for the liberation of Palestine.
Rabbani objected to its release, saying the new government should be
focused on domestic problems and rebuilding Afghanistan’s diplomatic
alliances, not antagonising powerful enemies. Hekmatyar’s policy
team, including Sabawoon, pressed their case but Rabbani again vetoed
the statement’s release. One enraged Hizbi urged Hekmatyar to push
back, reminding him that as a young activist in the Muslim Youth he
had stood in Zarnigar Park shouting that there are no national borders
in Islam. ‘I remember,’ said Hekmatyar. When it was finally released,
the policy paper bore Hizb’s unmistakable imprint, expressing support
for ‘the righteous resistance in Palestine’ and ‘the freedom movement
in Kashmir,’ while calling for an end to the oppression of Muslims
in Myanmar.20 That August, bin Laden issued his own statement on
international affairs: an 8000-word declaration of war against the
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 THE GREAT GAME

continued presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia. He was now

living in a rudimentary mountain complex near Tora Bora, south
of Jalalabad, and although his main focus was the situation in his
homeland, it was clear that his horizons were expanding. Bin Laden’s
declaration of war took Hekmatyar’s ideas to their logical conclusion
and he sounded just like his mentor as he reeled off a list of places,
from Tajikistan and Kashmir to Somalia and Bosnia, where Muslims
had been killed in recent conflicts. The world had done nothing to
stop the bloodshed, he said. It was now time for Muslims to fight back
against ‘the Zionist-Crusader alliance.’21
The disagreement between Hizb and Jamiat over foreign policy
was indicative of the chasm that still existed between the two parties.
Massoud soon sought to control Hekmatyar’s Al-Qaeda-trained force
of bodyguards by bringing it under the remit of the government’s
intelligence service. This was resisted by Haji Islamuddin, the chief
bodyguard, who said he was only willing to answer to Sabawoon at
the defence ministry. Toran Amanullah, meanwhile, was appointed as
a police officer in Kabul, living near Sulaiman Layeq’s old house in
Kart-e Parwan; he found the work demeaning and blamed Massoud
for trying to sideline him. Hekmatyar moved his family into a two-
storey house with a large garden in central Kabul, opposite the UN
compound in which Najib still lived.22
Four years after he first sought asylum there, the former communist
president remained trapped inside the building because successive
mujahideen governments were unable to agree on what to do with
him. However, he was allowed visitors and he spent many hours talking
to one of his personal physicians, a friend from his days as a rabble-
rousing university student. To further stave off boredom, Najib was
writing a Pashto translation of The Great Game by the English author
Peter Hopkirk, a seminal book charting the rivalry between the British
Empire and Tsarist Russia for strategic influence over Afghanistan. He
told visitors that he took no pride in knowing that his predictions
about the mujahideen’s chaotic rule had come true. He was confident
the new government would not last. After the horror of recent times,
he was convinced that the Taliban would soon seize Kabul.23

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 PART FOUR

THE TALIBAN
1996–2001
 21

THE NEXT WAR

In early September 1996 the Taliban swept through eastern Afghanistan

like God’s wrath incarnate. Behind them lay relics of their purges:
unspooled musical cassettes draped from trees, piles of smashed
televisions, posters torn and blackened for showing the human form.
Compared to the mujahideen that ruled the country before them,
however, these pious young men from the Pashtun heartlands behaved
like saints. They did not rape, pillage or plunder, nor did they act with
the arrogance of feudal kings. For many Afghans, their eccentric brand
of authoritarian, theocratic rule was a logical antidote to the anarchy
of the last four years.
As the Taliban moved towards Jalalabad, Fazel Haq Mujahid was
caught in two minds about how to respond. The Hizb commander,
who had been so integral to Osama bin Laden’s return to Afghanistan,
refused to fight them. Together with other members of Jalalabad’s
ruling council, he had been to see Mullah Omar in Kandahar soon
after the Taliban’s formation and was convinced of the movement’s
righteous intentions. Fazel Haq came away from that meeting clutching
a letter of reference from the one-eyed leader and still thought that
the document would be enough to protect him. With the Taliban on
Jalalabad’s outskirts, all too late did he realise that they were intent
on taking full control of the city, and the country, by force. Jalalabad
fell to them on 11 September—a date that would resonate across the
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world for very different reasons five years later. Fazel Haq fled on foot
to Peshawar.
From Jalalabad, the Taliban pushed on towards Surobi, passing the
Arab training camps at Darunta as rocket and artillery fire echoed from
the mountains. Hizb deployed hundreds of fighters to confront them,
backed by mujahideen from Jamiat. For a short time, their defensive
lines held, but they were only delaying the inevitable. Zardad, the
Ahmadzai commander who dominated Surobi, evacuated his base and
retreated; other Hizbis switched sides, their rigid fundamentalism
an easy fit for the Taliban. Massoud’s troops withdrew to launch hit-
and-run attacks, unaware that the tactics they had used so effectively
against the Russians would prove useless against men who did not fear
death. The Taliban marched on, entering Surobi’s main bazaar on 25
September. Kashmir Khan and Waheedullah Sabawoon tried in vain to
rally their troops, before they too pulled back.1
Hekmatyar was in Kabul when news of these defeats reached him.
He had experienced many low moments in his life—from the murder
of his father and brothers to the failures of his multiple coup attempts—
yet he had rarely shown any signs of depression or fear. Now, though,
a brooding sense of doom threatened to overwhelm him. The Taliban
were a force unlike anything Afghanistan had seen before and he felt
utterly powerless to stop them. Over the last two years Hizb had
lost almost all its hard-won territory to the new movement. It had
been decimated by heavy casualties and mass defections, and forced
into a humiliating political compromise with Jamiat. The unrelenting
pressure was getting to Hekmatyar. He and Massoud had spent weeks
locked in talks about the best way to combat the Taliban, but their
bitter rivalry made it impossible for them to agree on the right course
of action. Massoud pressed for Hizb and Jamiat to leave the capital,
reasoning that they would win the city back soon enough in a guerrilla
war. Hekmatyar opposed the idea, unable to bear the thought of ceding
power yet again. Only when the Taliban smashed through Surobi did he
realise his mistake: Kabul was fatally exposed.2
Massoud and Sabawoon, the past and present defence ministers,
retreated to a military command centre in Hazara-e Baghal on Kabul’s
northern outskirts, to plan the government’s evacuation. Panjshir,
Massoud’s home base, was judged to be the safest place to go for the
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mujahideen’s armed forces. Surrounded by mountains, there was only

one main way into the valley from the capital: a narrow road bordered
by a river, which would be almost impossible for the Taliban’s swarms
of trucks and tanks to breach. Massoud and Sabawoon ordered the
government’s artillery stocks to be transported there, then drove to
the town of Jabal-e Saraj, at the mouth of the valley, to make the final
preparations for the withdrawal.3
In Kabul, Hekmatyar was paralysed by indecision, his military
position now worse than ever. At 2.30pm on 25 September he sat in
the prime ministerial office, mulling over his fate, when a Hizbi bustled
in. Hekmatyar looked up absentmindedly and asked why the man had
bothered to come. His visitor—a friend of many years—had never
seen him so anxious and replied that the situation was deteriorating
rapidly, hoping that Hekmatyar would offer a clear plan of action.
Instead, Hekmatyar let the remark pass and changed the subject. The
visitor left, now certain that defeat was inevitable; joining up with
Hekmatyar’s stepson-in-law and advisor, Humayoun Jarir, he fled the
capital later that day without informing his erstwhile leader.4
The one decision Hekmatyar did make was to evacuate his children.
Most of his relatives had already escaped Kabul but his second wife, two
of his daughters and one of his sons remained in the city. He entrusted
them to his secretary Qazi Abdul Hai Faqeri, who had been by his
side for the last four years. Faqeri drove them to his family home in a
village in Parwan, where they stayed for the night; he then drove them
even further north, to Mazar-e Sharif. No one knew if Hekmatyar
would follow.5
***
On 26 September, Hekmatyar and other high-level officials gathered
in Rabbani’s underground hideout in the north of Kabul. Known in
government circles by the code number twenty-five, the hideout was
more than just a simple cave dug into a mountainside. Divided into
several rooms and a spacious meeting hall, it was plushly furnished
and had a regular electricity supply. It was the only place anyone in
the government felt safe. Hekmatyar arrived a few minutes after the
mid-morning meeting began, just as radio chatter was coming in from
Massoud and his lieutenants that the Taliban had reached the edge of
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 NIGHT LETTERS

the city. They were an hour or two away from where the president and
prime minister now sat; four or five hours at most if there was some
resistance inside Kabul. Although Rabbani tried to sound defiant, his
words lacked conviction. ‘The Taliban are like dogs. If we run from
them they will follow us,’ he told the meeting. ‘But if we hit them with
a stone they will stop. We should form small groups of fedayeen and
fight them street by street. We should conduct a guerrilla war.’6
At around 12.30pm a messenger hurried into the room and put
a note in front of Rabbani. The president read it to himself, then
passed it to Hekmatyar. Without saying anything, they both got up and
left. Several awkward minutes passed as ministers and party officials
wondered where they had gone. One worried Jamiati rushed off to find
out; he discovered Rabbani and Hekmatyar in another room, deep in
conversation. They told him that the note was from Massoud, warning
them that the government had collapsed and he could not accept
responsibility for their security. ‘You can both take care of yourselves,’
the note said. The concerned Jamiati told Rabbani and Hekmatyar
that they should leave Kabul immediately. If they waited until nightfall
either the Taliban would catch them or common criminals would block
their escape route and rob them. He hurried back and told the other
ministers they would have to fend for themselves.7
Hekmatyar and Rabbani left Kabul that afternoon, travelling in two
separate vehicles. Gathering speed as they weaved through traffic, they
drove up the hill that marked the city’s northern border, before the
ground levelled out onto a plain of vineyards, scattered villages and
empty fields laced with landmines. The north of Afghanistan was still
out of the Taliban’s reach and the mujahideen leaders were now part
of a long convoy of refugees fleeing the capital in minibuses, lorries
and rusting old station wagons. Horns blaring, they barged through
the traffic, past Bagram air base and the town of Charikar, down into
a broad valley and over a bridge that crossed the Panjshir River. Just
as their jeeps began to climb into the Hindu Kush, they turned off
the main road, bumping slowly past a cluster of old shops and mud-
walled houses. There, in Jabal-e Saraj, Massoud and Sabawoon waited
for them.8
Other members of the government were left scrambling to save
their own lives as the Taliban surged into Kabul. One of the last
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 THE NEXT WAR

ministers to escape fled north with his son in a Toyota Corolla. His
bodyguards followed discreetly behind in a truck, wary of drawing
attention to him but ready to come to his defence should the Taliban
attack. All official communication lines were cut so the minister had no
idea where Hekmatyar or Rabbani were. He drove to Bagram, thinking
that they might be waiting there to catch a plane out of the country. All
he found was a group of pilots sitting in a room, counting out a pile of
money between themselves, and a lone aircraft marshall who felt duty-
bound to turn up for work despite the chaos around him. The minister
sped onwards to Jabal-e Saraj.
When he arrived that evening, Massoud was busy in a makeshift
command centre and looked shattered, having barely slept for four
days. Hekmatyar and Rabbani were slumped in a nearby compound,
trying to come to terms with their defeat. Their faces were pale, their
lips dry and cracked. Several other government officials who had
made their own ways to safety sat with them. At midnight the Ittehad
leader Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf arrived, rumbling into Jabal-e Saraj in a
convoy of heavily-armed fighters. He owed his life to Hekmatyar, who
had put their long-standing rivalry aside and radioed him just before
leaving Kabul, warning him that the Taliban were close. An hour later,
at 1am, Massoud entered the room and they began to discuss their
next move. Everyone had different ideas about the wisest course of
action. Abdul Rahman, Massoud’s consigliere, feared that the Taliban
would reach Jabal-e Saraj after sunrise and capture or kill them all;
he urged them to go Bagram while they still had time to arrange a
flight to Tajikistan or Iran. Massoud listened for a while, then, speaking
with quiet authority, told them not to worry about the collapse of
Kabul. The government still held northern Afghanistan and parts of
the west, and he was confident it could protect those areas from the
Taliban. He and Sabawoon would stay in Jabal-e Saraj to organise the
defence, he said, but he would prepare four helicopters to evacuate
the leaders of the government’s four main factions: one for Rabbani,
one for Hekmatyar, one for Sayyaf and one for Shia members of the
regime. The helicopters would fly the mujahideen leaders to a former
residence of the king in a remote part of  Takhar province. From there,
they could drive to the provincial capital Taloqan and establish a new
headquarters for the government. Everyone agreed to the plan.
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 NIGHT LETTERS

By the time the four helicopters landed in Jabal-e Saraj at 8am

the next morning, the Taliban were in full control of Kabul. After a
fitful night’s rest, Hekmatyar had lost confidence in Massoud’s plan.
Fearing that his old enemy might have sabotaged one of the aircraft, or
perhaps intended to shoot him down, he refused to fly alone; instead,
he demanded to be in a helicopter with Rabbani. An argument ensued:
the other mujahideen leaders complained that, even with their lives
in the balance, Hekmatyar had to get his own way. After an hour of
bickering they gave in; Hekmatyar climbed aboard with Rabbani and
the helicopter took off towards their hideout in Takhar, 100 miles to
the north.
Two days later, on 29 September, they all arrived in Taloqan as
planned. Thousands of people waited to greet them as their convoy
eased into the main market. Hekmatyar and Rabbani stood in the back
of a pick-up truck, waving to the crowd. Sayyaf—who was normally
quick to lighten the mood with a joke—sat glumly next to them, his
sense of humour having deserted him. He wondered what they were
celebrating; they looked like cockerels strutting around with ruffled
feathers after losing a fight, putting on a hollow show of defiance. He
was embarrassed and ashamed to be with them. The convoy stopped
at the main mosque in town, where each of the leaders gave a fifteen-
minute speech. They then set out for Kunduz, the province in which
Hekmatyar was born and raised.9
***
When Hizb had captured Kabul in 1992 Hekmatyar’s complacency
ensured that the triumph was short-lived. The Taliban made no such
mistake; they exerted their authority immediately and brutally. In
the early hours of 27 September a group of Talibs entered the UN
compound in which Najib was sheltering, and grabbed the former
communist president. They castrated him and tied him to the back of
a jeep, before dragging him around the grounds of the presidential
palace, bleeding heavily but still alive. They then shot him dead and
hung his corpse from a traffic post in Kabul’s diplomatic quarter, in
front of a mural promoting the virtues of the Rabbani regime. As
Najib’s mutilated body dangled before crowds of curious children,
the bare flesh of his stomach bulged out from beneath his clothes. His
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 THE NEXT WAR

arms were contorted at an unnatural angle and, beneath a rumpled

waistcoat, the sleeves of his shalwar kameez were rolled up, its front
smeared red like a butcher’s apron. The body of his brother Shahpur
hung beside him, dressed in jeans, a neat jacket and sports shoes.10
Sulaiman Layeq was living out his retirement in the sleepy German
town of Wülfrath, near Düsseldorf, when a television news bulletin
informed him that Najib had been killed. Layeq, who had played such
a pivotal but unrecognised role in Afghanistan’s wars, had not seen his
protégé for the last four years. During that time he had occasionally
sent messages to Najib in the UN compound via mutual acquaintances,
but their relationship had been permanently scarred by the chaotic
collapse of their communist project. With his life’s work in ruins and
his old friend strung up like a piece of meat, all he could do was switch
off the TV.11
On 28 September, Mullah Omar issued a decree from Kandahar
announcing the formation of a ‘pure Islamic government’ and vowing
to protect the ‘life, property and honour’ of Kabul’s residents. That
same day the Taliban declared that corporal punishment would be
formally imposed upon Kabul in keeping with the Islamic concept of
hudud. A newly convicted thief was soon paraded through the city, his
face blackened, his left hand cut off, a weight attached to his jaw so his
mouth hung open in gormless penance.12 Residents greeted the new
edicts with resignation; all they wanted was peace and security, however
suffocating it might be. After four years of mujahideen rule much of
Kabul was a wasteland. The worst-hit neighbourhoods were in the
west of the city, where Hekmatyar’s ally Abdul Ali Mazari once ruled.
Taliban patrols combing the area found body parts and the remains of
executed prisoners. At Kabul University, the Muslim Youth’s spiritual
home, books were scattered around the campus: dirty, torn and, in
some cases, burnt to ashes.13
As the Taliban moved through the city, the Hizbis who had been
left behind began to flee north, hoping to catch up with Hekmatyar at
an agreed rendezvous point in Baghlan province. Toran Amanullah and
the three Ahmadzai commanders, Zardad, Qalam and Chaman drove
together through the Soviet-built Salang tunnel that cut through the
Hindu Kush. In Baghlan they were stopped by a group of Dosutm’s
militiamen blocking the road. The Hizbis did not trust the Uzbek
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 NIGHT LETTERS

fighters despite their recent alliance, and when Toran Amanullah spied
more of them scurrying to get behind the convoy, he was sure that they
were preparing an ambush. He got out of his vehicle and ordered the
other commanders to do the same. Assault rifles in hand, they made it
clear that they would open fire if they were attacked. Dostum’s men
retreated. Still unsure whether to proceed, Toran Amanullah ordered
the Hizb convoy to turn around, and they drove back through Salang
and into Panjshir, where they were welcomed by Massoud’s forces.
After a short rest, they left their vehicles and heavy weapons in the
valley and again moved north, this time on horseback, riding through
the district of Andarab until they eventually reached Pul-e Khumri, the
main town in Baghlan. Other Hizbis had similar problems: Kashmir
Khan was also stopped on the road by Dostum’s gunmen as he fled
north; he ended up staying for one night near Salang while he radioed
ahead for help. Eventually, some Hizbis drove from Baghlan to escort
him through the blockade. He escaped just in time; on 1 October the
Taliban reached Salang.14
***
Hekmatyar made his way to Baghlan from Kunduz, leaving Rabbani and
Sayyaf to return to Takhar without him. He had again taken charge of
Hizb from the temporary stewardship of Kashmir Khan and set up a new
headquarters for the party at a sugar processing factory, on the outskirts
of Pul-e Khumri. Together with a few square miles of surrounding
territory, the old factory with its yellow walls, smashed windows and
stalled turbines was now all that was left of Hekmatyar’s Islamic state.
He was forty-eight years old and his life had come full circle: Baghlan
was the home province of the murdered MuslimYouth activist Saifuddin
Nasratyar. It was also where, as young men, they had both sent a
threatening night letter to Layeq’s father—one of the first warning signs
of their virulent extremism. Hekmatyar wanted to turn Baghlan into
another Chahar Asyab, but he no longer had the manpower or resources
to do so. Dostum’s men had robbed some of the Hizbis leaving Kabul,
taking their weapons, vehicles and money. Even Hizb’s printing press,
which had been used to continue publishing its propaganda during the
civil war, had been dismantled, with half the machinery taken by the
Taliban when they stormed into Jalalabad. The party was in ruins.15
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As Hekmatyar considered his next move, Massoud was fighting

bravely and brilliantly—thwarting a Taliban offensive on Panjshir and
counter-attacking with an assault on Kabul that sent panic through the
new government. But with Pakistani madrassa students reinforcing
their ranks, the Taliban were not going to be easily beaten. In early
January 1997 they skirted Panjshir and again swarmed north towards
Salang, coming perilously close to Hizb’s headquarters. To stay out of
their reach, Hekmatyar kept moving, shuttling between his factory
base and the far north of the country. Soon, he began to consider
leaving Afghanistan entirely. He realised that he was never going to
rule an Islamic state from Kabul; if he stayed alive, though, he might
still salvage his global jihad and one day take the fight to America. He
flew to Iran to see if his contacts in the government there might help.
The feedback he received was positive.
Hekmatyar did not want to leave Afghanistan, but he was angry and
more paranoid than ever. One morning, after the Fajr dawn prayer, he
addressed his few remaining disciples at a mosque near the sugar factory.
As he spoke, Toran Amanullah noticed two men acting suspiciously
and arrested them; they were taken away and interrogated. Soon,
Hekmatyar declared that Massoud had sent the mysterious strangers to
assassinate him—much to the consternation of even some of his most
loyal acolytes.Worn down by all the years of inter-mujahideen feuding,
they longed for a period of calm and unity, yet there was nothing they
could do to settle Hematyar’s nerves. He was spinning out of control,
confused and desperate as his world crumbled around him.16
In May a powerful former ally of Dostum joined the Taliban,
causing the provinces of Badghis, Faryab and Sar-e Pul to collapse
in the west and north of the country. That same month the Taliban
seized the city of Mazar-e Sharif, a place once considered beyond
their reach. A day later Pakistan officially recognised Mullah Omar’s
regime as Afghanistan’s legitimate government, followed by Saudi
Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.The Taliban were quickly routed
from Mazar, as Dostum’s former ally again switched sides; however,
this was a temporary setback. Hell-bent on revenge, Hekmatyar
knew they would return stronger. Abandoned by its international
allies and surrounded on the battlefield, Hizb was perilously close
to extinction.
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 NIGHT LETTERS

On 31 May, Fazel Haq Mujahid was shot dead in front of two of

his sons as he returned home from praying at a mosque in Hayatabad,
Peshawar. His family were convinced that he was murdered because
of his links to bin Laden. Although Fazel Haq had always stood out as
an extremist even among his radical peers, his ideology had sharpened
further in recent months as the shame of Hizb’s demise ate away at
him. Unwilling to work with Massoud, he refused to travel to Baghlan
with the rest of the party leadership, instead returning to Peshawar to
continue his own jihad.17
Fazel Haq’s assassination shocked Hekmatyar. In fear of his life, the
Hizb emir left the sugar factory and headed north, moving between
provinces with Rabbani and the other mujahideen leaders. Yet he was
too proud to rely on his old enemies for protection. That late spring
and early summer he ordered the wholesale evacuation of Hizb-e
Islami personnel and supplies to Iran.
***
The exodus unfolded in stages. Hizb foot soldiers who were not
easily recognisable were instructed to hand in their weapons to senior
commanders, before returning to their homes to resume their lives as
civilians. Flights on Iranian military transport planes were arranged
for high-profile party figures. One of the first aircraft took off from
Kunduz, loaded with Hizb’s radio and television equipment. On
landing in Mashhad international airport, the Hizbis on board were
greeted by members of the Revolutionary Guard Corps—the same
force that had organised the military campaign in Azerbaijan—and
escorted through a side entrance where they would not be stopped
by police for having no travel documents. In this way, dozens of
Hekmatyar’s men were smuggled from Afghanistan. Hizb made sure it
did not leave its Arab fighters behind: Haji Islamuddin, Hekmatyar’s Al-
Qaeda trained bodyguard, took charge of their evacuation, establishing
a base in Mashhad where they could recuperate. Toran Amanullah had
the task of getting many of them there: equipped with nine of the US-
supplied surface-to-air Stinger missiles left over from the anti-Soviet
jihad, he travelled with fifty Arabs by road from Baghlan to Imam Sahib
in Kunduz. His wife, two sons and two daughters accompanied him on
the journey. Once in Kunduz he planned to cross into Tajikistan and fly
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 THE NEXT WAR

to Iran, but a rival commander blocked the convoy and demanded that
he hand over the Stingers. Toran Amanullah refused and, after a tense
stand-off, turned the convoy around. After a long detour, he eventually
flew from Mazar-e Sharif to Mashhad.18
Hekmatyar himself made several trips back and forth to Iran to
facilitate Hizb’s restructuring and evacuation. When his work was
complete, he crossed into Tajikistan from Badakhshan province in
Afghanistan’s northeast, then flew from Dushanbe to Mashhad. From
there he went to Tehran, where he would stay with his family until
early 2002.19 Under the protection, and surveillance, of the Iranian
authorities, Hekmatyar struggled to settle; he lived briefly in a number
of different houses before eventually finding a four-storey government-
owned villa to his liking in the suburb of Niavaran. He spent his
time reading, writing and issuing fiery statements against his long
list of enemies: the Taliban, the Northern Alliance, the king, Russia,
Pakistan and America.20 His rhetoric had no bearing on the situation
in Afghanistan: he was yesterday’s man. In August 1998 the Taliban
recaptured Mazar and massacred at least 2,000 people there, most of
them Shia Hazara civilians.21 Gunmen stormed the Iranian consulate
in the city, killing ten Iranian diplomats and a journalist. While the
Taliban denied ordering the diplomats’ deaths, the attack brought Iran
and Afghanistan to the brink of war; it also gave Hekmatyar breathing
space.Wary of his Sunni extremism,Tehran nevertheless viewed the Hizb
emir as a potentially useful asset against both the Taliban and the US.
Only a few high-profile Hizbis stayed behind in Afghanistan. With
Hekmatyar’s reluctant blessing, they lent their support to Massoud
and the reconfigured Northern Alliance. Kashmir Khan returned to
his home district of Shaygal, in Kunar, to lead the defence of eastern
Afghanistan. He did so half-heartedly, dismissive of the Taliban but
unwilling to risk his life and reputation for Massoud. As far as he was
concerned, only Hizb represented the true face of militant Islam. At
one point the Taliban sent a local official to see him, curious about the
famed commander’s intentions. ‘If you want to fight me, I am ready to
fight,’ said Kashmir Khan. ‘If you are not fighting me, then I am here
to preach.’ He did not have the heart for a struggle that, in his eyes at
least, had lost its moral certitude. He complained to Massoud that the
Northern Alliance were too disorganised and had not been sending
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him the weapons he was promised. When nothing changed, he simply

cut his ties with the coalition and opted to live in semi-retirement.
Cautious of his reputation as one of Afghanistan’s most formidable
insurgents, a confused Taliban official returned to assess his intentions.
‘I am not going to fight you,’ repeated Kashmir Khan. ‘But if you fight
me I will defend myself.’ For the next three years the Taliban opted to
leave him and the people of Shaygal alone.22
Across much of Afghanistan a mutual respect existed between
commanders of the Taliban and Hizb-e Islami, despite their contrasting
backgrounds and fortunes. Hizbis were generally well educated and
internationalist in their outlook; the Taliban’s fighters were largely
parochial and had minimal schooling.They did, though, share a religious
fanaticism and a hatred of the communists and Massoud. The Taliban
knew Hizb’s origins in the Muslim Youth and felt a debt of gratitude
for the sacrifice that Hekmatyar’s men had made for Afghanistan
and Islam. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Kapisa, where
Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman’s childhood home had been destroyed
multiple times. First the Afghan communists burnt it down; after it
was rebuilt by his family, the Soviets destroyed it; when the Northern
Alliance began to use the reconstructed building as a fighting position,
the Taliban ordered its destruction for a third time. The decision was
a painful one for all concerned. As a carpenter helped dismantle the
building, the Talib overseeing its demolition burst into tears.23
***
As his forces conquered most of the country, Mullah Omar stayed
in Kandahar, still much the same quiet and insular figure as when
the Taliban first formed. He gave elliptical speeches to his cohorts
that were heavy on religious portent and vague on practical policy
advice. In sharp contrast to Hekmatyar, his public statements were
bland and cautious; in word if not in deed, he went out of his way
not to provoke foreign governments, remarking that ‘Islam is not a
threat to anybody.’24 The Taliban regime was difficult to define. Its
draconian edicts, which banned women from working in public and
had them killed for adultery, were primitive and brutal.Yet many of its
officials were known for their humility and honesty. Although Mullah
Omar and his closest confidants were unabashed fundamentalists,
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relatively moderate former mujahideen helped run the government’s

administrative affairs. Members of the Khuddam ul-Furqan movement,
who had once provoked the ire of the MuslimYouth for their progressive
religious outlook, held high-level administrative positions within the
regime. Entirely Pashtun at the outset, growing numbers of Afghan
Tajiks and Uzbeks were joining the ranks, together with fighters from
across Pakistan.
The US did not know what to make of the new government. One
early State Department cable, sent a day after Najib was savagely
killed, outlined a moderate and cautiously welcoming approach,
recommending that American diplomats emphasise their country’s
‘long history of friendship with the Afghan people.’ Only after
addressing less controversial issues such as counternarcotics were
they advised to broach the subject of terrorism. They should welcome
Taliban assurances that ‘the terrorist and militant training camps
formerly run by Hekmatyar’ would be closed down, the cable said,
and request an update on the camps’ current status. They should also
ask for bin Laden’s location and remind the Taliban that his presence in
the country did not serve Afghanistan’s best interests.25
Political indifference towards Afghanistan’s suffering existed within
the administration of US President Bill Clinton, just at it had under
his predecessor George H.W. Bush. But this was not the only reason
for US officials’ reluctance to push the Taliban too hard: America saw
huge potential in the vast untapped oil and gas reserves of Central
Asia. However unpalatable the Taliban’s religious beliefs were, Mullah
Omar’s government was Afghanistan’s best hope for stability and a
lucrative energy deal. In time, industry lobbyists with close ties to
past and present US governments made it clear that they wanted to
work with the Taliban to help build a pipeline linking Turkmenistan,
Afghanistan and Pakistan. Unocal, a California-based energy company,
estimated the project to be worth $4.5 billion.26
Mullah Omar and his aides were dumbfounded by the US interest
in bin Laden. At first they knew little of the Saudi or Al-Qaeda, but
tolerated his presence in the country out of respect for his role in
the anti-Soviet jihad. The nuances of international diplomacy came
a distant third to loyalty to Islam and Pashtun honour codes, which
held that guests seeking protection must be looked after at all costs.
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 NIGHT LETTERS

The American pressure did have some effect, however; Mullah Omar
summoned bin Laden from Tora Bora to live in Kandahar, where he
could monitor the Saudi better and keep him safe from harm. The
move had the unintended effect of boosting bin Laden’s profile. He
gave speeches in local mosques and gradually inveigled himself into the
Taliban’s ruling circle, worrying some of the movement’s more astute
officials. Mullah Omar had enough problems to deal with in trying to
defeat Massoud’s Northern Alliance, and he ordered bin Laden not
to speak to the media. As time went on, however, the Taliban leader
grew to admire the Saudi’s devotion and generosity. Bin Laden settled
with his family in a modest compound on Kandahar’s outskirts, even as
he used what was left of his inherited fortune to fund reconstruction
projects in the city.27
While Al-Qaeda’s influence over the Taliban steadily grew, they
remained uneasy partners. Hizb was a more natural ally to the Arab
fighters. Bin Laden’s group was building on Hekmatyar’s work, as were
extremists across Central and South Asia and the Middle East. On 17
November 1997, militants in Egypt slaughtered sixty-two people—
the majority of them foreign tourists—at an archeological site near
Luxor. Most of the victims were shot in the head and chest; many of
the women were finished off with knives. The attack was blamed on a
group associated with Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian
cleric who was still imprisoned in the US and had once toured the
Afghan battlefields with Hekmatyar.28
The slaughter signified a new era. The Hizb-influenced GIA in
Algeria had been one of the first Islamist groups to deliberately target
civilians. Now others were pushing this methodology to even more
horrifying extremes. On 22 February 1998, bin Laden issued a fatwa
calling for ‘jihad against Jews and crusaders’ on behalf of a new militant
conglomerate, ‘the World Islamic Front.’ The religious edict expanded
on his previous declaration of war, accusing the US of planning to use
the continued presence of its troops in Saudi Arabia to reshape the
Middle East. As proof, bin Laden cited ongoing American military
activity in Iraq, where a no-fly zone had been imposed over the north
of the country and UN sanctions were devastating the healthcare
system. The fatwa, co-signed by Ayman al-Zawahiri, who just a few
years earlier had written admiringly to Hekmatyar, said it was ‘an
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individual duty for every Muslim who can do it’ to ‘kill the Americans
and their allies—civilians and military’ wherever they found them.
On 26 May, bin Laden hosted a press conference reiterating his call
to arms. Journalists attending the event were given a laminated card
containing a fatwa issued by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman from his US
jail cell. It urged all Muslims to target Americans, Christians and Jews:
‘Tear them to pieces, destroy their economies, burn their corporations,
destroy their peace, sink their ships, shoot down their planes and kill
them on air, sea and land,’ it said.29
With bin Laden openly threatening the US and Saudi Arabia,
Washington and Riyadh increased pressure on the Taliban to expel
him. The Taliban prevaricated, still insisting he was not a danger to
anyone outside Afghanistan. It soon became clear they were wrong.
On 7 August 1998, Al-Qaeda suicide attackers detonated truck bombs
at the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people and
wounding more than 5,000. The US responded by firing seventy-
five cruise missiles at guerrilla training camps in eastern Afghanistan,
hoping to kill bin Laden.The air strikes were militarily inconsequential
and strategically disastrous; while at least twenty-one Pakistani fighters
died, bin Laden was unhurt, and the spectacle of another global
superpower clumsily lashing out at war-ravaged Afghanistan only
burnished his reputation in international Islamist circles. More foreign
militants flooded into the country.30
Mullah Omar was furious with the Americans for striking
Afghanistan and incensed with bin Laden for going against his wishes
and provoking them.31 The divisions that already existed within
the Taliban over the presence of the foreign fighters on Afghan soil
threatened to tear apart the government. To ease the tension, some of
the foreign militants agreed to swear allegiance to Mullah Omar. One
of the first to do so was Tahir Yuldashev, leader of the newly formed
Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan—an Islamist insurgent group using
Afghanistan as a training ground for war in Central Asia. Bin Laden
followed Yuldashev’s example in 1999;32 in truth, though, the Saudi
remained wedded to his own agenda. Even as members of an elite Al-
Qaeda unit, the 055 Brigade, were playing a prominent role fighting
alongside the Taliban against Massoud’s obstinate Northern Alliance
forces, bin Laden was moving towards war with America. The one
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Afghan leader above all others who could be relied on to promote his
ideology was Hekmatyar, not Mullah Omar.
***
Life in the comfort of Niavaran, one of Tehran’s wealthiest
neighbourhoods, did not suit the Hizb emir. Hekmatyar missed the
cut and thrust of politics, the smell of cordite and the sense that he
was fighting for a cause higher than himself. Most of all, he missed
believing that he might one day establish his own Islamic State in
Afghanistan. He had thought of little else for thirty years; now, more
mundane concerns bothered him. For exercise, he played volleyball
with his children and went for long walks in the Alborz mountains
overlooking his villa. He slept uneasily at night and napped for an hour
most afternoons. Even then, he jolted awake at the slightest noise.
Always a prolific writer, Hekmatyar bought his first computer so he
could work at greater speed, churning out everything from poems
to political treatise and religious tracts. He struggled to master the
new technology and admitted to a technician in a local computer shop
that he didn’t even know how to switch the device off. Assuming that
he was being sarcastic, the technician swore at him and told him to
waste someone else’s time. The incident seemed to sum up how far
Hekmatyar had fallen: in Tehran, he existed not as the former prime
minister of Afghanistan or a mujahid who had once defeated the Soviet
empire, but as a confused immigrant, old beyond his years. Hekmatyar
grew depressed and felt constantly angry; his attitude towards Shia
Muslims turned from cautious acceptance to outright intolerance.
Disgusted at the way the technician had talked down to him, he bought
every computer book he could find so he could teach himself about
programming. It was this innate will to win that kept Hizb alive against
the odds.33
The party now existed in fragments, its central core spread over
countries and continents. Members communicated with Hekmatyar
through letters or furtive phone calls, but Hizb’s trademark unity and
discipline had waned. Jan Baz Sarfaraz, the former envoy to the Arabs,
lived in Pakistan and was involved in a cross-party peace initiative based
out of Cyprus. Made up of Afghan exiles of all political persuasions,
it aimed to find common ground with the Taliban and the Northern
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 THE NEXT WAR

Alliance.34 Haji Abubakr and Engineer Tareq also lived in Pakistan,

while Ustad Abdul Saboor Farid and Waheedullah Sabawoon divided
their time between Iran and Afghanistan. Members of Hizb’s various
committees still tried to gather regularly at an industrial site the party
owned in Hayatabad, Peshawar, and loudspeakers were installed in the
Shamshatu township so that Hekmatyar’s speeches could be broadcast
from Iran. But these were token measures to boost morale, not the
decisive strategic moves Hizb needed to rebuild its reputation. Everyone
could sense that Hekmatyar was losing his passion for the fight. In 1999
he announced that he wanted to quit as Hizb leader to concentrate on
his cultural activities, particularly his writing. Some members liked the
idea, hopeful that it would reduce the surveillance they were under from
the ISI and CIA. Others feared that the party would dissolve without
its charismatic figurehead. When the central committee held a vote,
Hekmatyar was reelected as emir. He wearily accepted the result.35
Only in Kashmir Khan did the fires of old still seem to burn. His
quiet semi-retirement in Shaygal came to an end when the Taliban
issued him with an ultimatum to surrender or face the consequences.
When he refused to budge, they tried to storm the district against
the advice of local elders, who warned them that no one had ever
been able to conquer Shaygal while the Hizb lieutenant was there. It
took just two days of fighting for Kashmir Khan to force the Taliban to
retreat. The battle was small compared to the wars he had waged in
the past, but for Hizb—and Hekmatyar—it hinted at an abiding truth:
no matter how badly the party was hurt, it could never be wiped out.
Even at its lowest ebb, Hizb remained a force to be reckoned with.36
Hekmatyar knew that the party could not realistically hope to
topple the Taliban regime. The Northern Alliance was squeezed into a
corner of Afghanistan around Panjshir and Takhar, and it seemed only
a matter of time before the Taliban took total control of the whole
country. With Hizb members’ confidence in his leadership reaffirmed,
he consoled himself that there were bigger issues at stake than the
fate of Afghanistan. He would patiently prepare for any opportunity to
wage the next war, the one he had spent his life working towards: the
jihad against the ‘ancient enemy’ America. In early 2000 his wait came
to an end; bin Laden, who had been in regular touch with Hekmatyar,
contacted him asking for help.
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 NIGHT LETTERS

By this point, planning for 9/11 was well under way inside Al-
Qaeda. Few people in bin Laden’s organisation knew of the plot and
the Saudi did not share the details with Hekmatyar. He did, however,
hint that some kind of attack was in the pipeline and asked the Hizb
emir if he could find a safe place for him to hide after the operation.
Hekmatyar told him not to trust the Iranians but suggested Iraq as a
viable option. Neither of them liked the secular ideology of Saddam
Hussein’s government, but it was a matter of priorities. Intent on
dragging the US into a war deep in the Muslim world, they would work
with anyone who could help them achieve their aim. Saddam despised
America and seemed reckless enough to be open to their proposal,
as evidenced by the disastrous conflicts he had waged against Kuwait
and Iran. Despite the hostility between Tehran and Baghdad that still
lingered after their eight-year war, Hizb had managed to keep both
governments on side. Hekmatyar knew that the Iranian authorities
would allow him to travel to see Saddam, whom he had met in the
past, as long as he didn’t reveal the true purpose of his trip.
Hizb had particularly good relations with Iraq’s ambassador to Iran,
Abdulsattar al-Rawi, and so Hekmatyar’s faithful secretary Qazi Abdul
Hai Faqeri called on him to arrange the necessary travel documents for
a trip to Iraq. Issued with a visa, the Hizb emir set off for Baghdad soon
afterwards, driving in the armoured Toyota Land Cruiser bin Laden
had gifted him just before he became prime minister. In a gesture of
friendship designed to smooth the way for the Al-Qaeda leader, he
intended to give the expensive, customised vehicle to Saddam Hussein,
while two conventional SUVs would be awarded to other Iraqi officials.
Faqeri and Haji Islamuddin, Hekmatyar’s chief bodyguard, were part
of the small, carefully selected team that accompanied Hekmatyar
on the trip. After eight hours they reached Qasr-e Shirin, the Iranian
city marking the border with Iraq. Foreign ministry officials from
Baghdad were waiting for them on the other side, but the Iranian
border guards refused to let the Hizbis pass because their vehicles did
not have the correct paperwork. Hekmatyar spent the night in Qasr-e
Shirin. In the morning, he persuaded the Iranians to let him cross the
border in the armoured 4x4, and arrived at the Al-Rasheed Hotel in
Baghdad in time for lunch. It was the same hotel that the Hizbis and
communists had used when meeting Yasser Arafat in 1989. This time,
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 THE NEXT WAR

though, the floor of the lobby was decorated with a tile mosaic of
former US president George H.W. Bush that required visitors to walk
over him when they arrived—a conspicuous insult in Arab culture.
Hekmatyar happily obliged.
During their week-long stay in the Iraqi capital, which coincided
with the Persian New Year, the Hizbis were treated with a respect
normally reserved for visiting government dignitaries. Iraq’s foreign
minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, took them to the revolving
restaurant at the top of a 205-metre-high television tower and
Ali Hassan al-Majid, the director of the state’s notoriously brutal
intelligence service, invited them to his house. The most sensitive
issue—the subject of bin Laden—was left for a one-to-one meeting
between Hekmatyar and Saddam. After the meeting the Hizb leader
declined to tell his colleagues exactly what was said, but it was obvious
from his demeanour that Saddam seemed reluctant to host bin Laden.
Despite this, Hekmatyar returned to Tehran in good spirits. He had
given bin Laden’s customised Land Cruiser to the Iraqi president as
planned and felt a surge of pride at the reverential way he had been
treated. The regime in Baghdad had given him and his colleagues a set
of gold jewellery each as a token of its appreciation. Hizb protocol held
that any official gifts belonged to the party rather than the individuals
who received them. Arriving home, they handed the jewellery—rings,
necklaces, bracelets and earrings—to Hizb’s finance officer, who sold
them for cash in Tehran’s Tajrish bazaar. If bin Laden was right and a
war with America was looming, Hizb would need every cent.37
As the months went by, Hekmatyar stayed in touch with bin Laden.
Still hopeful that a war with America was coming, he passed the time
telling his children stories about Islam’s prophets and continuing
his writing.38 In November 2000 George W. Bush, whose father was
so reviled in Baghdad, was elected US president. In an April 2001
interview with a Pakistani journalist, Hekmatyar openly boasted of his
admiration for bin Laden, describing him as ‘a great man … a good
friend’ and ‘a real mujahid.’ He predicted that America would soon
invade Afghanistan and that the Taliban government would fall. ‘Then
we’ll continue our jihad against America,’ he said matter-of-factly.39
These seemed like preposterous claims to make in the prevailing
geopolitical climate, but Hekmatyar knew something that the rest
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of the world did not: an Al-Qaeda attack, one which would provoke
just such a response from the US, was going to happen. Relying on
intelligence intercepts, Massoud had a similar sense that something big
was about to unfold. On 4 May, he spoke at the European parliament
in Strasbourg, where he warned about the threat bin Laden posed to
the international order. ‘If President Bush doesn’t help us, then these
terrorists will damage the US and Europe very soon,’ he said.40
Bin Laden had never met Massoud. For much of the 1980s
circumstance kept them apart, with the Al-Qaeda leader mostly
in Peshawar and Massoud in Panjshir. But as the conflict with the
Russians dragged on and the Afghan rebels turned on each other, bin
Laden deliberately avoided any contact with him out of deference to
Hekmatyar. When the mujahideen were about to enter Kabul in 1992,
the Saudi had refused to set foot in the Afghan capital unless the Hizb
emir went first.41 Whether bin Laden decided to kill Massoud as a
gesture of respect to Hekmatyar or the Taliban, or whether he wanted
him dead because he knew that he would be a problem in the coming
war, the result was the same. On 9 September 2001, two Al-Qaeda
assassins posing as journalists met Massoud in Takhar. During the
interview one of them detonated a bomb in his camera, killing himself
and the Northern Alliance leader. Two days later, on 11 September,
three hijacked passenger planes crashed into the World Trade Centre
and the Pentagon. The war Hekmatyar had always dreamed of could
now begin.

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 PART FIVE

THE AMERICANS
2001–2017
 22

THE GUESTS

The US-led invasion of Afghanistan began on 7 October 2001. In a

speech at the White House, President George W. Bush characterised
it as the start of a long campaign against terrorism that would take
many forms and span multiple fronts. He urged patience and promised
victory, warning America’s enemies that they would be relentlessly
hunted down. The invasion was designed to avoid the pitfalls of a long
and costly Soviet-style ground war. Air strikes would decimate Taliban
positions, allowing the Northern Alliance to do most of the fighting;
CIA operatives and teams of American and British Special Forces would
scour the country, hunting Al-Qaeda’s high command. Had it not been
for Hizb-e Islami, the strategy might well have succeeded. The US,
however, had still not learned from past mistakes. Almost thirty years
after the American embassy in Kabul first dismissed the capabilities of
the Muslim Youth, officials in Washington continued to underestimate
Hekmatyar and his disciples. While Bush predicted that ‘the terrorists
may burrow deeper into caves and other entrenched hiding places,’ the
Hizb leader, who had done so much to bring about the war, lived in
plain sight in a four-storey villa in suburban Tehran.1
In the month since 9/11, Hekmatyar had shaken off the torpor of
exile to revel in the spotlight shining on his homeland. His public profile
was higher than it had been for years. He gave regular interviews to
the international media and sent a letter to the UN Secretary General
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Kofi Annan, warning that Bush must not be allowed to start a crusade
against Islam.2 Hekmatyar had given up all thoughts of relinquishing
the Hizb leadership and retiring from active duty. Now he was plotting
a political and military comeback more audacious than anything he
had attempted before. Soon after the first US air strikes, he appointed
a three-man team to meet Taliban officials in Kabul. Even with his
great rival Ahmad Shah Massoud dead, he was sure that with American
backing the Northern Alliance would overrun the Afghan capital
within weeks. The thought of the coalition of mujahideen, warlords
and mercenaries seizing the city that was meant to be the centre of his
Islamic empire was too much to bear. He wanted the Taliban to put
Hizb in charge of resisting the onslaught. To lead the delegation, he
appointed his son-in-law and chief diplomat, Ghairat Baheer.
The team of Hizbis took a taxi from Peshawar to the Pakistan border,
where a Taliban convoy was waiting for them. Baheer climbed into one
of the pickup trucks and prayed for a quick, incident-free journey. He
looked like the other fighters in the convoy: bearded, head covered,
dressed in a shalwar kameez. But while the Taliban were garrulous and
relaxed, he twitched nervously. Much to Baheer’s consternation, his
escorts insisted on stopping twice en route to stretch their legs and
pray, untroubled by his sense of urgency.
When the convoy finally reached Kabul, the Taliban fighters didn’t
have the right password to get through their own checkpoints. Only
after explaining who they were and what they were up to were they
allowed through. Baheer had heard plenty of stories about the Taliban’s
haphazard way of governing, but he was surprised and darkly amused
at the extent of their naivety. Even the most fanatical Hizbis had some
degree of professionalism. The Taliban’s faith in God was so strong that
they seemed to think it would protect them from anything they faced
in battle, including a wounded and vengeful America.
After an anxious night’s sleep, the Hizb delegation went to
Shashdarak in central Kabul to meet Taliban cabinet members. They
were stunned by the sight that greeted them: dozens of trucks and
jeeps parked outside, making the meeting an obvious target for any
American planes. Baheer lost his composure and told the Taliban’s
defence minister, Mullah Obaidullah, to be more careful. He then gave
him a detailed assessment Hizb had made of the US strategy, warning
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 THE GUESTS

that Mazar-e Sharif would be the first city to fall, and that it would
fall quickly. Only Hizb had the organisational skills and experience
to defend the country, he said. If the Taliban transferred at least some
power to Hekmatyar’s party, they would forget their past rivalry and
work together to fight the Americans. Mullah Obaidullah said it would
take two weeks for him to consult the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Omar,
who was still in Kandahar; the Hizbis asked him for a quicker reply,
but after waiting three days they returned to Peshawar without a deal.
Baheer was convinced that the Taliban were woefully underestimating
just how much of a crisis they faced.3
***
If Hekmatyar was disheartened by the Taliban’s reluctance to work
with him, he did not show it. Aged fifty-three and still bruised by the
disappointment of his defeat in the civil war, he was not about to let Al-
Qaeda’s stunning attack on US soil go to waste. In public, he questioned
whether bin Laden was behind the carnage, but his protestations were
a smoke screen. The Saudi had told him in advance that Al-Qaeda was
planning a major operation and Hekmatyar had met Saddam Hussein
in Baghdad to prepare for the fallout. All his adult life the Hizb emir
had asked God for a war with the ‘ancient enemy’ America. Now his
prayers had been answered.
Although he took no direct part in the attacks on New York and
Washington, Hekmatyar had done everything in his power to spread
the extremist ideology that underpinned 9/11.4 On a tour of Germany
in 1985, he had told supporters that events in Afghanistan would
change the world within the next half century. At the time it seemed
like typical bravado, but after the destruction of the Twin Towers it felt
more like prophecy. Hekmatyar had made the remarks in Hamburg,
where members of the 9/11 hijacking team—including three of its
pilots—first met. They were radicalised in the city by a Syrian-born
car mechanic, Mohammed Haydar Zammar, who moved to Germany
as a child and fought under Hizb’s banner in Afghanistan during the
early 1990s.5
Despite his virulent anti-Americanism, Hekmatyar had always
been careful to stay one step removed from killing US or European
citizens in their own countries. It was a pragmatic decision rather than
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a moral one: he believed Hizb could best serve the cause of radical
Islam as a facilitator and inspiration for other extremist groups. This
indirect approach gave him some critical breathing space in the weeks
before and after the 7 October invasion. While the CIA knew of his
links with bin Laden, it did not regard him as an imminent threat. The
Bush administration intended to capture or kill Al-Qaeda’s leadership
first, then go after Hekmatyar, a strategy that would prove to be a
costly misjudgement.
Just as Ghairat Baheer predicted in his meeting with the Taliban,
Mazar-e Sharif fell to the Northern Alliance a month after the invasion
began. Kabul collapsed four days later, on 13 November. Bin Laden
stayed in the capital until the last moment, confounding American
expectations that he would already be on the run. His dramatic escape
was organised by a friend of Kashmir Khan’s named Awal Gul, and
Hekmatyar helped him pull the operation off.
Awal Gul was a mid-ranking commander in Jalalabad who served
as the chief of a military brigade under the Taliban regime. He was best
known for his heroics on the battlefield during the Soviet occupation,
when he fought for the same mujahideen party as the former Hizbi
Jalaluddin Haqqani. But Gul was a clever operator and he kept his most
treasured political allegiance to himself. Fluent in Arabic, he had in fact
been a key local contact for bin Laden since 1996, taking care of the
Saudi’s security arrangements whenever he was in Jalalabad or visiting
the surrounding area. Afghans who knew him best considered him to be a
member of Al-Qaeda in all but name. Almost as soon as 9/11 happened,
Gul wrote to bin Laden offering his services in the event of a US attack
on Afghanistan. Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the Al-Qaeda military
chief, Mohammed Atef, met him in Kabul soon afterwards to draw up an
escape plan. Leaving the capital at the last minute, when the Americans
would least expect it, was part of the strategy.
As the Northern Alliance entered Kabul, bin Laden drove east
to Jalalabad, where he hid in a safe house Gul had rented him in
the neighbourhood of Regi Shamod Khan. Zawahiri arrived soon
afterwards. They did not intend to stay in town for long. Pro-US
warlords were already starting to encroach on the city and if they were
not careful their exits would be cut off. Their ultimate aim was to get
to the mountains of Tora Bora, thirty-five miles to the southwest. Even
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 THE GUESTS

there, they did not intend to make a heroic last stand. Instead, they
would lure the Americans into the warren of caves, valleys and forests,
then sneak past them and head towards Kunar.
Bin Laden had built a modest camp on a ridge line near Tora Bora
and knew the area well, having often gone on long hikes there in the
past. Gul was equally familiar with the terrain and felt confident that
local Pashtun villagers would be sympathetic to Al-Qaeda’s cause.
Just in case, he paid tribal elders thousands of dollars in bribes on bin
Laden’s behalf. The Americans would now have to break bonds forged
by religion, ethnicity, political patronage and cold hard cash to have
any chance of catching their man. They would also have to learn very
quickly how to tell their friends from their enemies—a task that was
never easy in Afghanistan.
Gul was not the most obvious suspect in the hunt for bin Laden.
He was not a diehard Taliban member and had even fallen out with the
movement in the past. Although he made no secret of his admiration
for some of the Arabs who had been living in Afghanistan, that hardly
made him unique. He reasoned that as long as he kept his friendship
with bin Laden quiet and did not panic, he would have time to get the
Al-Qaeda leader into and out of Tora Bora, and into Kashmir Khan’s
protection in Kunar.
As the Northern Alliance moved towards Jalalabad and air strikes
pounded the countryside, Gul’s militants escorted bin Laden and
Zawahiri along the narrow dirt road to Tora Bora. They travelled at
night as part of a long convoy of retreating Taliban and Arab fighters,
their headlights switched off. Gul waited for the last of them to reach
safety, then made it known that he would not confront the advancing
US-backed forces. Before fleeing, the Taliban’s provincial governor had
signed over control of Jalalabad to him, and Gul now pretended to act
as a neutral arbiter between the crumbling regime and the Northern
Alliance. To demonstrate his goodwill, he entrusted the city to a local
warlord, Hazrat Ali, even sending his own white Toyota Land Cruiser
to bring his enemy into town as a mark of respect. All the while, the
Al-Qaeda leadership moved deeper into the mountains.6
As the Arab fighters fled, Gul dispatched one of his commanders
with an urgent message for Hekmatyar. Acting on bin Laden’s orders,
the emissary was to contact the Hizb emir to ask for his assistance in
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the next part of the escape plan. Hekmatyar was still in Iran when the
emissary—a Pashtun named Dr Amin ul-Haq—arrived in Peshawar,
so the message was passed to senior Hizbis who quickly confirmed
that the party was ready to help. All bin Laden needed to do was hold
tight and wait for an opening to leave Tora Bora; he would then be
transferred to Kashmir Khan in Kunar.7
It did not take long for the Americans to learn where the Al-
Qaeda leadership had gone. Afghans in Jalalabad had reported seeing
bin Laden rallying local tribesmen before his departure, dressed in a
camouflage jacket and shalwar kameez, a Krinkov assault rifle slung
over his shoulder. But Gul’s role in his escape—and his contacts with
Hizb in Peshawar—remained secret. By the end of November CIA
operatives were based out of a school in the Tora Bora foothills, where
they received regular tip-offs from spotters tracking bin Laden’s
movements. Calling in air strikes from B-52 and B-1 bombers, they
transformed the mountains into a wasteland of craters, scorched earth
and shredded tree trunks. In the four days between 4–7 December, US
planes dropped 700,000 pounds of ordnance on Tora Bora. Two days
later they used a daisy cutter bomb, a notoriously destructive weapon
originally designed to flatten swathes of jungle in Vietnam.
As winter set in, conditions grew increasingly perilous: rain lashed
down and storm winds battered the rocky outcrops; thick snow
started to fall. Estimates on the number of Al-Qaeda fighters in Tora
Bora varied from several hundred to 2000. Shielded from the worst
of the bombing in caves and trenches, bin Laden told them not to be
afraid. The CIA was confident he was trapped and asked the Pentagon
for American troops to be flown in to flush him out. The head of US
Central Command, General Tommy Franks, turned the request down,
unconvinced that bin Laden was even in Tora Bora. His confusion gave
Gul and Hizb the opening they needed. On 12 December one of the
local warlords working for the CIA agreed to a ceasefire with the
cornered Al-Qaeda fighters. The next day bin Laden was heard over
radio intercepts giving his men permission to turn themselves in. Then
the trail went cold.8
For years afterwards US military and intelligence officials would
speculate that bin Laden wriggled free from Tora Bora by crossing
the border into Pakistan. Instead, he travelled back into an area
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supposedly under the control of the CIA-supported Northern

Alliance. Clambering down from the mountains in the dark with two
of his sons and Zawahiri, he reached a village in Wazir Tangi, a narrow
valley corridor in the districts of Khogyani and Pachir Wa Agam, south
of Jalalabad. They rested for a short time in a pre-arranged safe house
before an SUV arrived to take the sons away. Gul pulled up soon
afterwards in the same white Toyota Land Cruiser he had loaned to the
pro-US warlord when transferring control of Jalalabad. Bin Laden and
Zawahiri climbed in. The Land Cruiser had heavily tinted windows,
making it impossible for anyone to see exactly who was inside. Gul
knew that any Northern Alliance checkpoints would recognise it as
his and wave him through. Rather than head towards Pakistan, as the
Americans might have expected, Gul drove bin Laden and Zawahiri
into the heart of Jalalabad, guessing that no one would be searching for
them in a densely populated city. As the 4x4 eased through the gates
of his office in the centre of town, he breathed a sigh of relief. For the
time being at least, the world’s most wanted men were safe. The jeep
carrying bin Laden’s sons also stopped there.
The office, a two-floor concrete building on roughly 1000 square
metres of land, had an illustrious history. Located near a busy square,
Jalalabad’s appeal court and a high school, it once served as the house
of the king’s prime minister—the same official who resigned after
student protestors were shot dead in Kabul in 1965, paving the way
for the rise of the communists and the Muslim Youth. Gul parked in
the yard and told bin Laden and Zawahiri to stay put, shielded from
view by the Land Cruiser’s dark windows. At one point a group of
Northern Alliance warlords including Hazrat Ali burst in through the
front gate, just metres from the vehicle. They were on the hunt for bin
Laden and had picked up reports that Gul might know something. He
denied having any information and, while his interrogators remained
suspicious, Gul was a powerful figure in Jalalabad whom they could
not easily confront. When they left, Gul climbed into the SUV with
bin Laden and Zawahiri and eased out of the compound gates, heading
towards Kunar. Bin Laden’s sons travelled in a separate vehicle.
After five hours’ hard driving on a dirt road, they reached Asadabad,
where Gul transferred bin Laden and Zawahiri to a squad of Kashmir
Khan’s men. While US and Northern Alliance forces combed the
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devastated landscape around Tora Bora, the Al-Qaeda leaders pushed

deeper into Hizb territory, the road climbing steadily and unevenly
into the mountains. They reached Shaygal and the village of Monai,
above a flood plain in a broad valley. Free from danger for the first time
in weeks, they trekked the rest of the way on foot to their hideout.9
***
The help Hizb gave bin Laden and Zawahiri was part of a wider strategy
adopted by the party to shelter foreign militants from the Americans.
Hekmatyar was intent on rebuilding his battered reputation in
extremist circles and spreading the jihad beyond his home country. In
the past, he had mentored and trained Arabs from across the Middle
East; his task now was more rudimentary but just as important: he
would serve as their fixer, getting them out of harm’s way and into
position to launch a series of interlinked insurgencies that would sweep
through Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and ultimately Syria. Hekmatyar
viewed the Taliban leadership as disorganised and expected many of
the movement’s members to be killed, arrested or forced into hiding.
This would leave Hizb as the only radical group in the region with the
contacts, knowhow and assets to help Al-Qaeda and its allies.
In Peshawar the party worked closely with Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed, the Pakistan-born extremist who planned 9/11.Together,
they established an intricate network of properties and couriers for
the fleeing fighters, making sure that no fugitive spent longer than
a month in any one place.10 The US was now offering $25 million
rewards for information leading to the capture or killing of bin Laden
and Zawahiri; smaller rewards were on offer for other militants. The
United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia had cut their diplomatic ties
with the Taliban, and Pakistan was no longer a reliable ally. Reluctant
to crack down on the Taliban and lose its strategic influence in
Afghanistan, Islamabad sought to appease the US by hunting for some
of the Arab fighters instead.
While Hizb hid some of the fugitives in Peshawar and its Shamshatu
township, the main hub for the operation was Iran, where suspicions
of US motives still ran deep within the government. Hizb had offices
in the cities of Tehran, Mashhad, Kerman, Zahedan and Birjand.11
These were complemented by long-standing ties with local criminal
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gangs that had spent decades smuggling everything from contraband

petrol to opium throughout the region. The party also continued to
have excellent relations with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps—the
paramilitary force that had helped arrange its mission to Azerbaijan in
1993. Its elite Quds Force, under the leadership of Qasem Soleimani,
knew what Hizb was doing and made no effort to stop it.12
Hekmatyar put Toran Amanullah in charge of evacuating the foreign
fighters. Working out of the party’s office in Birjand, near the Afghan
border in southeast Iran, the Hizb commander organised the entire
logistical process, from smuggling the fugitives over the frontier to
choosing where exactly to hide them.13 Most of the Arabs arrived after
the collapse of Kandahar in December. Their evacuation was ordered
by Saif al-Adel, a senior Al-Qaeda operative already indicted and
charged by a US federal grand jury for helping plan the 1998 bombings
of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Middlemen from
Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates arrived in Iran first. Flush with
cash and acting on Adel’s orders, they paid Hizb to provide houses and
apartments for any foreign fighters who needed them. A steady trickle
of militants followed, some of them later joined by their families; Adel
was among them. A former lieutenant colonel in the Egyptian Special
Forces, he would use his time in Iran to draw up a seven-stage plan
for Al-Qaeda to transform the Middle East. As part of the plan, he
predicted that a new Islamic caliphate would be created in the Levant
at some stage between 2013 and 2016—an ambition that became a
reality with the advent of ISIS and the fanaticism of two more men
Hizb saved from the clutches of the Americans.14
One of them was another Egyptian, Mohammed Khalil al-Hakaymah,
who had been living in the UK on 9/11. First, Hizb smuggled him into
Afghanistan from Iran so he could join in the defence of Kandahar,
then it brought him back to Iran when Kandahar fell. Hakaymah was
not yet a member of Al-Qaeda, but the experience of fighting for
more than a month in Afghanistan pushed him to new extremes and
he would eventually join bin Laden’s organisation. He later authored a
pioneering manifesto, The Management of Savagery, that would become
a blueprint for ISIS. Writing under a pseudonym, Hakaymah argued
that extreme levels of violence should be used to polarise nations; only
then would people choose between the forces of radical Islam and the
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forces of ‘falsehood.’ Hakaymah had come to this conclusion the hard

way, on the battlefields of Afghanistan. ‘One who previously engaged
in jihad knows that is is naught but violence, crudeness, terrorism,
frightening [others] and massacring,’ he wrote. He owed this life lesson
to the man he called ‘Sheikh Hekmatyar.’15
***
Of all the Arab fighters Hizb smuggled out of Afghanistan none would
prove as important as a Jordanian evacuated into Iran with Hakaymah.
Born Ahmed Fadil al-Khalayleh, the world would come to know
him as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Hizb’s
role in Zarqawi’s rescue was not simply a matter of luck, money or
convenience, but the product of a long and intermittent relationship
nurtured over a generation. Their ties went back to 1989, when
Zarqawi arrived in Pakistan as a newlywed twenty-three-year-old,
hoping to experience combat alongside the Afghan mujahideen. In
those days he and Hekmatyar seemed worlds apart: Zarqawi was barely
literate and had only recently begun to show an interest in religion
after spending his youth as a thief and a pimp, while the Hizb leader
had already spent two decades fighting to establish an Islamic state
in Afghanistan and seemed about to realise his dream. Despite their
contrasting backgrounds, they were natural ideological kin. Both were
headstrong, charismatic and unafraid to use violence to get their way.
Their inner fury and love for the more extreme teachings of their faith
would gradually draw them together. Under Hizb’s occasional tutelage,
Zarqawi embraced religion with the fanaticism of a man desperate
to atone for his sins. Hekmatyar would come to respect, admire and
occasionally chastise him, like a father rearing a wayward son.
Zarqawi fought alongside Hizbis in eastern Afghanistan in 1991
and spent time with Hekmatyar in Chahar Asyab during the civil war.
He didn’t stand out as a brilliant fighter and he certainly wasn’t an
intellectual, but he paid close attention to Hekmatyar’s sermons and
speeches and made it clear to anyone who would listen that he admired
his uncompromising brand of jihad. Zarqawi returned to Jordan in late
1992 or early 1993 brimming, as he recalled, ‘with a kind of extra
enthusiasm’ for radical Islam.16 He formed his own militant group
and was soon imprisoned for five years. Upon his release, he headed
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back to Afghanistan, where he hoped to join Al-Qaeda. Bin Laden was

wary of the squat, inarticulate ex-convict, and refused to welcome
him into the fold. Instead, Zarqawi was encouraged to set up his own
guerrilla training camp for Jordanian, Palestinian, Syrian and Iraqi
fighters in Herat province. He needed Hekmatyar’s help to keep the
camp running smoothly. Hizb ensured Zarqawi was never short of
fresh recruits, using its smuggling networks to bring new fighters into
Iran and send them across the border into Afghanistan. During their
training, the men left their passports and other personal items for safe
keeping with Hizb.
Hekmatyar again came to Zarqawi’s aid after the US invasion.
An air strike in Kandahar in late November 2001 had left him with
broken ribs, and he was still recovering from his injuries when he
arrived in Iran. Toran Amanullah passed him on to a local smuggling
network that took him to Karaj, a verdant area west of Tehran. There,
a Hizbi working as a caretaker in one of the local orchards looked after
Zarqawi in a house buried deep within the trees. The caretaker, a man
named Bashir Ikhwan, watched over the Jordanian and a small group
of Arabs for a month. While most of the other fighters spent their time
reading and praying, Zarqawi adopted a strict exercise regimen, as if
strengthening himself for the fight ahead. At one point, he broke the
arm of a fellow militant as he grappled with him in a wrestling match.
Although Zarqawi’s stay with Hizb in Iran was brief, the weeks he
spent training under Hekmatyar’s watch marked a pivotal moment
in the evolution of militant Islam, when the old ways of doing jihad
began to bleed imperceptibly into the new. Hekmatyar had always
thought of himself as a man of books and letters, and he tried to
keep his distance from some of the worst excesses of his disciples.
Zarqawi was about to become the first jihadist superstar of the digital
age, notorious for beheading prisoners in grainy internet snuff films.
Other Islamists would have a more lasting influence on the Jordanian’s
life, but Hekmatyar was a quietly important presence at key junctures
in his radicalisation, steering him towards their shared destiny: war
with America.
As he hid out in the orchard near Tehran, Zarqawi became convinced
that the US would invade Iraq next. It was an open secret that Bush
wanted to topple Saddam Hussein, and with the Taliban regime gone,
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Washington was already starting to lose interest in Afghanistan. He and

Hekmatyar both sensed that conditions would soon be ripe to wage
jihad on two fronts. All they had to do was fan the flames.
The formation of a new Afghan interim authority, led by a charming
and convivial Pashtun named Hamid Karzai, helped their cause. Karzai
had endeared himself to the West but remained an unknown quantity to
most Afghans. In the struggle against the Soviets, he had served under
Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, the curmudgeonly old mujahideen leader
once condemned as an apostate by Hekmatyar’s Arab supporters. The
US judged Karzai to be a moderate, unifying figure but his government
was dominated by the Northern Alliance and Hekmatyar was certain
there would be a backlash against his rule.
Iraq posed a more complex problem. Neither Hizb nor Al-Qaeda
had a presence in the country, though Hekmatyar did have contacts
there who would prove crucial to Zarqawi’s plans. In early 2002 three
members of a small, newly-formed insurgent group based in northern
Iraq travelled to meet Hekmatyar at his villa. They belonged to Ansar
al-Islam (Helpers of Islam), an ultra-radical Islamist faction inspired
by Hizb. Several of their colleagues had been based in Chahar Asyab
during the civil war and they now wanted Hekmatyar to come and live
with them in Iraq. A decade-old US-imposed no-fly zone meant that
the Kurdish-dominated north of the country had de facto autonomy
from Baghdad, and Ansar had established a rump state in around three
square miles of territory, near the border with Iran. Hekmatyar was
sceptical about the group’s ability to meet his needs and joked that he
would not be able to fit on the land it controlled, but he saw an opening
for Zarqawi and suggested they shelter him. The Ansar members
went to meet the Jordanian and the other Arabs at the orchard. They
eventually agreed to take all except a few of them to Iraq. Those who
didn’t make the journey were three Saudis from Mecca; the Ansar
fighters feared their dark skin would mark them out as foreigners and
arouse the suspicion of Iraq’s security forces.
Smuggled across the border, Zarqawi soon settled in Ansar’s main
base, a modest camp of seven small buildings surrounded by bunkers
and dirt berms, near the city of Halabja. He was still not yet in Al-
Qaeda and few people outside Hizb took him seriously, but Hekmatyar
recognised his potential. The Jordanian would go on to repay him by
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launching an insurgency that would leave hundreds of thousands of

Iraqis dead, kill more than 4,500 American troops, sow the seeds for
ISIS and push the Middle East into a transnational sectarian conflict.17
***
On 14 February 2002 Kashmir Khan left Shaygal, where he continued
to hide bin Laden and Zawahiri, and travelled to Jalalabad to meet
Hamid Karzai. A memorial ceremony was being held in the city for a
rival mujahideen commander killed by the Taliban four months earlier.
Against his better instincts, Kashmir Khan let some of his men persuade
him that it was worth taking the extraordinary risk to personally size
up the character of Afghanistan’s new interim leader. While some
Hizbis had already made the decision to join the insurgency, the party
was split over the prospect of waging another long and bloody war,
particularly now so many of its mujahideen were past their prime. This
had not stopped Northern Alliance officials in the new government
from pursuing old vendettas against anyone deemed to have links with
Hekmatyar. Kashmir Khan wanted to ask Karzai to ease the crackdown,
guessing that no one would dare arrest him at the ceremony.18
He turned up in a heavily armed convoy and shook Karzai’s hand
as they sat together in front of thousands of mourners. Everyone in
the audience listened quietly to the eulogies, until it was Kashmir
Khan’s turn to speak. Suddenly, people jumped to their feet and
began to clamber up trees and walls to get a better look at the famous
mujahideen commander. Others surged to the front. Kashmir Khan
was not a natural orator but he knew exactly what he wanted to say.
Without directly calling for a jihad against US forces, he urged Karzai
not to forget the sacrifices Afghans had made fighting to free their
country from Soviet occupation. With the speeches over, they ate
lunch; Karzai asked him to work with the government and promised
that any Hizbis wrongly detained by the Northern Alliance would be
released. He had no idea he was talking to the man who was sheltering
bin Laden and Zawahiri. Impressed with Karzai’s dignified manner, but
unsure whether he could really be trusted to keep his word, Kashmir
Khan spent the night in Jalalabad. The next morning he received a
warning from friends in Kabul that he was in danger if he did not leave
soon. He immediately returned to Shaygal.19
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It was a lucky escape.Weeks earlier, on 26 December, the Northern

Alliance had detained Awal Gul, the mujahid who guided bin Laden
in and out of Tora Bora.20 By early 2002 the CIA had concluded that
Hekmatyar probably knew where the Al-Qaeda leader was hiding.
Arresting Kashmir Khan would have ended the hunt for bin Laden
and may even have ended the war. Now it was up to Tehran to hand
Hekmatyar over and Washington was losing patience. In late January
Bush had condemned Iran as part of an ‘axis of evil’ with Iraq and
North Korea, adding to decades of mutual animosity. The Iranian
regime was split between reformists around the president Mohammed
Khatami, who wanted to improve relations with the US, and hardliners
who believed it was essential to stand against the Bush administration’s
plans to reshape the Middle East. Torn between these two internal
factions, Tehran decided to solve its Hekmatyar dilemma without
simply handing him over to Washington.
The Iranian government gave Hizb the names of twenty-five party
members who must leave the country. Hekmatyar was top of the list.
Although he had been preparing himself for this moment, he could not
contain his anger. In mid-February he made an emotional telephone
call to a senior Hizbi in Pakistan, raging through tears about his old
mujahideen rivals in the Northern Alliance.21 Three days later, with
encouragement from sympathetic officials in Iran’s Revolutionary
Guard Corps and the intelligence ministry, he flew from Tehran to
Zahedan in the south east of the country, dressed in a crude disguise.
From there he was smuggled to Pakistan.22
Arriving in Peshawar, Hekmatyar tried to lay low, but he found life
on the run far harder in his fifties than it had been in his twenties. His
face was known across the city and, suffering from a tooth ache, he
struggled to keep his composure. When he snuck out of a safe house
to visit a friend who worked as a dentist, he became convinced that he
had been identified and his location betrayed.23 Worried that US spies
were closing in, his Hizb handler—a party intelligence operative
named Abdul Malik—decided to get him out of the area fast. He
telephoned Kashmir Khan’s younger brother, Haji Nurrahman, and
requested help. When he received the call in Mardan, thirty-one
miles northeast of Peshawar, Nurrahman said he would do whatever
he could.
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 THE GUESTS

Although not as accomplished as his elder sibling, Nurrahman was

a skilled mujahid in his own right who had already proved integral
to Hizb’s work with the Arab fugitives, known in party code as ‘the
guests.’ For weeks he had been shuttling back and forth between
Peshawar and Shaygal, transferring messages from bin Laden and
Zawahiri to Al-Qaeda operatives in the city. Rescuing Hekmatyar
was just another job. On 20 February, Nurrahman telephoned Hizb’s
offices in Shamshatu and asked to be put in touch with Kashmir Khan,
who was still in Kunar. After a brief delay a communications officer
called Nurrahman back and held his telephone up to a military radio
so the two brothers could talk. Mistakenly referring to Hekmatyar by
a pre-arranged code denoting another high profile Hizbi, Nurrahman
told his brother, ‘Engineer twenty-two wants to come your area. He
is here now.’ Kashmir Khan was calm in his reply. ‘Bring him,’ he said.
The next night, Nurrahman and Hekmatyar stayed in Yousef Abad
refugee camp—a Hizb stronghold in the Bajaur tribal agency. It began
to rain while they drifted off to sleep, and overnight the rain turned to
snow.The following morning, Nurrahman found a taxi driver willing to
take them to the Afghan border in a Datsun pickup truck. In preparation
for the trip, Hekmatyar removed the woolly hat he had been wearing
since fleeing Iran and sported a dark-coloured pakol instead. He pulled
on a pair of sturdy walking shoes and a cotton jumper over his shalwar
kameez. Nurrahman chose two close associates to accompany them:
one of them was a cousin, the other a friend. The four men drove east
to the frontier until thick snow made it impossible for them to go any
further. They left the driver and continued on foot.
Hekmatyar had two backpacks with him containing spare clothes,
a satellite phone and various identity cards, which Nurrahman’s
friend and cousin now carried. It was Eid al-Adha, the holiest day in
the Islamic calendar, and they trudged onwards towards Afghanistan
until they neared a chain hung across the road, marking the border. As
they noticed two Pakistani guards watching them from a ledge above,
Hekmatyar muttered to Nurrahman that he was carrying a pistol.
Nurrahman was furious that he hadn’t told him earlier. The guards
were standing with their hands in their pockets, staring at the four
Afghans walking towards them. If they stopped them and found the
gun, Hekmatyar’s cover would be blown and they would all be arrested.
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Nurrahman told him to wander off to one side and crouch down on
his haunches—the way Afghan men urinate for reasons of modesty.
With his back turned to the guards, he should then drop the pistol
to the ground. Hekmatyar did as instructed and Nurrahman walked
over to squat beside him in the snow. Still hidden from the guards’
view, he picked up the gun and stuffed it into the belt of his trousers.
The two Hizbis carrying Hekmatyar’s bags then walked on ahead to
distract the guards, while Hekmatyar and Nurrahman followed soon
after, trying to look as casual as they could. They passed untroubled
into Afghanistan, crossing into the district of Marawara, near Asadabad
in Kunar.
The next morning Hekmatyar reached Kashmir Khan in Shaygal.
Nurrahman had only told his brother that he was bringing a high
profile fugitive, without using the Hizb leader’s name, so Kashmir
Khan was surprised to see Hekmatyar walking wearily towards him.24
He reacted calmly, attributing the arrival of yet another wanted man
to fate. Fearful that the Americans might be on their trail, he hurried
Nurrahman and Hekmatyar to a safe house, where they stayed for two
nights. They left under the cover of darkness on 25 February 2002,
trekking further into the mountains and edging closer to Nuristan.
Hekmatyar found the hike tough and twice stopped to catch his breath.
After an hour of clambering over rocks, dirt and ice they were nearly
at their destination. Nurrahman transferred Hekmatyar to another
commander, Haji Wazir Mohammed, who took him to the village of
Khwarr. Reachable only by walking through the territory of some of
the most fanatical Hizbis in the country or by flying in a helicopter,
the village was the perfect hideout, secluded even by the remote
standards of Kunar. Bin Laden and Zawahiri were waiting there to
greet Hekmatyar.25

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THE RECKONING

Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri were sheltering in a house

that looked out over a broad valley of terraced fields. Made of mud
and stone, with wooden doors and window frames, it was nestled in
a copse of trees on a gentle slope at the foot of a mountain. A narrow
dirt road ran past the rear of the building, separating it from a small
mosque. In the weeks before Hekmatyar’s arrival, they spent their time
inside, talking in hushed tones, worried that even within the confines
of the thick walls villagers might hear them and wonder who they
were. Bin Laden had written his last will and testament before leaving
Tora Bora, ready to die as he fled the US bombardment. Now, gaunt
and grey, he began to recover his strength and plan his next move.
Kashmir Khan checked regularly on the Al-Qaeda leaders, while the
Hizb commander who owned the house guarded them round the clock
with two of his sons. Only a small cadre of Hizbis knew that the party
was sheltering the world’s most wanted men. No one in Khwarr, the
sparsely-populated Pashtun village in which they were hiding, noticed
the new neighbours.
Kashmir Khan’s brother, Haji Nurrahman, was one of the few men
bin Laden trusted. Their first meeting earlier that winter had been
shrouded in secrecy; Kashmir Khan had rousted Nurrahman in the
dead of night without explaining where they were going, and by the
time he arrived at the village he was exhausted.When his eyes adjusted
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to the dim glow of the small lamp that barely lit the room, he saw
bin Laden sitting on the floor, wearing a pakol. Zawahiri was there
too, with Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, bin Laden’s Kuwaiti son-in-law who
served as Al-Qaeda’s spokesman. Nurrahman told bin Laden that they
reminded him of a story in the Qur’an about a group of devout young
men who flee persecution in a city and take refuge in a cave.They sleep
for hundreds of years then wake to find the people of the city have
embraced religion.1 Bin Laden laughed at the comparison and Kashmir
Khan hustled Nurrahman out of the room. He guided his brother back
through the mountains before sunrise, so no one at his base would even
know he had ever been gone. Although only brief, the meeting was
the start of a working relationship between Nurrahman and Al-Qaeda
that would last for around a year. On one of his first assignments, he
arranged for a wife of bin Laden to be smuggled to the village. Most of
the time, though, his job was to pass messages between bin Laden and
the Arabs looked after by Hizb in Peshawar.
The carefully choreographed secrecy lasted until Hekmatyar
arrived. His entrance into Khwarr on 25 February 2002 was unplanned
and, though no one said as much, Kashmir Khan and the Al-Qaeda
leaders feared it risked undermining the delicate equilibrium they
had achieved. Even Hekmatyar was uncertain about the arrangement.
During his journey into Kunar from Pakistan he had asked Nurrahman
to hide him further north, in the Kamdesh district of Nuristan, but
Nurrahman persuaded him that Kunar would be safer. Kashmir
Khan, meanwhile, had mistaken Hekmatyar for another Hizbi when
he originally invited him to stay in Shaygal. Rather than send him
elsewhere, they decided to keep him close until the situation had
calmed. It was still less than five months since the US-led invasion, and
American informants were everywhere. The only people they could
trust were each other.
Hekmatyar spent most of the time in a house a short distance from
bin Laden and Zawahiri—quarantined for his and their safety. Kashmir
Khan knew his old friend had a habit of courting and attracting
attention. On his way into Shaygal, Hekmatyar had introduced himself
to an elderly stranger who didn’t recognise him, teasingly asking the
man if he knew who he was talking to. Further on, he had stopped
to rest at a madrassa only to find it was soon swarming with Hizbis
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desperate to see him. If something similar happened now, they would

all be in danger.
Kashmir Khan and bin Laden asked Hekmatyar not to hold any
meetings or give any interviews to the media while he was still in
Khwarr. He agreed but could not keep silent for long. Frustrated,
bored and unused to taking orders, Hekmatyar soon began to spend
more time at the Al-Qaeda house. In total, seven Arabs were staying
there, including bin Laden’s sons, Hamza and Osman. Sure enough,
as Hekmatyar settled in, the sleepy calm that hung over the village
began to dissolve. Neighbours started to notice a growing buzz of
activity around the once quiet property. At night the windows were
brightly lit, suggesting that whoever was inside had brought in a petrol
generator for electricity—a rare commodity in such an isolated and
impoverished part of Afghanistan. During the day, people glimpsed
strangers walking back and forth. It soon became common knowledge
locally that some prestigious guests had arrived in the area. Not
everyone knew exactly who they were or what they had done to be in
need of their help, but, in customary fashion, the old men of the village
went to welcome them. Soon, even elderly women were queuing up
to pay their respects to bin Laden. As he handed out money to some
of the villagers to thank them for their hospitality, the Al-Qaeda leader
grew increasingly agitated that his whereabouts had been exposed to
the Americans. In March, the CIA scored its first major arrest of the
war, detaining the Saudi-born Abu Zubaydah in Faisalabad, Pakistan.
Zubaydah had worked as a middleman for Hizb and Al-Qaeda in the
past, sending recruits to Hekmatyar’s chemical weapons training camp
in Darunta during the mid-1990s. Bin Laden began to grumble about
Hekmatyar’s inability to keep a low profile to some of the Afghans in
his security detail. The Taliban had listened carefully to his every word,
he said; now he was being bossed around by the Hizb emir—a man
who had been forgotten by the world until bin Laden brought him out
of retirement.
Bin Laden wasn’t even aware of Hekmatyar’s most egregious
violation of security protocol. Every morning at 6am the Hizb leader
was using a satellite phone to speak to his secretary, Qazi Abdul Hai
Faqeri, in Iran. They kept the conversations short in an attempt to stop
foreign intelligence agencies tracking the calls, but their tradecraft
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was inept compared to the rigorous and highly disciplined methods

bin Laden drilled into his lieutenants. When an official in Tehran asked
Faqeri to pass on a request for Hekmatyar to talk to the Iranian foreign
minister, Hekmatyar initially refused, fearing that it was part of an
American plot to pinpoint his exact location. Nevertheless, his ego
eventually got the better of him.
To try to relax, Hekmatyar, bin Laden and Zawahiri occasionally
made the half-hour walk to Kashmir Khan’s home village of Derai, and
they were there on Monday 6 May when Hekmatyar dialled the Iranian
minister’s number. It was 10.30am. As he chatted, he strolled around
with the satellite phone to his ear, while Kashmir Khan sat behind a
nearby wall and some farmers busied themselves close by. Suddenly,
there was a deafening roar and a huge crash. Stones and dirt showered
Kashmir Khan; Hekmatyar stumbled disorientated through a cloud
of smoke and dust. A Hellfire missile had smashed into the ground
beside a walnut tree, where the Hizb leader had been standing a few
minutes earlier. Had he not been talking on the move, he would have
been blown to pieces. Instead, two farmers received minor injuries.
Hekmatyar was left shaken but unharmed, and from that point on, he
never used the satellite phone again.
The missile had been fired by a CIA predator drone in one of the first
attacks of its kind in any conflict. Hekmatyar had barely dusted himself
down before he issued a written diatribe in response, warning that even
if he was killed the jihad would continue. ‘I tell the American terrorists
this: if the decision about when we die was with anyone except God,
then I and other people similar to me would have died hundreds of
times at the hands of the CIA and KGB,’ he wrote. Hekmatyar’s defiant
posturing failed to calm bin Laden and Zawahiri, who were enraged
at his lack of professionalism. Prior to his arrival in Khwarr they had
started to think they were safe; they had even formulated a plan to
launch the insurgency from Kunar and Nuristan, asking Kashmir Khan
to assemble a force of some 3000 fighters whom they would help
finance and supply. Hekmatyar’s arrogance had jeopardised everything.2
That same spring, the first US Special Forces arrived in Kunar,
establishing a base just south of the provincial capital Asadabad.
Anyone who might know where bin Laden was hiding was considered
a legitimate target for their operations.3 When Hizbis in the province
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heard of their arrival, some of them started referring to the American

troops as ‘the English’—their hostility to foreign occupation rooted in
their ancestors’ opposition to Britain’s imperial endeavours more than
a century earlier. To them, an infidel was an infidel. They were not yet
ready to fight the invading troops, but that did not mean they wanted
them there.4
Worried about the growing US focus on Kunar and convinced
that Khwarr would again come under attack, Kashmir Khan began to
evacuate his fugitives to the district of Dangam on the border with
Pakistan. The Arabs went first, one at a time; Hekmatyar followed
later. In Dangam, bin Laden, Zawahiri and the spokesman Sulaiman
Abu Ghaith stayed in a compound belonging to a Hizb commander
named Haji Khan Jan. An experienced mujahid, Khan Jan became the
first Hizbi in Kunar to show his opposition to the American troops,
hitting their base in a rocket attack. He had learnt from the lapse
security arrangements in Shaygal and put a tough new regimen in place
to protect the Arabs, keeping them under virtual house arrest. When
they complained and said they wanted to leave, he and his sons refused
to let them go anywhere until they had received Kashmir Khan’s
permission. Eventually, Kashmir Khan’s brother Nurrahman went to
Dangam to get the restrictions lifted. Hekmatyar stayed in a nearby
house that belonged to a Hizb foot soldier.
Gradually, the memory of the near-catastrophic drone strike
in Shaygal faded. It was clear that the Americans had not followed
them. The tension between Hekmatyar and bin Laden eased and they
refocused on the task of waging jihad.That June, Al-Qaeda’s spokesman
Sulaiman Abu Ghaith published a chilling series of articles online that
provided a glimpse into the kind of discussions they were having in
Dangam. The posts warned that 9/11 was just the start of a period of
reckoning that would redress the balance of decades of violence and
oppression carried out by the US and its allies across the Muslim world.
To avenge these historical injustices, Al-Qaeda reserved the right to use
chemical and biological weapons against Western civilians, wrote Abu
Ghaith. ‘The Americans have still not tasted from our hands what we
have tasted from theirs,’ he warned. ‘Those killed in the World Trade
Centre and the Pentagon are but a tiny part of the exchange for those
killed in Palestine, Somalia, Sudan, the Philippines, Bosnia, Kashmir,
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Chechnya and Afghanistan. We have not reached parity with them. We

have the right to kill four million Americans—two million of them
children—and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds
of thousands.’ Hekmatyar, meanwhile, considered Afghanistan dar-al
harb, a territory at war with Islam, just as he had as a student activist
under the king. Anyone who questioned the judgement could not be
considered a real Muslim.5
***
In the summer of 2002 Hekmatyar’s thinking turned from merely
staying alive to working on the practicalities of igniting the insurgency.
One of the Arabs in Kunar showed him how to rig up landmines using
crude, easy-to-find components. Hekmatyar was a good student and
he was soon hosting bomb-making classes for some of Kashmir Khan’s
men in a quiet part of the province. Later, when the Hizbis were
ready to deploy them in combat, he detonated the first mine himself,
targeting an American patrol—an attack designed to boost morale
more than have a significant impact on their enemy.6 Even as a young
man Hekmatyar had never been a frontline commander and he was not
about to start now. To sustain an insurgency in the long-term, it would
take more than the ageing emir and a few homemade bombs. Hizb and
Al-Qaeda needed to strengthen if they were serious about defeating
the ‘ancient enemy.’
With time on their hands and the Americans seemingly off their
tail, Hekmatyar and bin Laden began to talk about forming a united
front against the occupation. They hoped to work together with the
Taliban and had started to gauge the mood among remnants of the
deposed regime hiding out in Pakistan. An Al-Qaeda field commander
from Libya, Abu Laith al-Libi, was privy to some of the negotiations.
He admired Hekmatyar and knew that Hizb retained a significant
following in Afghanistan, even if most of its former mujahideen
were now retired. He urged both sides to forget their differences:
Hekmatyar should learn to cooperate with others, rather than trying
to hoard power for himself, and the Taliban should make the the most
of Hizb’s expertise in guerrilla warfare.7
To speed up the negotiations, Hekmatyar summoned his secretary,
Qazi Abdul Hai Faqeri, who had been with him on the pre-9/11 trip to
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meet Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. Using Hizb’s smuggling networks

to get out of Iran, Faqeri rode a bus through Balochistan in southwest
Pakistan, blending in with the refugees and low-rent market traders
who travelled the same route. He was accompanied by a Saudi he knew
only as Abu Osman, Al-Qaeda’s chief liaison officer in Iran. Questioned
by Pakistani police, Faqeri made sure his Arab companion pretended
to be a Pashtun missionary rendered mute by illness. As soon as they
arrived and had prayed, Hekmatyar laid out his strategy for a new
extremist conglomerate. He wanted Faqeri to arrange a meeting with
the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar. Faqeri immediately began to make
arrangements and, via an intermediary, organised a meeting with
Mullah Omar subject to a written request being made by Hekmatyar
and bin Laden personally. Confident that they were on the verge of a
major breakthrough, Faqeri and Abu Osman arranged the documents
and prepared to deliver them. Just as they were about to leave for
Quetta to see the Taliban intermediary, a Hizbi hurriedly arrived with
an urgent message from Hekmatyar; the meeting was a trap, he said.
Faqeri, who had planned to stay with his aunt in Quetta, immediately
cancelled the trip. The next morning Pakistani security forces raided
her house. Hekmatyar’s few remaining friends inside the Pakistani
government had come good at the last minute and tipped him off to
the fact that Faqeri’s Taliban middleman was actually an ISI operative.8
The Americans were also still on the hunt. In September, under
cover of darkness, several hundred US Special Forces troops pushed
into Shaygal, hunting for Kashmir Khan. The Hizb lieutenant had long
anticipated such an operation and as soon he heard the Americans
arriving he scrambled into a well camouflaged, tree-covered valley.
The Special Forces found his safe house but not him; he left the next
morning for Pakistan.9 Soon after Kashmir Khan reached Peshawar,
Hizb was dealt a further blow. In the early hours of 30 October,
Hekmatyar’s son-in-law, Ghairat Baheer, was arrested in a joint CIA-
ISI raid on his house-cum-office in Islamabad. Another Hizbi was
detained in the raid; his name was Gul Rahman, and as a member of
Haji Islamuddin’s Support Group—the Al-Qaeda-trained force of
bodyguards first established in the late 1980s to protect Hekmatyar
from assassination—he had been making frequent trips into Kunar to
visit the fugitives, acting as a courier for Hekmatyar and bin Laden.
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When he had not been with them he had been using Baheer’s car,
which possessed VIP licence plates, to get around Pakistan’s more
cosmopolitan areas without being harassed by the police. On one trip,
he had been to Rawalpindi to collect a sheath of documents from an
Algerian Al-Qaeda member. Gul Rahman had helped organise the
return of Faqeri to Afghanistan at the start of the mission to contact
Mullah Omar, and served as the messenger who passed on Hekmatyar’s
last-minute warning to the secretary.The Americans had struck gold.10
Baheer and Gul Rahman were detained in Islamabad for a week,
then flown to a secret prison in an abandoned brick factory behind
Kabul airport. Known as Cobalt or the Salt Pit, the black site had
been open for just over a month and was already full. The CIA needed
somewhere it could interrogate high value detainees without having to
worry about obeying international law, and Kabul under the control of
its proxies in the Northern Alliance was the perfect place. Prisoners at
the Salt Pit were held in almost total darkness, with music blasted into
their cells at a volume so loud the guards wore ear defenders. Baheer
was beaten and humiliated throughout his detention; at one point his
CIA interrogators forced him into a coffin-sized box, slammed it shut
and demanded he tell them where Hekmatyar and bin Laden were
hiding. But Baheer was a diplomat, not an operative, and he knew little
about the military side of the party. The same could not be said for
Gul Rahman.11
Throughout his detention Hekmatyar’s bodyguard was left naked
or in a diaper. On one occasion he was showered in freezing cold water,
then chained up wringing wet for hours in a specially designed sleep
deprivation cell. Gul Rahman refused to talk. He was made to run
down a long corridor with his hands bound and a hood covering his
head, causing him to fall; instead of helping him up, his interrogators
dragged him along the ground, punching and slapping him. Ever
defiant, he threw food and a bucket full of excrement at his guards.The
following day, on 20 November, Gul Rahman was found dead from
hypothermia in his cell. His body lay on its side in a foetal position, his
hands bound to his feet, which were tied to a grate on the wall by a six
to twelve inch chain—a technique the CIA called ‘short shackling.’12
When Hekmatyar heard of Gul Rahman’s arrest he feared that it
was only a matter of time before his own whereabouts were revealed.
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The Americans were already agonisingly close: a US patrol had passed

just metres from one of his hideouts; he could even hear the troops
talking. Haji Khan Jan, the Hizb commander sheltering bin Laden and
Zawahiri, was also nearly captured.13 By late 2002 it was obvious to
Hekmatyar, bin Laden and Zawahiri that they needed to change their
location. Kashmir Khan’s brother Haji Nurrahman escorted them to
Peshawar—the Arabs first, Hekmatyar later—where they were split
up and moved between Hizb safe houses.
For a short time Nurrahman stayed in the city with bin Laden’s
son, Hamza, but he never saw the Al-Qaeda leader again. He met
Zawahiri just once more, in 2003, soon after the 9/11 mastermind
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured in the Pakistani city of
Rawalpindi. They sat together in broad daylight on a park bench near
the Islamia College in Peshawar. Zawahiri was unrecognisable from
the elderly scholar so familiar from Al-Qaeda propaganda videos. He
was clean shaven and wore a black coat, complemented by a white
skull cap rather than his usual turban. When Nurrahman remarked
upon his strange appearance, the Egyptian seemed irritated by
his naivety. ‘This is jihad,’ he replied. Speaking in Dari and clearly
unnerved by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s arrest, Zawahiri said he
wanted to return to Kunar to live with Kashmir Khan, not realising
that the Hizb lieutenant had fled the area. Nurrahman promised
to pass the message on and Zawahiri melted away into the city. A
short while later they made contact again, though not face-to-face.
Nurrahman told Zawahiri that Kashmir Khan would happily shelter
him in Peshawar. For now, though, he could not look after him in
Kunar. Zawahiri declined the offer.
The intense US pressure was paying off. Hizb and Al-Qaeda were
running out of room to hide and space to work. Hizb would remain
ideologically aligned with Al-Qaeda throughout the next decade, and
both Hekmatyar and Kashmir Khan would make occasional contact
with key Al-Qaeda figures. But daily coordination between the
leaderships of both groups had become impossible, and with it the
dream of a coordinated jihad carried out by the Taliban, Hizb and Al-
Qaeda. Hekmatyar would have to strike out on his own.14
***

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In truth, Hizb was in no shape to fight. Helping bin Laden was one
thing; going into combat against the most powerful military force in
the world was quite another. By the end of 2002 there were around
9,700 American troops in Afghanistan, supplemented by a small
NATO-led international force based in Kabul. Had the same scenario
existed fifteen years earlier, Hekmatyar’s mujahideen would have
outnumbered the foreign soldiers three or four to one. Now, old and
weary from a lifetime of conflict and compromised ideals, most Hizb
survivors were unwilling to put themselves in danger for Hekmatyar
or his grandiose ambitions.15
Jan Baz Sarfaraz, Hizb’s former roving envoy to the Islamic world,
did not want to fight the Americans but was terrified of admitting it in
case he antagonised his leader. He was summoned to the US consulate
in Peshawar and issued with an ultimatum to renounce his ties to the
Hizb emir. He had been there before, on 21 December 1989, when
he received a three-month visa to travel to the US. He was not even
asked to pay the usual fees, such was America’s love affair with the
mujahideen in those days. Sarfaraz had been to the US twice, visiting
Chicago, Seattle, Ohio and Washington, and had no quarrel with
American civilians, only the foreign policies of the governments they
elected. Now he had to try to articulate his predicament to a young
consular official demanding an oath of loyalty from him. Sarfaraz
replied that, as he lived in Pakistan, it was not safe for him to speak
against Hekmatyar in public. ‘The world doesn’t know what he’s like,’
he said, thinking of all the people who had died or disappeared crossing
him. ‘He’s very powerful.’ The official let Sarfaraz go with a warning.16
Waheedullah Sabawoon, the architect of Hizb’s mission to
Azerbaijan, was not so fortunate; accused of planning a coup, he was
arrested in Kabul by the Afghan government. Hundreds of other party
members who had arrived in the city from Peshawar, hoping to reconcile
with the administration, were detained as part of the operation.
Sabawoon had fallen out with Hekmatyar during the Taliban era, even
going so far as to work as finance officer for the Northern Alliance, but
his background with Hizb was enough to warrant suspicion. He was
held under house arrest for three months.17 A year later, the Ahmadzai
commanders Sabawoon had turned into such effective shock troops for
Hizb during the civil war were rounded up. Chaman was arrested for
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 THE RECKONING

plotting to kill the Afghan president Hamid Karzai and the American
ambassador to Kabul. He was transferred to the US detention centre
at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Under questioning, he claimed that he had
been working as an informant for the Northern Alliance and British
intelligence. His fellow commander Qalam was detained at Bagram air
base, where US forces had opened another internment centre.18
The most notorious Ahmadzai commander of them all, Zardad,
was arrested in Britain in July 2003. Once feared for the punishments
he meted out to civilians travelling on the highway between Kabul
and Jalalabad, he had arrived in the UK in 1998 on a false passport
and was running a pizza restaurant in south London at the time of his
arrest. Charged with conspiring to take hostages and torture, he was
tried in Britain’s central criminal court and sentenced to twenty years
in prison.19
***
Unable to micromanage Hizb’s military and political affairs as he once
had, Hekmatyar made do with becoming a symbol of resistance to the
small pocket of diehard Hizbis willing and able to answer his call to
arms. His words, rather than his actions, were now his most potent
weapon. Based out of a shopping centre on University Road, Peshawar,
in 2003 the Hizb newspaper Shahadat started publishing again after
being shut down during the Taliban regime. From his various safe
houses, Hekmatyar typed up anti-US statements on his laptop, printed
them out and delivered them to the office by courier. Although Pakistani
government censors toned down the most inflammatory articles, 3,000
copies of Shahadat were published every day in Pashto and Dari, with
many of them smuggled over the border into Afghanistan. When he
wasn’t working as a part-time journalist, Hekmatyar typed up night
letters that were printed out and distributed as glossy leaflets throughout
the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area—a far cry from the handwritten
notes of the past. One included a photo of a US soldier patting down
a girl. ‘Dirty American hands are searching the bodies of young Afghan
women,’ he wrote beside the picture, warning that ‘thousands of Osama
bin Ladens’ would rise up to avenge this dishonour in future.20
By now the US had made Hekmatyar a ‘Specially Designated Global
Terrorist’ alongside bin Laden and Zawahiri. The UN had followed
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suit, adding him to its Al-Qaeda sanctions list. In public, Hekmatyar

wore the classification with pride, but privately, the incessant pressure
took a heavy toll. When his mother Kimya died from natural causes in
Pakistan on 28 April 2003, twenty-five years after his father had been
brutally murdered by the Afghan communists, he dared not attend her
funeral in Shamshatu.21
While Hizb was not the force of old, some of its most revered
commanders fought on, albeit with limited effectiveness. In Wardak,
Toran Amanullah carried out a number of small pinprick operations
against US troops before being arrested and sent to Bagram; his brother
continued to fight in his absence. In Kunar, an Egyptian, Abu Ikhlas al-
Masri, assumed responsibility for the bomb-making classes Hekmatyar
had started earlier in the war and taught Kashmir Khan’s men how
to fix their old Soviet-era weapons. Married to a local woman, Masri
would become a thorn in the side of the American troops in Kunar,
staging regular ambushes in the province until he was captured in
December 2010.22
Kashmir Khan had left Peshawar and was now drifting in and out of
Kunar, hiking through the mountains at night, sometimes crossing into
Nuristan and Bajaur. Now in charge of Hizb’s military committee, he
paid fighters a few hundred dollars from the party’s coffers in Shamshatu
every time they conducted a successful attack against American troops.
If he couldn’t be contacted, Engineer Tareq—the Hizbi who had once
clashed with Massoud in Panjshir—ran the military committee from
inside Pakistan. Still, money was tight and operations few.23
The US invasion of Afghanistan was, in theory, exactly the
opportunity Hekmatyar had always sought: a chance to fight directly
against the ‘ancient enemy.’ In reality, however, Hizb was a shadow of
its former self. Rather than wage jihad against America, Hekmatyar’s
struggle had become one of trying to stay relevant. Even its senior
members began to complain that Hizb would never be able to defeat
the US militarily. Hekmatyar needed something to change.
***
In late 2003 the NATO-led international force in Kabul opened up
backchannel contacts with a Hizbi in Peshawar. Hekmatyar granted
approval for him to travel to Kabul to continue the talks in person.
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 THE RECKONING

The intermediary had previously lived in the UK and spoke excellent

English; he had also been integral to helping Hekmatyar return to
Afghanistan to link up with bin Laden in 2002. Now he met the NATO
commander, Canadian Lt. General Rick Hillier, in west Kabul. At
the end of two-and-a-half hours of talks, Hillier invited him back for
another round of dialogue a fortnight later, this time with dozens of
NATO representatives. After the second meeting, the Hizbi received
an official letter inviting the party to send a delegation to Kabul. The
offer was made on the understanding that this was a breakaway faction
of Hizb with no direct ties to the insurgency.24
In the first week of May 2004 a group of Hizbis arrived to set
up an office in Kabul. They insisted that they had not been in touch
with Hekmatyar since he left Iran. In fact, they had received written
consent from him to make the journey. Hekmatyar hoped they would
be able to put pressure on the Karzai government to release some of
the party’s prisoners and to advocate for the withdrawal of foreign
troops. It was a pragmatic decision: if he could not win through force,
he would talk, just as he had with the Taliban and Massoud years before.
Jan Baz Sarfaraz moved to Kabul to facilitate the work. He was joined
by Sayed Rahman Wahidyar, the Hizbi who had taken bin Laden on his
first mission into Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, and Abdul
Qadeer Karyab, who represented Hizb in the 1989 talks with Sulaiman
Layeq in Baghdad and Tripoli. While one wing of Hizb would continue
trying to resurrect an armed struggle, another would now be able to
meet Western and Afghan officials.25
In 2006, two years after the Hizb office opened in Kabul, and a
year after several of the party’s candidates won seats in national
parliamentary elections, the insurgency exploded into life. The
epicentre of the violence was in the south of Afghanistan, where house
raids and arbitrary arrests by foreign troops were a source of rising
friction in Pashtun communities. A wave of Taliban suicide bombings
came in response. Over the previous five years there had been a total
of twenty-two such attacks. In 2006 alone there were 123.26 Their
growing use owed much to the influence of Hekmatyar’s protégé,
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was now Al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq and
had been deploying suicide bombings to devastating effect since the
US invasion of 2003. Although Hizb would not adopt the tactic until
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later, Hekmatyar was still in touch with Zarqawi. A month before the
Jordanian died in a US air strike north of Baghdad, Hekmatyar declared
he would fight under the flag of Al-Qaeda. In a video statement, he
praised bin Laden and Zawahiri for helping Hizb defeat the Soviets and
vowed to return the favour. ‘We stand alongside them,’ he said.27
While Hekmatyar tried to play a double game of both peacemaker
and Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist, Western military and intelligence
officials were convinced that he was little more than an opportunist
crook.They viewed much of Hizb as a criminal enterprise that traded in
everything from timber to heroin to fund its war effort. In April 2008
American and Afghan commandos raided the Shok valley in Nuristan,
hoping to capture or kill a prominent Hizb commander suspected of
making millions of dollars smuggling gemstones across the border.
Hundreds of insurgents ambushed the troops with rocket-propelled
grenades and heavy machine gun fire. The resistance was so fierce that
the Americans became convinced they had fortuitously stumbled upon
a meeting between the commander, Hekmatyar, Kashmir Khan and
other senior Hizb members.Ten of the Green Berets would later receive
a Silver Star for bravery—the third highest award for valour in the US
military—but the mission failed; Kashmir Khan wasn’t in the area and
Hekmatyar was nowhere to be found. Even the commander the troops
had originally hoped to kill survived. The war in Afghanistan, which
had once seemed so easy to the Americans, was becoming a protracted
and bloody grind. They were getting stuck in the very quagmire that
had wreaked so much damage on the Soviets.28
***
As additional soldiers began to deploy to Afghanistan under US
president Barack Obama in 2009 and 2010, another Hizb delegation
arrived in Kabul, this one carrying a fifteen-point peace plan and acting
openly on behalf of Hekmatyar. It called for a phased withdrawal of
all foreign forces, with security handed over to the Afghan army and
police. A new national security council would run the country until the
troops left and fresh elections could be held; in exchange, no foreign
militants would be allowed to shelter on Afghan soil.The US expressed
vague support for the plan but continued to expand the occupation
regardless. By mid-2010 there were some 100,000 American troops in
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Afghanistan, backed by 88,000 Pentagon-employed contractors. Allies

including Britain, Germany, Canada and France added 41,000 troops.
Together, it was more than twice the size of the Soviet force Hizb had
been so instrumental in humbling decades earlier.29
With his peace proposal ignored, Hekmatyar could only watch
and wait. Back in Afghanistan, shuttling between Kunar, Nuristan and
Laghman, he took comfort in his laptop computer, which he kept with
him at all times. Stored on its hard drive was a popular Arabic digital
library of thousands of Islamic books, Maktabah Shamilah, as well as
a collection of religious texts put together by Sunni Muslims in Iran.
There was also a selection of writing critiquing Western culture, given
to him by a scholar in Hizb. The only problem was finding a regular
electricity source to charge the computer’s battery. Still suffering from
pain in his teeth, on one occasion Hekmatyar snuck into Jalalabad to
visit a dentist. More often than not, though, he stayed in remote,
mountainous areas that had been Hizb strongholds for generations. No
matter how many American troops were in the country, there would
always be valleys and villages they could not easily enter. Between
them, Hekmatyar and his most loyal lieutenants seemed to know every
rat run, cave and trail for thousands of miles.30
Untethered from his mujahideen and lacking enthusiastic new
recruits of his own, he had to make do as a relatively passive elder
of Islamic extremism. He compiled statements for Hizb’s website
that veered between angry denunciations of Muslim suffering in
the Middle East to relatively moderate instructions for his own
mujahideen. Hizb commanders shouldn’t let their men harass civilians
or carry out explosions in mosques, medical clinics and schools, he
wrote in 2011, nor should they kill teachers, judges and journalists,
or force people into paying the Islamic charitable tax ushr. His writing
grew more poetic the longer he was on the run. ‘We need to show the
Americans that our patience is high, our stamina is strong, and that we
can travel the dark nights,’ he wrote in one letter. ‘You fight for my
imprisonment, and I fight for my freedom.’ In one of his books, The
Real Faith, he seemed acutely aware of his own mortality. ‘Your death
is evidence that you are condemned to [God’s] will,’ he wrote. ‘You
do not want to be condemned to death; humans do not want to be
condemned to old age; they do not want their power to end, but what
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can they do? When a sword is placed at your throat you are too weak
to take it away.’31
On 2 May 2011, bin Laden was finally killed by US Special Forces in
Abbottabad, Pakistan. Hekmatyar reacted angrily to the news, accusing
the American troops of acting like animals by shooting the Saudi in
front of his family and burying him at sea. Kashmir Khan, meanwhile,
received a letter from Zawahiri, thanking him for sheltering bin Laden
at the start of the conflict. ‘In all Afghanistan, you are the only man
who is righteous,’ he wrote. ‘You helped us without any kind of self-
interest.’32 Like Hekmatyar and Hizb, bin Laden and the old iteration
of Al-Qaeda had become increasingly marginalised. A new generation
of Islamic radicals was rising up in Iraq, cut from the same cloth as Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi.They would soon form ISIS, a far more extreme and
violent manifestation of the beliefs Hekmatyar had dedicated his life to
nurturing. His ideological offspring had outgrown him; his time as a
mujahid appeared to be over.
Hekmatyar may not have established the empire of which he had
always dreamed, but he could look on with a degree of satisfaction,
knowing he had done much to inspire and nurture this latest
vanguard. There was something else he could count as a victory: his
mere survival. He had outlived most of his major contemporaries,
be they allies or enemies.33 Even Burhanuddin Rabbani, the Jamiat
leader, had fallen by the wayside, assassinated in Kabul as he tried
to facilitate peace talks with the Taliban. As Hizbis negotiated with
the Karzai government for his safe return, Hekmatyar continued
to mix his contradictory brand of fundamentalism and pragmatism,
unable to resist the temptation to land a few final blows in the name
of jihad. Early on the morning of 18 September 2012, a female Hizbi
carried out one of the only known suicide bombings by a woman
in Afghanistan’s history. A young recruit named Fatima volunteered
for the mission in response to a short YouTube video that mocked
the Prophet Mohammed. Driving at high speed on a road leading
from Kabul airport, her car packed with explosives, she smashed
into a minibus full of foreign civilian contract workers, killing twelve
people. The blast was audible on the other side of the city. More
suicide bombings followed in the years ahead, as Hizb tried to wring
a few final concessions from the Afghan government.34
432
 THE RECKONING

By the time Hekmatyar was ready to make peace, Karzai had left
office to be replaced by a US-brokered coalition government with
a former World Bank technocrat at its head, Ashraf Ghani. Obama
was also on his way out of the White House, about to be replaced by
Donald Trump. Although a few thousand American troops remained in
Afghanistan, Hekmatyar was tired of being on the run. In September
2016, two months after Kashmir Khan died from natural causes in a
Peshawar hospital, he signed a peace deal. On 4 May the following
year he returned to Kabul, driving into the city from Jalalabad—a faint
echo of the journey he had once made in an armoured SUV gifted to
him by bin Laden.

433
12. On 15 August 1947, on the eve of independence, India’s first prime minister,
Jawaharlal Nehru, delivered a famous speech in Delhi: ‘Long years ago we made a
tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not
wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour,
when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.’
13. Salil Tripathi, The Colonel Who Would Not Repent: The Bangladesh War and Its Unquiet
Legacy, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016, p. 9.
14. ‘By the turn of the nineteenth century,’ notes Sushil Chaudhury, ‘pro-Bengali
views were being vigorously expressed.’ As notions of Muslim-Indian identity were
increasingly discussed in the region, so too was the assertion that the two identities
Bengali and Muslim were not mutually exclusive. Sushil Chaudhury, ‘Identity and
Composite Culture: The Bengal Case’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh 58,
no. 1 (June 2013), pp. 1–25.
15. ‘Pakistani and French Envoys Criticize UN Involvement in Bangladesh War Crimes
Process’, 12 May 2009, via Wikileaks, https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/
cables/09DHAKA474_a.hml
16. Sheikh Mujib had put forward a list of six demands in 1966. They were as follows: 1.
For a federal Pakistan with universal adult franchise; 2. For the federal government
to be tasked only with defense and foreign affairs, and for all other matters to be
conducted by the federating states; 3. For distinct currencies for the respective
wings, and/or independent central banks, and/or measures to prevent capital flight
from east to west; 4. For the power of taxation and revenue collection to be held by
the federating states; 5. For foreign exchange earnings to be held by the respective
wings, and for the federating states to have the ability to build trading relations with
foreign states; 6. For East Pakistan to have its own military or paramilitary and for the
nation’s navy to be headquartered in East Pakistan.
17. Tripathi, The Colonel Who Would Not Repent, p. 49.
18. Gary Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger and a Forgotten Genocide, London: Hurst
& Co., 2014, p. 23.
19. S. Mahmud Ali, Understanding Bangladesh, London: Hurst & Co., 2010, p. 44.
20. Archer K. Blood, The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh: Memoirs of an American Diplomat, Dhaka:
University Press Ltd, 2002, p. 115.
21. Bass, The Blood Telegram, p. 102.
22. Bass, The Blood Telegram, p. 24.
23. Blood, The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh, p. 116.
pp. [2–22]

NOTES

PROLOGUE
1. Al-Adel, Saif, Jihadist Biography of the Slaughtering Leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
copy in PDF format, p. 13, scholarship.tricolib.brynmawr.edu/bitstream/
handle/10066/5092/ZAR20090817.pdf, last accessed 23 May 2019.
2. Author interview with Qazi Abdul Hai Faqeri, Kabul, 27 October 2018.
3. Author interviews with Engineer Mohammed Daoud, Kabul, 12 August 2013; and
Sayed Alamuddin Atheer, Kabul, 14 May 2013.
4. Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, September 11th Interviews and Articles, Peshawar: Mishaq-e
Issar, 2002, p. 39.
5. The details about Hekmatar’s life in Iran and his escape from the country are taken
from author interviews with Qazi Abdul Hai Faqeri, Shamshatu, 19 March 2014; and
Habib-ur-Rahman Hekmatyar, Hayatabad, 18 February 2014.

1. EARTHQUAKES
1. The communist activist Tahir Badakhshi introduced Taraki and Karmal at the meeting.
He also served as the photographer.
2. Author interviews with Sulaiman Layeq, Kabul, 17 August 2014 and 13 March
2016.
3. Author interview with Sulaiman Layeq, Kabul, 25 December 2010.
4. Author interview with Sulaiman Layeq, Kabul, 11 November 2014.
5. Author interviews with Sulaiman Layeq, Kabul, 16 June 2013 and 11 November
2014.
6. Calvert, John, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism, London: Hurst, 2010,
pp. 81, 182.
7. Pargeter, Alison, The Muslim Brotherhood: From Opposition to Power, London: Saqi Books,
2010, p. 21.

435
 NOTES pp. [23–38]

8. Al-Banna, Hassan, ‘Towards the Light,’ Ikhwanweb, 13 June 2007, http://www.

ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=802, last accessed 27 May 2019.
9. Information about the life of Ghulam Mohammed Niazi is taken from interviews
with Mohammed Amin Weqad, Kabul, 23 April 2016; Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai,
Kabul, 24 April 2016; Sulaiman Layeq, Kabul, 2 May 2016; Mustafa Niazi,
Kabul, 23 May 2016; Mohammed Naseem Niazi, via phone,19 July 2016; Wali
Mohammed, via phone, 19 July 2016.
10. Rabbani, Burhanuddin, ‘Biography of Martyr Ustad Ghulam Mohammed Niazi,’
Eslahonline, 3 June 2012.
11. ‘His Majesty Opens 2.2 Billion Afghanis Highway of Salang’, Kabul Times, Afghanistan,
5 September 1964.
12. Author interview with Nancy Hatch Dupree, Kabul, 10 January 2011.
13. Adverts in Kabul Times, 1 July 1964 and 20 September 1964.
14. ‘Yousuf Lauds Restraint, Wisdom in Elections; Results are Announced,’ Kabul Times,
Afghanistan, 2 October 1965.
15. Dupree, Louis, Afghanistan, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1973,
pp. 592–6.
16. Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, The Islamic Movement, Peshawar: Mishaq-e Issar, publication
date unknown, pp. 190–1.

2. A NEW WORLD
1. Author interview with Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai, Kabul, 24 April 2016.
2. Samady, Saif R., Education and Afghan Society in the Twentieth Century, Paris: UNESCO,
2001, pp. 59–64.
3. The details about the locations of the Sharia faculty and Ghulam Mohammed Niazi’s
office are taken from author interviews with Jan Baz Sarfaraz and Sayed Rahman
Wahidyar, Kabul, 4 February 2016. The atmosphere at the university was described
by Sharif Fayez (author interview, Kabul, 15 January 2014).
4. The information about Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman’s childhood is taken from author
interviews with Dr. Anwar, Kabul, 10 June 2013 and 2 August 2015; and Aziz-ur-
Rahman Tawab, Mahmoud Raqi, 26 January 2014.
5. Dupree, Louis, Afghanistan, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1973, pp. 601–9.
6. Dupree, op. cit, p. 620.
7. Author interview with Engineer Salaam, Shamshatu, 19 February 2014.
8. ‘Polytechnic to Have 22 Departments,’ Kabul Times, Afghanistan, 20 September 1967.
9. Interview with Abdul Qadeer Karyab, Kabul, 26 October 2013.
10. Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, The Islamic Movement, Peshawar: Mishaq-e Issar, publication
date unknown, pp. 135–7.
11. The eight young men at the Muslim Youth’s founding meeting were: Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar, Abdul Rahim Niazi, Saifuddin Nasratyar, Mawlawi Sahib Habib-ur-
Rahman, Abdul Qadir Tawana (Islamic law student from Balkh province), Ghulam
Rabbani Attesh (Islamic law student from Paghman), Sayed Abdul Rahman Agha
(Islamic law student from Takhar province) and Gul Mohammed (Islamic law
student from Maidan Wardak province). The four men who joined the Muslim
Youth soon afterwards were: Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman, Dr. Mohammed Omar

436
pp. [39–50] Notes

(medical student from Badakhshan province), Khwaja Mahfouz Mansour (science

student from Baghlan province) and Abdul Habib Hanani (science student from
Nangahrar province).
12. Edwards, David B., Before the Taliban, London: University of California Press, 2002,
p. 212.
13. The Qur’an, 51:16-19
14. Author interview with Mamor Noorullah, Kandahar, 23 August 2014.
15. The letter was loaned to the authors by Sulaiman Layeq.
16. The scholar was named Mawlawi Qurban Mohammed and came from the district of
Chah Ab in Takhar province.
17. Leitner, Richard J. and Leitner, Peter M., Unheeded Warnings, Washington, DC:
Crossbow Books, 2007, pp. 33–4.
18. Leitner, op. cit, p. 50.
19. The information about Hekmatyar’s childhood comes from author interviews with
Habib-ur-Rahman Hekmatyar, Hayatabad, 18 February 2014, and Abdullah Shahab
Hekmatyar, Kabul, 5 February 2014. Also from Hekmatyar, The Islamic Movement,
op.cit, pp. 109–22.
20. Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, The Priority of Sense over Matter, Peshawar: Mishaq-e Issar,
publication date unknown, 2009, pp. 7–22.
21. Hekmatyar, The Priority of Sense Over Matter, op.cit, p.79.
22. Author interview with Sulaiman Layeq, Kabul, 11 November 2014.
23. Author interview with Sulaiman Layeq, Kabul, 28 December 2013.
24. Author interview with Wares Mohammed Waziri, London, 7 April 2015.
25. Author interview with Mohammed Amin Weqad, Kabul, 1 December 2010. Also
from Hekmatyar, The Islamic Movement, op.cit, pp. 179–80..

3. ‘THE ANCIENT ENEMY’

1. Khalil Sayed, The Kabul Times Annual, Kabul: Kabul Times Publishing Agency, 1970,
pp. 11–16.
2. Article 15 of the Afghan Constitution.
3. ‘Premier Opens Zarnigar Park, Two New Bridges in Kabul,’ Kabul Times, 8 December
1964, and ‘Zarnegar Park Clocks Afghanistan’s Heartbeat,’ The Kabul Times, 4 April
1970.
4. Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, The Islamic Movement, Peshawar: Mishaq-e Issar, publication
date unknown, pp. 193–4.
5. Author interviews with Abdul Qadir Imami Ghori, Kabul, 24 December 2013; Fazel
Maula Latun, Kabul, 29 December 2013; Mohammed Amin Karim, via Skype, 25
March 2014; Mohammed Hassan Wolusmal, Kabul, 10 May 2014.
6. Cassette recording of speech from Hizb-e Islami’s archive transcribed and translated
by authors.
7. Author interview with Mamor Noorullah, Kandahar, 23 August 2014.
8. Author interviews with Shahnawaz Tanai, Kabul, 27 July 2010, and Dr. Anwar, Kabul,
10 June 2013.
9. Author interviews with Mohammed Hassan Wolusmal, Kabul, 16 December 2012
and 10 May 2014.

437
 NOTES pp. [51–60]

10. Taken from a speech Gulbuddin Hekmatyar gave to mark the eighteenth anniversary
of the MuslimYouth’s establishment, 2 April 1987.The speech is available onYouTube,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TerOZ_bROX0, last accessed 27 May 2019.
11. Author interviews with Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai, Kabul, 24 April 2016, and Mustafa
Niazi, Kabul, 23 May 2016.
12. Author interview with Sulaiman Layeq, Kabul, 16 June 2013.
13. Author interviews with Ahmad Bashir Royga, Kabul, 2 September 2013 and 24
December 2013, and Sulaiman Layeq, Kabul, 28 December 2013.
14. Hekmatyar, The Islamic Movement, op. cit, p.182.
15. Author interview with Dr. Jawad, Jalalabad, 16 January 2014.
16. Author interview with Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai, Kabul, 9 December 2013.
17. Abdul Rahim Niazi was accompanied to India by his brother, Abdul Karim, and friend,
Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai. The details about his trip to Delhi, the return of his body
to Afghanistan, and his funeral are drawn from the authors’ interviews with: Sayed
Rahman Wahidyar, Kabul, 13 May 2013, 31 December 2013 and 30 August 2014;
Dr. Anwar, Kabul, 10 June 2013; Engineer Obaidullah, Kabul, 4 December 2013;
Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai, Kabul, 9 December 2013; Mohammed Amin Weqad, Kabul,
5 May 2014; Mamor Noorullah, Kandahar, 23 August 2014. Also from Hekmatyar,
The Islamic Movement, op. cit, pp. 197–8.
18. Hekmatyar, The Islamic Movement, op. cit, p. 197.
19. Hekmatyar, The Islamic Movement, op. cit, p. 197.
20. Author interviews with Mohammed Amin Weqad, Kabul, 18 December 2010 and
5 May 2014; Sayed Rahman Wahidyar, Kabul, 13 May 2013; Dr. Anwar, Kabul, 5
January 2014. The Muslim Youth’s executive council members were Hekmatyar,
Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman, Saifuddin Nasratyar, Mawlawi Sahib Habib-ur-Rahman
and Ghulam Rabbani Attesh.
21. ‘Wife of Filipino Diplomat Caught Smuggling Hashish’, The Kabul Times, 19 May
1970; Advert in The Kabul Times, 15 June 1971; Ruttig, Thomas, ‘How it All Began’,
Afghanistan Analysts Network, 2013; Advert in The Kabul Times, 9 October 1971.
22. Armstrong, Karen, Muhammad, London: Harper Perennial, 2007, p. 56.
23. Author interview with Taj Malok, Shamshatu, 15 June 2014.
24. Hekmatyar, The Islamic Movement, op. cit, pp. 188–99.
25. Author interviews with Mohammed Amin Weqad, Kabul, 1 December 2010; Abdul
Qadeer Karyab, Kabul, 26 October 2013; Engineer Obaidullah, Kabul, 4 December
2013. Also from Hekmatyar, The Islamic Movement, op. cit, pp. 205–8.
26. Interview with Haji Mohammed Karim Khawaki, Bazarak, 4 August 2010.
27. Interview with Dr. Anwar, Kabul, 27 October 2013.
28. Author correspondence with Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, Kabul, December 2013.
29. The Muslim Youth member who told Mojaddedi to sit down was Ghulam Rabbani
Attesh. Author interview with Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai, Kabul, 9 December 2013.
30. Hekmatyar, The Islamic Movement, op. cit, pp. 200–1.
31. Author interview with Arsalan Rahmani, Kabul, 6 November 2010.
32. Author interview with Abdul Hakim Mujahid, Kabul, 12 April 2014.
33. The imam’s son was Mullah Nasrullah, who would later join Hizb. Mullah Nasrullah
established and ran the Kandahar bureau of Gahiz newspaper in the Kabul Darwaza
area of the city. He recalled how Minhajuddin Gahiz visited the bureau just before it

438
pp. [61–67] Notes

opened and blessed the office by sprinkling it with water in traditional Afghan fashion.
The delegation that subsequently went to Kandahar in response to the stabbings
was made up of Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai, Muslim Youth founding member Ghulam
Rabbani Attesh and Sayed Ahmad, an Afghan who worked as a translator at the French
embassy in Kabul. They stayed in a mosque in the Dih Khwaja neighbourhood of
Kandahar run by Mullah Nasrullah’s father.
34. Author interviews with Qazi Mahmoud ul-Hassan, Kabul, 8 April 2014; Mullah
Nasrullah, Kandahar, 23 August 2014; Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai, Kabul, 1 June 2015.
Also from Hekmatyar, The Islamic Movement, op. cit, pp. 124–6.
35. Mitrokhin, Vasiliy, The KGB in Afghanistan, Washington: The Cold War International
History Project, Wilson Centre, 2009, pp. 17–24.
36. Arnold, Anthony, Afghanistan’s Two-Party Communism, California: Hoover Institution
Press, 1983, p. 55. Also from author interview with Sulaiman Layeq, Kabul,
2 May 2016.
37. Cassette recording of speech from Hizb-e Islami’s archive transcribed and translated
by authors.
38. Authors’ correspondence with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, June 2015.
39. Author interview with Mohammed Amin Karim, via Skype, 21 May 2014.
40. Maududi and Qutb were identified as the key intellectual influences on the Muslim
Youth in author interviews with Jan Baz Sarfaraz, Kabul, 27 May 2013; Engineer
Mohammed Khan, 8 June 2013; Dr. Anwar, Kabul, 8 June 2013; Qazi Mahmoud ul-
Hassan, Kabul, 8 April 2013. However, the Muslim Youth also drew inspiration from
several Iranian scholars and intellectuals, including Ali Shariati, Mehdi Bazargan,
Mahmoud Taleghani and Naser Makarem Shirazi, all of whom would play important
roles in their own country’s 1979 Islamic revolution. From Iraq, the Muslim Youth
looked to the teachings of the philosopher and cleric, Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr, the
future father-in-law of Muqtada al-Sadr, leader of the most powerful Shia insurgent
group in post-2003 Baghdad.
41. Calvert, John, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism, London: Hurst, 2010,
p. 89.
42. Calvert, op. cit, p. 131.
43. Calvert, op. cit, p. 159.
44. Qutb, Sayyid, Milestones, New Delhi: Islamic Book Service, 2002, p. 42.
45. Qutb, op. cit, p. 80.
46. Calvert, op. cit, p. 224.
47. Calvert, op. cit, p. 225.
48. In an interview with the authors, Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai recalled that he was sent to
try to calm Nasratyar, Kabul, 9 December 2013.
49. Interviews with Fazel Maula Latun, Kabul, 29 December 2013 and 10 November
2014.
50 ‘Knowledge of econ. essential for Students’, The Kabul Times, 1 May 1971.
51. Cassette recording of speech from Hizb-e Islami’s archive transcribed and translated
by authors.
52. Confidential, US Embassy Kabul to Department of State, Airgram A-60, Merajuddin:
Portrait of a Moslem Youth Extremist, 29 May 1972. Published by the National Security
Archive, George Washington University.

439
 NOTES pp. [69–78]

53. Author interviews with Khalid Farooqi, Kabul, 4 July 2013; and Abdul Qadeer
Karyab, Kabul, 26 October 2013. The culprit was identified in an interview with
Mamor Noorullah, Kandahar, 23 August 2014.
54. Author interview with Engineer Tareq, Hayatabad, 17 February 2014.
55. Hekmatyar, The Islamic Movement, op. cit, pp. 209–16.

4. THE INSURRECTION
1. Author interview with Sulaiman Layeq, Kabul, 29 April 2015.
2. ‘Afghanistan Declared a Republic’, The Kabul Times, 22 August 1973.
3. ‘President Daoud Holds First Press Conference’, The Kabul Times, 22 August 1973.
4. Confidential US Embassy Kabul to Department of State, Airgram A-33, The Afghan
Left, 22 May 1973. Published by the National Security Archive, George Washington
University.
5. Memorandum, Harold H. Saunders and Henry R. Appelbaum, National Security
Council Staff, to Dr. Henry Kissinger, Coup in Afghanistan, 17 July 1973. Published by
the National Security Archive, George Washington University.
6. Author interview with Dr. Anwar, Kabul, 5 January 2014.
7. Author interviews with Mustafa Niazi, Kabul, 23 May 2016; Mohammed Naseem
Niazi, via phone, 19 July 2016;Wali Mohammed, via phone, 19 July 2016. Also ‘Kabul
University Instructors Return from Holy Mecca’, The Kabul Times, 14 February 1973.
8. Author interview with Musafa Niazi, Kabul, 23 May 2016.
9. Author interview with Salahuddin Rabbani, Kabul, 11 September 2013.
10. Author interview with Mohammed Esh’aq, Kabul, 2 December 2013.
11. Author interview with Jan Baz Sarfaraz, Kabul, 29 April 2014.
12. Es’haq, Mohammed, ‘Islamists Felt Need for a Party to Defend Islam’, AFGHANews,
1 January 1989.
13. Dr. Tawana, ‘The Islamic Movement in Afghanistan’, AFGHANews, 15 May 1989.
14. Author interview with Mohammed Zaman Muzamil, Kabul, 22 August 2013.
15. Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, The Islamic Movement, Peshawar: Mishaq-e Issar, publication
date unknown, pp. 244–50.
16. Calvert, John, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism, London: Hurst, 2010,
p. 199.
17. Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman’s status as the Muslim Youth’s chief military strategist at
this time was confirmed in author interviews with Qazi Mohammed Hakim Hakim
(Peshawar, 19 February 2014), Dr. Anwar (Kabul, 27 October 2013), and Jan Baz
Sarfaraz (Kabul 29 April 2014). The mosque in which Qazi Hussain Ahmad spoke
was based in the Guzargah neighbourhood of Kabul and run by the senior Muslim
Youth activist Mawlawi Sahib Habib-ur-Rahman. Qazi Hussain’s visits to the city
were described in author interviews with Jan Baz Sarfaraz, Kabul, 27 May 2013 and
16 June 2013.
18. Details about Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman’s meeting with Maududi are taken from
author interviews with Aziz-ur-Rahman Tawab, Mahmoud Raqi, 26 January 2014;
and Jan Baz Sarfaraz, Kabul, 24 May 2014. Also from Ahmad, Qazi Hussain, The
Afghan Jihad is the Morning of Hope for the Islamic Ummah, Peshawar: Mishaq-e Issar,
1991, p. 6. Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman’s views on Pakistan were expressed in the

440
pp. [79–90] Notes

cassette recording of his 25 February 1972 speech about the violence that led to the
creation of Bangladesh.
19. Author interview with Dr. Anwar, Kabul, 5 January 2014. Dr. Anwar is the nom de
guerre of Abdul Basir.
20. Author interview with Haji Naqib Mohammed Fared, Peshawar, 18 February 2014.
21. Author interviews with Qazi Nazer, Kabul, 19 April 2014; and Dr. Anwar, Kabul,
2 August 2014. Also from Hekmatyar, The Islamic Movement, op. cit, pp. 244–50.
22. Author interview with Khalid Farooqi, Kabul, 4 July 2013. Toran Amanullah also
recalled meeting Hekmatyar for the first time in Zadran during this period. Author
interview, Shamshatu, 19 February 2014.
23. Hekmatyar, The Islamic Movement, op. cit, pp. 133–4.
24. Author interviews with Jan Baz Sarfaraz, Kabul, 27 May 2013; Ahmad Shah
Ahmadzai, Kabul, 9 December 2013; Qazi Faizanullah Faisel, Mehtar Lam, 1 May
2014; Pohanmal Abdul Sabor Ghafoorzai, Mehtar Lam, 1 May 2014.
25. Author interview with Taj Malok, Shamshatu, 15 June 2014.
26. Author interview with Khalid Farooqi, Kabul, 4 July 2014.
27. Kiessling, Hein G., Faith, Unity, Discipline, London: Hurst, 2016, p. 34. Brown, Vahid
and Don Rassler, Fountainhead of Jihad: The Haqqani Nexus, 1973–2012, London:
Hurst, 2013, p. 44.
28. Author interviews with Jan Baz Sarfaraz, Kabul, 27 May 2013 and 29 April 2014.
29. Author interview with Ahmad Bashir Royga, Kabul, 8 December 2013.
30. Author interview with Jan Baz Sarfaraz, Kabul, 29 April 2014; and Pohanmal Abdul
Sabor Ghafoorzai, Mehtar Lam, 1 May 2014.
31. ‘Military Tribunal Issues Verdicts on Terrorists, Spies,’ The Kabul Times, 19 August 1974.
32. Author interviews with Dr Anwar, Kabul, 10 June 2013 and 2 August 2014; Aziz-ur-
Rahman Tawab, Mahmoud Raqi, 26 January 2014.
33. Omar, Dr. Mohammed, To You, Dear Sons of the Motherland, Kabul: Eslah-e Afkar, 2010,
p. 36.
34. Author interviews with Khalid Farooqi, Kabul, 4 July 2013; Qazi Mahmoud ul-
Hassan Jahid, Kabul, 17 March 2014; Waheedullah Sabawoon, Kabul, 12 May 2014.
35. ‘President Addresses the Nation’, Aryana, Summer 1975.
36. Author interviews with Mohammed Es’haq, Kabul, 26 August 2013 and 2 December
2013; Nancy Hatch Dupree, Kabul, 30 March 2014; Abdul Rahim Wardak, 3 August
2014. Es’haq, Mohammed, ‘Panjshir Uprising of 1975’, AFGHANews, 1 February
1989. Dupree, Louis, ‘Toward Representative Government in Afghanistan’,
American Universities Field Staff, 1978, pp. 3–4.
37. Author interviews with Haji Naqib Mohammed Fared, Peshawar, 18 February 2014;
Mawlawi Muslim, Mahmoud Raqi, 19 April 2014; Qazi Faizanullah Faisel, Mehtar
Lam, 1 May 2014.
38. Author interview with Abdul Rauf, Kohistan, 26 January 2014.
39. Author interviews with Khalid Farooqi, Kabul 4 July 2013; Engineer Obaidullah,
Kabul, 14 December 2013; Qazi Nazir, Kabul, 19 April 2014.
40. Author interview with Abdul Hameed Mubarez, Kabul, 3 December 2013.
41. Dupree, op. cit, pp. 4–5.
42. ‘Saboteurs Incited by Pakistan Subdued’, The Kabul Times, 27 July 1975.
43. ‘Pak Fiasco in Panjsheer Affair’, The Kabul Times, 27 July 1975.

441
 NOTES pp. [90–101]

44. Author interviews with Fazel Maula Latun, Kabul, 29 December 2013; Abdul Mobin
Safi, Mahmoud Raqi, 19 April 2014.
45. Author interview with Abdul Hakim Mujahid, Kabul, 12 April 2014.

5. SPIES
1. Author interview with Waheedullah Sabawoon, Kabul, 3 July 2017.
2. Author interviews with Mohammed Amin Weqad, Kabul, 5 May 2014; and
Waheedullah Sabawoon, Kabul, 12 May 2014.
3. Taken from a speech Gulbuddin Hekmatyar gave to mark the eighteenth anniversary
of the MuslimYouth’s establishment, 2 April 1987.The speech is available onYouTube,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TerOZ_bROX0, last accessed 27 May 2019.
4. Author interviews with Engineer Obaidullah, Kabul, 9 December 2013; Mohammed
Amin Weqad, Kabul, 5 May 2014; Jan Baz Sarfaraz, Kabul, 24 May 2014; Mawlawi
Storay, Hayatabad, 14 June 2014.
5. Author interview with Abdul Latif, Kabul, 5 May 2014.
6. Author interview with Qarib-ur-Rahman Saeed, Peshawar, 6 March 2015.
7. Author interviews with Haji Rohullah, Jalalabad, 1 May 2014; Mawlawi Storay,
Hayatabad, 14 June 2014; Ahmadullah Morshed Safi, Kabul, 7 June 2014.
8. Author interviews with Waheedullah Sabawoon, Kabul, 12 May 2014; Ahmadullah
Morshed Safi, Kabul, 7 December 2014; Kashmir Khan, Shaygal, 4 June 2016.
9. Author interviews with Mohammed Es’haq, Kabul, 26 August 2013; Haji Naqib
Mohammed Fared, Peshawar, 18 February 2014; Dr. Anwar, Kabul, 2 August 2014;
Jan Baz Sarfaraz, Kabul, 24 May 2014; Mawlawi Storay, Hayatabad, 14 June 2014;
Mohammed Amin Weqad, Kabul, 23 April 2016; Kashmir Khan, Shaygal, 4 June 2016.
10. Author interviews with Mohammed Es’haq, Kabul, 26 August 2013 and 14 January
2014; Haji Naqib Mohammed Fared, Peshawar, 18 February 2014; Waheedullah
Sabawoon, Kabul, 12 May 2014; Mohammed Sediq Chakari, London, 16 October
2014; Mawlawi Storay, Hayatabad, 14 June 2014; Ahmadullah Morshed Safi, Kabul,
7 December 2014; Kashmir Khan, Shaygal, 4 June 2016.
11. The three mujahideen who visited Jan Mohammed at the Pakistani base in Nowshera
were Kashmir Khan, Mawlawi Buzorg and Mawlawi Mirza. Author interviews with
Waheedullah Sabawoon, Kabul 12 May 2014; and Kashmir Khan, Shaygal, 4 June
2016. Haji Naqib Mohammed Fared claimed Hekmatyar also visited Jan Mohammed
there on a separate occasion (author interview, Peshawar, 18 February 2014).
12. ‘Three Subverters Executed’, The Kabul Times, 5 July 1977.
13. Cassette recording of speech from Hizb-e Islami’s archive transcribed and translated
by authors. Date unknown.
14. Taken from a speech Gulbuddin Hekmatyar gave to mark the eighteenth anniversary
of the MuslimYouth’s establishment, 2 April 1987.The speech is available onYouTube,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TerOZ_bROX0, last accessed 27 May 2019.
15. Authors’ correspondence with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, June 2015.
16. Author interview with Mohammed Amin Weqad, Kabul, 5 May 2014.
17. Author interview with Mohammed Es’haq, Kabul, 26 August 2013.
18. The quote about Daoud not being a communist is from author correspondence with
Najibullah Lafraie, 13 July 2013. The quote about Rabbani being pro-negotiations

442
pp. [101–110] Notes

is from author interview with Salahuddin Rabbani, Kabul, 11 September 2013. The
contacts with Qazi Hedayat and Wafiullah Sami were described in author interviews
with Homayoun Shah Assefy, Kabul, 20 August 2013; Dr. Anwar, Kabul, 8 December
2013; and Engineer Obaidullah, Kabul, 9 December 2013.
19. Author interview with Mohammed Amin Weqad, Kabul, 5 May 2014.
20. Author interview with Ahmadullah Morshed Safi, Kabul, 7 December 2014.
21. Author interview with Mawlawi Storay, Hayatabad, 14 June 2014.
22. Authors’ correspondence with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, June 2015.
23. Author interviews with Haji Naqib Mohammed Fared, Peshawar, 18 February 2014;
and Ahmadullah Morshed Safi, Kabul, 7 December 2014.
24. Author interview with Mawlawi Storay, Peshawar, 14 June 2014.
25. Author interview with Mohammed Amin Weqad, Kabul, 5 May 2014.
26. The Daoud regime also regarded Khwaja Mahfouz Mansour, not Massoud, as the leader
of the rebellion in Panjshir. ‘Three Subverters Executed’, The Kabul Times, 5 July 1977.
27. The information about Massoud’s background and childhood is taken from author
interviews with Mohammed Es’haq, Kabul, 26 August 2013 and 14 January 2014;
Ahmad Wali Massoud, Kabul, 5 January 2014.
28. Author interview with Qarib-ur-Rahman Saeed, Peshawar, 6 March 2015.
29. Author interviews with Mohammed Es’haq, Kabul, 26 August 2013 and 14 January
2014; Ahmad Wali Massoud, Kabul, 5 January 2014; Ahmadullah Morshed Safi,
Kabul, 7 December 2014. The tribal leader who sheltered Massoud was named Sarir
Ahmad Khan.
30. ‘An Appeal to the Leaders of the PDPA Groups Parcham and Khalq’, Decree of the
Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 8 January
1974. Published by the Cold War International History Project at the Wilson Centre.
31. ‘Information for the Leaders of the Progressive Afghan Political Organisations
Parcham and Khalq Concerning the Results of the Visit of Mohammed Daud to the
USSR.’ Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 21 June 1974.
Published by the Cold War International History Project at the Wilson Centre.
32. Author interview with Sulaiman Layeq, Kabul, 29 April 2015.
33. ‘On the Saur Revolution’, The Kabul Times, 20 October 1978.
34. Layeq was accompanied to Kunduz by Ghulam Dastagir Panjshiri. Author interview
with Sulaiman Layeq, Kabul, 11 November 2014.
35. This was Engineer Obaidullah. Author interview with Engineer Obaidullah, Kabul, 9
December 2013.
36. Author interviews with Dr. Anwar, Kabul, 8 December 2013 and 5 January 2014;
Qazi Nazer, Kabul, 19 April 2014; Jan Baz Sarfaraz, Kabul, 29 April 2014.
37. Taken from a speech Gulbuddin Hekmatyar gave to mark the eighteenth anniversary
of the MuslimYouth’s establishment, 2 April 1987.The speech is available onYouTube,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TerOZ_bROX0, last accessed 27 May 2019.
38. Author interview with Engineer Obaidullah, Kabul, 9 December 2013.
39. Author interview with Wares Mohammed Waziri, London, 11 March 2015.
40. The information about Mir Akbar Khyber’s life and death comes from author
interviews with Sulaiman Layeq, Kabul, 18 August 2013, 29 April 2015 and 9
November 2015; Wares Mohammed Waziri, London, 11 March 2015 and 2 February
2016; Faqir Mohammed Faqir, Kabul, 16 April 2016.

443
 NOTES pp. [110–124]

41. Taken from a speech Gulbuddin Hekmatyar gave to mark the eighteenth anniversary
of the MuslimYouth’s establishment, 2 April 1987.The speech is available onYouTube,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TerOZ_bROX0, last accessed 27 May 2019.
42. Author interview with Qarib-ur-Rahman Saeed, Peshawar, 6 March 2015.
43. Author interview with Wares Mohammed Waziri, London, 3 February 2016.

6. THE REVOLUTION
1. Author interviews with Faqir Mohammed Faqir, Kabul, 15 December 2013, 17
December 2013 and 16 April 2016. Also ‘On the Saur Revolution’, The Kabul Times,
31 October 1978. The brother-in-law Amin sent to summon Faqir was named
Ghafoor.
2. Author interview with Sulaiman Layeq, Kabul, 9 November 2015.
3. ‘First Radio Announcement’, The Kabul Times, 4 May 1978.
4. The details about the day of the coup are taken from author interviews with Faqir
Mohammed Faqir, Kabul, 17 December 2013; Sulaiman Layeq, Kabul, 9 November
2015; Shahnawaz Tanai, Kabul, 27 July 2010.
5. ‘First Radio Announcement’, The Kabul Times, 4 May 1978; and ‘On the Saur
Revolution’, The Kabul Times, 31 October 1978.
6. Gall, Carlotta, ‘An Afghan Secret Revealed Brings End of an Era’, The New York Times,
31 January 2009.
7. ‘Taraki Elected Chairman of Revolutionary Council’, The Kabul Times, 4 May 1978,
and ‘Karmal Elected Vice-Chairman of Revolutionary Council’, The Kabul Times,
4 May 1978.
8. Braithwaite, Rodric, Afgantsy, London: Profile Books, 2011, p. 41.
9. ‘More Friendly Nations Recognise New Order’, The Kabul Times, 7 May 1978.
10. ‘The Asian ‘Soft Underbelly’ and Your Visit to Peking’, National Security Council
memo, 11 May 1978. Published by the Cold War International History Project at the
Wilson Centre.
11. ‘Taraki Receives Ghaffar Khan’, The Kabul Times, 9 May 1978.
12. ‘Basic Lines of Revolutionary Duties of Govt. of Democratic Republic of Afghanistan’,
The Kabul Times, 10 May 1978.
13. Those in attendance included Jalaluddin Haqqani, Nasrullah Mansour and Jamil-ur-
Rahman. Author phone interview with Mawlawi Storay, 29 December 2016.
14. Author interviews with Mohammed Amin Weqad, Kabul, 18 December 2010, 5 May
2014 and 23 April 2016.
15. Some supporters of Haqqani dispute this account, claiming that he was acting
independently of Hizb when he launched the first operation against the communists.
However, Hizbis insist he and Aziz Khan were members of the party at this time.
Author interviews with Mohammed Amin Weqad, Kabul, 18 December 2010 and 5
May 2014; Khalid Farooqi, Kabul, 4 July 2013.
16. Author interview with Waheedullah Sabawoon, Kabul, 3 July 2013.
17. The Qur’an, 3:103.
18. The information about Kashmir Khan’s early years is taken from author interviews
with Dr. Rahmanullah, Asadabad, 21 April 2015, and Kashmir Khan, Shaygal,
4 June 2016.

444
pp. [125–136] Notes

19. The four killed were Rahman Sayed and Massoum Khan from the Pech Valley,
Habibullah from Ghaziabad and Azzam Khan, who was Kashmir Khan’s uncle.
20. The man who fired the first shot was a Hizbi named Jehanzeb.
21. Author interviews with Waheedullah Sabawoon, Kabul, 3 July 2013; and Malim
Sayed Jamal, Asadabad, 21 April 2015.

7. DEVILS
1. Author interview with Fazel Karim Aimaq, Kabul, 1 December 2014.
2. Author interviews with Haji Abubakr, Kabul, 21 May 2013 and 28 May 2013.
3. Author interviews with Hadayatullah, Kabul, 21 October 2013; Engineer Obaidullah,
9 December 2013; Engineer Tareq, Hayatabad, 17 February 2014.
4. Author interviews with Fazel Maula Latun, Kabul, 4 January 2014; and Engineer
Tareq, Hayatabad, 17 February 2014.
5. Author interview with Wares Mohammed Waziri, London, 11 March 2015.
6. ‘New Order Guarantees Rights of All,’ The Kabul Times, 10 June 1978.
7. ‘We are the Sons of Muslims and Respect Principles of Holy Islam: Taraki’, The Kabul
Times, 13 June 1978.
8. Braithwaite, Rodric, Afgantsy, London: Profile Books, 2011, p. 42.
9. ‘23 Royal Family Members Stripped of Citizenship’, The Kabul Times, 14 June
1978.
10. ‘Our Revolution Aims to Carry Out Class Struggle’, The Kabul Times, 26 August
1978.
11. Roy, Olivier, Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986, p. 99.
12. Author interview with Shahrasul Rahmani, Kabul, 3 May 2014.
13. ‘Six Weeks After Afghanistan’s Revolution: A Summing Up’, Department of State
Telegram, June 1978. Published by the Cold War International History Project at the
Wilson Centre.
14. Tawana, Dr., ‘The Islamic Movement in Afghanistan,’ AFGHANews, parts 7-8, 1 July
1989 and 15 July 1989.
15. Author interview with Mawlawi Storay, Hayatabad, 6 March 2015.
16. Author interview with Ghulam Mustafa Jawed, Kabul, 4 August 2014.
17. Author interviews with Faqir Mohammed Faqir, Kabul, 16 September 2012, 15
December 2013, 17 December 2013 and 7 September 2014.
18. Edwards, David B., Before the Taliban, London: University of California Press, 2002,
p. 77.
19. ‘We Declare Jehad Against Akhwanis; Taraki Announces’, The Kabul Times, 23
September 1978.
20. Braithwaite, op. cit, p. 75.
21. In May 1978 Layeq joined Taraki at a meeting with elders from Kandahar and Paktia.
He was also present at a June 1978 meeting with elders from provinces including
Baghlan, Nangarhar, Logar, Kandahar, Ghazni, Kunar and Kunduz. ‘Saur 7 Revolution
Launched with the Will of Afghan People, Taraki tells Tribal Elders’, The Kabul Times,
21 May 1978; and ‘We are Sons of Muslims and Respect Principles of Holy Islam:
Taraki’, The Kabul Times, 13 June 1978.

445
 NOTES pp. [137–146]

22. Layeq, Sulaiman, ‘Ikhwanul Muslimeen or Ikhwanush Shayteen?’, The Kabul Times,
1 October 1978. ‘Shameful Crimes of Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen’, The Kabul Times, 8
October 1978.
23. ‘New Central Prison in Kabul Planned for 1,500 Inmates, afs 162.m cost’, The Kabul
Times, 26 February 1973.
24. ‘Soviet Communication to the Hungarian Leadership on the Situation in Afghanistan’,
Top secret Soviet bulletin, 17 October 1978. Published by the Cold War International
History Project at the Wilson Centre.
25. Author interview with Abdul Qadir Imami Ghori, Kabul, 24 December 2013, and
‘War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity: 1978-2001’, The Afghanistan Justice
Project, 2005, p. 13.
26. UN Mapping Report, 2005, pp. 22–3.
27. Author interview with Mustafa Niazi, Kabul, 23 May 2016.
28. Author interview with Sulaiman Layeq, Kabul, 3 August 2014.
29. Professor Niazi and Nasratyar both featured in one of the death lists the Afghan
communist regime meticulously compiled at the time. The lists detailed the names
of victims, their profession, their place of birth, their father’s name and the offence
for which they were killed. On a list dated 29 May 1979, Niazi was described as
the retired dean of Islamic law at Kabul University. His offence was simply to be an
‘Ikhwani.’ The same designation was applied to Nasratyar. The lists were obtained
by the International Crimes Unit of the Netherlands National Police during an
investigation into an Afghan who claimed to be the former head of interrogation at
AGSA. Published in 2013, they identified almost 5,000 victims.
30. ‘The Immortal Epic of May 29,’ Al-Jihad, No. 67, May 1990.
31. Author interview with Faqir Mohammed Faqir, Kabul, 7 September 2014.
32. Rubin, Barnett R., The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2002, p. 75.
33. Rubin, op. cit, p. 114.
34. Author interview with Abdul Jabar Shilgari, Kabul, 12 May 2013.
35. Author interview with Abdul Qadir Imami Ghori, Kabul, 24 December 2013.
36. Author interview with Haji Abubakr, Kabul, 21 May 2013.
37. Author interviews with Abdul Qadeer Karyab, Kabul, 3 November 2013; and
Habib-ur-Rahman Hekmatyar, Haytabad, 18 February 2014. Also Hekmatyar,
Gulbuddin, The Islamic Movement, Peshawar: Mishaq-e Issar, publication date
unknown, p. 117.

8. PROFESSIONS OF FAITH
1. Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, The Islamic Movement, Peshawar: Mishaq-e Issar, publication
date unknown, p. 114.
2. Author interviews with Jan Baz Sarfaraz, Kabul, 16 June 2013; and Mawlawi Shahzada
Shahid, Kabul, 14 September 2013.
3. Transcript of top secret telephone conversation between Taraki and Alexei Kosygin
regarding the situation in Afghanistan, 18 March 1979. Published by the Cold  War
International History Project at the Wilson Centre.
4. Author interview with Fazel Maula Latun, Kabul, 4 January 2014.

446
pp. [146–159] Notes

5. Author interview with Toran Amanullah, Shamshatu, 19 February 2014.

6. Author interview with Fazel Maula Latun, Kabul, 4 January 2014.
7. The commander was named Bashir Hemat, more popularly known as Qazi Nazir.
Author interviews with Mohammed Daoud Ghairat, Kabul, 1 June 2013; and Qazi
Nazir, Kabul, 1 December 2013.
8. Author interview with Mohammed Halim Almyar, Kabul, 24 December 2013.
9. Author interview with General Muzaferuddin, Kabul, 1 October 2013.
10. Author interviews with Abdul Hadi Safi, Kabul, 31 August 2013; and Engineer Tareq,
Hayatabad, 17 February 2014.
11. Dorronsoro, Gilles, Revolution Unending, New York: Columbia University Press,
2005, p. 87.
12. Gates, Robert M., From the Shadows, New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006, p. 146.
13. ‘Nature of the Afghan Opposition’, Confidential Cable from US Embassy Kabul to
Secretary of State, 16 August 1979. Published by the Cold War International History
Project at the Wilson Centre.
14. Author interviews with Abdul Qadeer Karyab, Kabul, 18 December 2013 and 14
January 2014.
15. Author interviews with Qarib-ur-Rahman Saeed, Peshawar, 6 March 2015, and
Kashmir Khan, Shaygal, 4 June 2016.
16. Author interview with Abdul Rahim Wardak, Kabul, 3 August 2014. Also Urban,
Mark, War in Afghanistan, London: Macmillan Press, 1988, p. 34.
17. Author interview with General Muzaferuddin, Kabul, 1 October 2013.
18. ‘War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity: 1978-2001’ The Afghanistan Justice
Project, 2005, p. 20. Also UN Mapping Report, 2005, p. 29.
19. Author interview with Malim Sayed Jamal, Asadabad, 21 April 2015.
20. Author interviews with Waheedullah Sabawoon, Kabul, 3 July 2013; Asial Khan, 29
August 2013; Malim Sayed Jamal, Asadabad, 21 April 2015; Kashmir Khan, Shaygal,
4 June 2016. Also author correspondence with Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, December
2013. The communist sergeant who became Kashmir Khan’s bodyguard was named
Amani Gul.
21. Top secret bulletin from the CC CPSU, ‘Soviet Communication to the Hungarian
Leadership on the Situation in Afghanistan’, 28 March 1979. Published by the Cold
War International History Project at the Wilson Centre.
22. Top secret excerpt from CC CPSU Politburo minutes, No. 156, ‘The Situation in
the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan’, with attached report from Gromyko,
Andropov, Ustinov and Ponomarev regarding the situation in Afghanistan, 28 June
1979. Published by the Cold War International History Project at the Wilson Centre.
23. Confidential Cables from US embassy to US Secretary of State, ‘Meeting with
Soviet Diplomat: Observations on the Internal Afghan Political Scene’, 25 June
1979. Published by the Cold War International History Project at the Wilson
Centre.
24. Braithwaite, Rodric, Afgantsy, London: Profile Books, 2011, p. 56–7. Also Top secret
excerpt from CC CPSU Politburo minutes, No. 156, op. cit.
25. Mitrokhin, Vasiliy, The KGB in Afghanistan, Washington: The Cold War International
History Project, Wilson Centre, 2009, pp. 17–20.

447
 NOTES pp. [161–175]

9. CULTURE WARS
1. Author interview with Mohammed Amin Weqad, Kabul, 5 May 2014.
2. The Qur’an, 24:42; 22:41; 40:12.
3. Author interview with Qarib-ur-Rahman Saeed, Peshawar, 6 March 2015.
4. Tanwir, Mohammed Halim, Afghanistan,Volume 2, US: self-published, 2013, pp. 489–
98.
5. Author interview with Haji Abubakr, Kabul, 21 May 2013.
6. Authors’ correspondence with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, June 2015.
7. Author interview with Rasul Dad, Kabul, 3 February 2014.
8. Author interviews with Ghulam Mustafa Jawad, Kabul, 4 August 2014, and Mawlawi
Storay, Hayatabad, 6 March 2015.
9. Mishra, Pankaj, From the Ruins of Empire, London: Penguin, 2012, p. 114.
10. Taken from a speech Gulbuddin Hekmatyar gave to mark the eighteenth anniversary of
the Muslim Youth’s establishment, 2 April 1987. The speech is available on YouTube,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TerOZ_bROX0, last accessed 27 May 2019.
11. Author interview with Asial Khan, Kabul, 29 August 2013.
12. Author interview with Abdul Qadeer Karyab, Kabul, 3 November 2013.
13. The two senior Hizbis who described how the secret talks between Hekmatyar and
Amin unfolded wished to remain anonymous. Mohammed Amin Weqad denied that
any meeting was held in Kunar, but hinted that Tarun did indeed make unofficial
contact with Hekmatyar on behalf of Amin (author interview, Kabul, 23 April 2016).
Hekmatyar’s denial was issued in correspondence with the authors, June 2015.
14. Author interview with Mohammed Ali Khan, Gardez, 15 May 2014.
15. Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, Secret Conspiracies, Naked Faces, Peshawar: Mishaq-e Issar,
1999/2000, pp. 10–11.
16. Excerpt of minutes of CPSU Politburo Meeting: Exchange between Ogarkov (Chief
of the General Staff) and Andropov, 10 December 1979. Published by the Cold War
International History Project at the Wilson Centre.
17. Braithwaite, Rodric, Afgantsy, London: Profile Books, 2011, p. 73.
18. Braithwaite, op. cit, p. 77.
19. Mitrokhin, Vasiliy, The KGB in Afghanistan, Washington: The Cold War International
History Project, Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, 2009, p. 18.
20. Braithwaite, op. cit, pp. 86–7.
21. Report from Kabul by Colonel-General S.K Magometov, Chief Soviet Military
Advisor in Afghanistan, 2 December 1979. Also Report from Kabul by Magometov,
4 December 1979, published by the Cold War International History Project at the
Wilson Centre.
22. Braithwaite, op. cit, pp. 94–5.
23. Author interviews with Faqir Mohammed Faqir, Kabul, 16 September 2012 and 17
December 2013.
24. Braithwaite, op. cit, pp. 98–9.

10. ‘THE WEST IS AFRAID’

1. Also with Kashmir Khan and Weqad at the Wata Pur mosque were Jamil-ur-Rahman
and Haji Ghafoor, who would go on to fight US troops in Nuristan after the 2001

448
pp. [176–189] Notes

invasion. Author interviews with Mohammed Amin Weqad, Kabul, 5 May 2014 and
23 April 2016.
2. Author interview with Mawlawi Storay, Hayatabad, 6 March 2015.
3. ‘On the Threshold of Liberation’, Kabul New Times, 1 January 1980.
4. Author interviews with Noor-ul-Haq Uloomi, Kabul, 13 October 2012; Sulaiman
Layeq, Kabul, 25 December 2010.
5. Author interviews with Sulaiman Layeq, Kabul, 11 November 2016 and 2 May 2015.
Also, ‘Members of Leading Party, State Organs Announced’, Kabul New Times, 12
January 1980.
6. ‘Amin, CIA Planned to Kill Half our People, says Karmal’, Kabul New Times, 27
January 1980. The cartoon is from the 27 January 1980 edition of Kabul New Times.
7. ‘Text of Fundamental Principles’, Kabul New Times, 20 and 21 April 1980.
8. ‘Laeq Explains Gains of Revolution’s New Phase’, Kabul New Times, 8 June 1980.
9. Confidential Memorandum from Stephen Larrabee for Zbigniew Brzezinski, ‘Soviet
Intervention in Afghanistan’, 31 December 1979. Published by the Cold War
International History Project at the Wilson Centre.
10. Coll, Steve, GhostWars, London: Penguin Books, 2004, p. 58.
11. Top secret memorandum from Jerry Schecter to Zbigniew Brzezinski, ‘SCC Working
Group on Iran and Afghanistan: Public Posture’, 14 January 1980. Published by the
Cold War International History Project at the Wilson Centre.
12. Author interview via Skype with a former CIA official who wished to remain
anonymous, 5 February 2014.
13. Author interview with Fazel Karim Aimaq, Kabul, 1 December 2014.
14. Author interview with Waheedullah Sabawoon, Kabul, 3 July 2013. Also Ruttig,
Thomas, ‘Six Days that Shook Kabul’, Afghanistan Analysts Network, 22 February 2015.
15. Grau, Lester W. and Michael A. Gress. (eds), The Soviet Afghan War, Kansas: the
University Press of Kansas, 2002, p. 31.
16. Author interview with Fazel Maula Latun, Kabul, 12 January 2014.
17. Cassette recording of speech from Hizb-e Islami’s archive transcribed and translated
by authors. Also author interview with Dr. Jawad, Jalalabad, 16 January 2014.
18. Author interviews with Fazel Maula Latun, Kabul, 12 January 2014; Qazi Mahmoud
ul-Hassan, Kabul, 8 April 2014; Ghulam Mustafa Jawad, Kabul, 4 August 2014. Bell,
Kevin, ‘Usama bin Ladin’s ‘‘Father Sheikh’’, The Combat Terrorism Centre at West
Point, May 2013, pp. 18, 28. Edwards, David.B, Before the Taliban, London: University
of California Press, 2002, p. 249.
19. Author interview with Kaka Tajuddin, Bazarak, 2 May 2009. Branigin, William,
‘Guerrillas Use Cease-Fire to Rearm’, The Washington Post, 18 October 1983. Davis,
Anthony, ‘A Brotherly Vendetta’, Asiaweek, 6 December 1996. Anderson, John Lee,
The Lion’s Grave, London: Atlantic Books, 2002, p. 214.
20. Author interviews with Abdul Hadi Safi, Kabul, 31 August 2013; Mohammed Esh’aq,
Kabul, 14 January 2014; Engineer Tareq, Hayatabad, 17 February 2014. Esh’aq said
the Hizbis were indeed disarmed by Massoud but insisted that they had been treated
‘very well.’
21. Author interviews with Mohammed Zaman Muzamil, Kabul, 22 August 2013; and
Dr. Anwar, Kabul, 2 August 2014. Also author correspondence with Sibghatullah
Mojaddedi, December 2013. Edwards, David B., Before the Taliban, London: University

449
 NOTES pp. [190–202]

of California Press, 2002, pp. 267–8. Rubin, Barnett R., ‘The Fragmentation of
Afghanistan’, New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 2002, p. 221.
22. Author interview with Engineer Salaam, Shamshatu, 19 February 2014. Muzhary,
Fazal, ‘Moving Out of Shamshatu’, Afghanistan Analysts Network, 14 April 2017.
23. Author interview with Ettore Mo, Amport, 19 February 2014.
24. Van Dyk, Jere, In Afghanistan, New York: Coward-McCann Inc., 1983, pp. 60–2.
25. Wright, Lawrence, The Looming Tower, London: Penguin Books, 2007, pp. 50–1.

11. BLACK TULIPS

1. UN Mapping Report, 2005, pp. 51–115. Alexievich, Svetlana, Zinky Boys, New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, 1992, p. 6.
2. Braithwaite, Rodric, Afgantsy, London: Profile Books, 2011, pp. 170–5.
3. Grau, Lester W. and Michael A. Gress (eds), The Soviet Afghan War, Kansas: the
University Press of Kansas, 2002, pp. 63–9. ‘Main Directorate of the Combat
Training, Analysis of Rebel Tactics’, October 1984. Published by the Cold War
International History Project at the Wilson Centre.
4. Alexievich, op. cit, p. 4. Crile, George, Charlie Wilson’s War, London: Atlantic Books,
2007, p. 222.
5. Author interview with Haji Amanullah, Gardez, 14 May 2014.
6. Report from the Chief of the Ministry of Defence Operations Group in Afghanistan,
V.I. Varennikov, to S.L. Sokolov, Marshal of the Soviet Union, 6 June 1985. Published
by the Cold War International History Project at the Wilson Centre.
7. Braithwaite, op. cit, pp. 142, 255.
8. Rubin, Barnett R., The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2002, p. 140.
9. Author interviews with Engineer Mohammed Khan, Kabul, 28 November 2010; and
Nasser Jamal Madanyar, Kabul, 7 April 2014.
10. Author interview with Sayed Karim Jalali, Kabul, 17 August 2014.
11. Mir, Sayed Edris, Crossing Through Fire, publisher unknown, 2013/2014. Information
taken from an English language version in PDF format, p. 5.
12. ‘The Course of US Interventions in Democratic Republic of Afghanistan - II’, Kabul
New Times, 17 January 1984. Also ‘Translation of the Opposite’, Kabul New Times, 5
July 1984.
13. Bearden, Milton and James Risen, The Main Enemy, London: Century, 2003, p. 236.
14. Author interviews with Moahmmed Zaman Muzamil, Kabul, 22 August 2013; Fazel
Maula Latun, Kabul, 17 March 2014; and Mawlawi Storay, Hayatabad, 6 March 2015.
15. Author interviews with Abdul Qadir Imami Ghori, Kabul, 20 May 2013; and Char
Gul Nasser, Kabul, 19 June 2013.
16. Responsibility of Members, 5th edition, Peshawar: Hizb-e Islami Publications, 1986.
17. Author interview with Abdul Qadir Imami Ghori, Kabul, 20 May 2013.
18. Author interview with Haji Sayed Nur Hilal, Kabul, 3 November 2013.
19. Author interviews with Mullah Nasrullah, Kandahar, 23 August 2014; and Sayed
Rahman Wahidyar, Kabul, 21 May 2017.
20. The account of Weqad’s attempt to oust Hekmatyar is taken from author interviews
with Fazel Maula Latun, Kabul, 12 April 2014; Dr. Anwar, Kabul, 2 August 2014;

450
pp. [203–214] Notes

Mawalwi Storay, Hayatabad, 6 March 2015; Mohammed Amin Weqad, Kabul, 23

April 2016. Weqad denied trying to remove Hekmatyar as leader or split the party.
He said he convened the meeting in Peshawar to express his unhappiness at the failure
of the different mujahideen factions to unite. Dr. Anwar said that Weqad accused
Hekmatyar of trying to undermine the mujahideen’s alliance. However, he did not
believe the meeting was a deliberate attempt to depose Hekmatyar.
21. Hamid, Mustafa, and Leah Farrall, The Arabs at War in Afghanistan, London: Hurst,
2015, pp. 30, 34.
22. Author interview with Jan Baz Sarfaraz, Kabul, 27 May 2013. Sarfaraz also let the
authors borrow his passport.
23. The meeting between Hekmatyar and Azzam was arranged by Mohammed Sediq
Chakari. Author interviews with Chakari, London, 13 June 2014 and 25 June 2014.
24. Hegghammer, Thomas, ‘Abdullah Azzam, the Imam of Jihad’. As featured in Kepel,
Gilles, and Jean-Pierre Milelli, Al-Qaeda in its Own W
  ords, Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 2009, p. 91. Azzam, Abdullah, The Defence of Muslim Lands,
copy in PDF format, publisher unknown.
25. This is the estimate of Abdullah Anas. Bergen, Peter, The Osama bin Laden I Know, New
York: Free Press, 2006, p. 41.
26. Author interviews with Jan Baz Sarfaraz, Kabul, 27 May 2013; and Mohammed
Zaman Muzamil, Kabul, 22 August 2013.
27. The details about Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman’s ties to Hekmatyar and their trip
into Afghanistan together are taken from Weaver, Mary Anne, A Portrait of Egypt, New
York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999, pp. 169–71.
28. Author correspondence with Abuzar Safi, 14 May 2014. Also Tanwir, Mohammed
Halim, Afghanistan, Vol. 2, US: self-published, 2013, pp. 494–7.
29. Coll, Steve, GhostWars, London: Penguin Books, 2004, pp. 65–6, 81–2, 151.
30. Crile, George, CharlieWilson’sWar, London: Atlantic Books, 2007, pp. 220–4.
31. Coll, op. cit, p. 120.
32. Yousaf, Mohammed, and Mark Adken, The Bear Trap, London: Leo Cooper, 1992, pp.
27, 41, 105.
33. Author correspondence with Daoud Abdei, 3 November 2013; author interview
with Mohammed Zaman Muzamil, 22 August 2013. Also Yousaf, op. cit, p. 41; and
Khalilzad, Zalmay, The Envoy, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016, p. 57.
34. Author correspondence with Abuzar Safi, 14 May 2014.
35. Speech available on YouTube, exact date unknown, http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=by7I8-nH_BU, last accessed 27 May 2019.
36. Speech available on YouTube, exact date unknown, http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=_P5mqcNK7Pk, last accessed 27 May 2019.
37. Vielhaber, David, ‘The Milli Görüs of Germany’, Hudson Institute, 13 June 2012.
Vielhaber quotes Erbokan as saying in 2007, ‘All infidel nations are one Zionist entity;
Jews want to rule from Morocco to Indonesia … Zionists initiated the Crusades,
Jews founded Protestantism and the capitalist order; and Bush attacked Iraq to build
Greater Israel, so Jesus can return.’
38. Author interview with Mohammed Zaman Muzamil, Kabul, 25 July 2015. Muzamil
and Nawab Salim, Hekmatyar’s interpreter, were on the trip to Turkey; Salim was also
with Hekmatyar on his trips to the US and Germany. Footage of Hekmatyar in Turkey

451
 NOTES pp. [215–222]

is available on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jY3Zt4QzN6Y, last

accessed 27 May 2019, and http:///www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIyPfp1Qwcw,
last accessed 27 May 2019.

12. THE MOTHER PARTY

1. Author interviews with Fazel Maula Latun, Kabul, 12 April 2014; and Ghulam
Mustafa Jawad, Kabul, 4 August 2014.
2. Author interview with Ghulam Mustafa Jawad, Kabul, 4 August 2014. Also Hekmatyar,
Gulbuddin, Secret Conspiracies, Naked Faces, Peshawar: Mishaq-e Issar, 1999/2000, p. 5.
3. Author interviews with Jan Baz Sarfaraz, Kabul, 17 June 2013; Mohammed Zaman
Muzamil, Kabul, 22 August 2013; Ghairat Baheer, Islamabad, 7 March 2015.
4. In correspondence with the authors, June 2015, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar defined jihad
as follows: ‘The literal meaning of the word ‘jihad’ is ‘effort’ and ‘working hard’,
and some even define it as any effort or any endeavour in the way of God. But in the
Qur’an, except for in two or three cases, when it uses jihad for the way of God it
uses it tens of times and in all of them jihad means armed struggle. All researchers are
united that jihad for the way of God means armed struggle.’ Similarly, Azzam wrote
‘the word ‘jihad’, when mentioned on its own, only means combat with weapons.’
Azzam, Abdullah, Join the Caravan, copy in PDF format, publisher unknown, p. 26.
5. Azzam, Join the Caravan, op. cit, p. 16.
6. Azzam, Join the Caravan, op. cit, p. 18.
7. Azzam, Join the Caravan, op. cit, p. 20.
8. Azzam, Abdullah, ‘Fi Khiddam al-Ma’rakah’, as featured in Abu-Rabi’, Ibrahim M.
(ed.), The Contemporary Arab Reader on Political Islam, Edmonton: The University of
Alberta Press, p. 46.
9. This is the estimate of Abdullah Anas. Bergen, Peter, The Osama bin Laden I Know, New
York: Free Press, 2006, p. 41.
10. Azzam, Abdullah, The Lofty Mountain, London, Azzam Publications, copy in PDF
format, date unknown, p. 92.
11. Author interview with Jan Baz Sarfaraz, Kabul, 16 June 2013.
12. Author interview with Sayed Rahman Wahidyar, Kabul, 8 July 2018. Exactly why bin
Laden never publicly spoke about his early activity with Hizb is unclear.
13. Braithwaite, Rodric, Afgantsy, London: Profile Books, 2011, p. 142.
14. Rubin, Barnett R., The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2002, pp. 129–31.
15. Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, The Islamic Movement, Peshawar, Mishaq-e Issar, publication
date unknown, p. 185; GRU Dossier on Najibullah, 1986, published by the Cold War
International History Project at the Wilson Centre.
16. Author interviews with Abdul Wahid Taqat, Kabul, 21 November 2010 and 7
December 2013.
17. UN Mapping Report, 2005, pp. 124–37.
18. The prisoner was named Abdul Latif, a Hizbi from Paghman. Author interviews with
Abdul Latif, Kabul, 5 May 2014 and 6 August 2014.
19. Braithwaite, op. cit, pp. 272–5; ‘Excerpts from Gorbachev’s Speech to the Party’,
The NewYork Times, 26 February 1986.

452
pp. [222–230] Notes

20. CC CPSUE Message Regarding the Situation in Afghanistan, 13 November 1986.

Published by the Cold War International History Project at the Wilson Centre.
21. Gwertzman, Bernard, ‘Reagan Bars Ties to Afghan Rebels’, The New York Times, 17
June 1986.
22. Crile, George, Charlie Wilson’s War, London: Atlantic Books, 2007, p. 419. Yousaf,
Mohammed, and Mark Adken, The Bear Trap, London: Leo Cooper, 1992, p. 182.
23. Bearden, Milton, and James Risen, The Main Enemy, London: Century, 2003, pp. 242–
52. Coll, Steve, GhostWars, London: Penguin Books, 2004, pp. 149–50.
24. Braithwaite, op. cit, p. 204. Cable from Joint Chiefs of Staff, ‘Impact of the Stinger
Missile on Soviet and Resistance Tactics in Afghanistan’, March 1987. Published by
the Cold War International History Project at the Wilson Centre.
25. Author interview with Mohammed Iqbal Safi, Kabul, 16 September 2013.
26. Weaver, Mary Anne, Pakistan, NewYork: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, p. 58. Coll,
op. cit, p. 180.
27. Author interviews with Asial Khan, 29 August 2013, and Shahrasul Rahmani, Kabul,
3 May 2014. Rahmani recalled Pakistani officers training him and other Hizb recruits
in how to use RPGs, mortars and anti-aircraft guns in the late 1970s. The training
took place inside Afghanistan, in Urgun, Paktika. He was one of around 1,500
recruits at the camp. The Pakistani officers were Pashtuns dressed in local clothes.
‘Our lives were very, very bad there,’ he said. ‘We were cooking our food in empty
tank shells.’
28. Author interview with Haji Abubakr, Kabul, 21 May 2013.
29. Author interview with Esmat Qani, Kabul, 4 June 2013.
30. Author interviews with Mohammed Hassan Wolusmal, Kabul, 19 May 2013 and 10
May 2014.
31. Dorronsoro, Gilles, Revolution Unending, New York: Columbia University Press,
2005, pp. 171–2
32. Author interview with Naim Majrooh, Kabul, 11 June 2013. The Afghanistan Justice
Project states that Hekmatyar personally assigned the assassin to kill Majrooh. ‘War
Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity: 1978-2001’, The Afghanistan Justice Project,
2005, pp. 59–60.
33. ‘Biography of Comrade Dr. Faiz Ahmad’, published by the website of Afghanistan
Liberation Organisation, http://a-l-o.maoism.ru/ahmad-e.htm, last accessed 27
May 2019.
34. Chavis, Melody Ermachild, Meena, London: Bantam Books, 2004, pp. 202–5 and
212–19.
35. Author interview with Mohammed Zaman Muzamil, Kabul, 22 August 2013.
36. Author interview with Ghulam Mustafa Jawad, Kabul, 4 August 2014.
37. Bearden, op. cit, pp. 236, 279–83. Although he does not identify Bearden by name,
Hekmatyar writes about meeting a high-level US official at this time and confronting
him over the CIA’s alleged assassination plans. He claims the official ended the
meeting by passing on a message from President Reagan, urging Hizb to continue its
attacks on Soviet troops. From Gulbuddin, Hekmatyar, Secret Conspiracies, Naked Faces,
Peshawar: Mishaq-e Issar, 1999/2000, p. 21.
38. Author interview with Nicholas Barrington, Cambridge, 28 February 2014. Crile,
op. cit, pp. 199–201. Coll, op. cit, p.124.

453
 NOTES pp. [231–243]

39. Author interviews with Kaka Tajuddin, Bazarak, 2 May 2009; Karimullah Khan,
Bazarak, 4 August 2010; Abdul Hafiz Mansoor, Kabul, 15 September 2013.
40. Author interview with Abdul Habib, Paryan, 3 August 2010. Grau, Lester W. and
Michael A. Gress (eds), The Soviet Afghan War, Kansas: University Press of Kansas,
2002, pp. 31–2. Braithwaite, op. cit, pp. 185–7.
41. Author interviews with Mohiuddin Mehdi, Kabul, 17 September 2013; and
Mohammed Es’haq, Kabul, 14 January 2014.
42. Author interview with Mawlawi Abdul Aziz, Kabul, 17 March 2014.
43. Author interview with Abdul Hadi Safi, Kabul, 31 August 2013.
44. Bearden, op. cit, p. 257. Gates, Robert M., From the Shadows, New York: Simon and
Schuster, 2006, p. 429.
45. Author interview with Ahmed Wali Massoud, Kabul, 5 January 2014.
46. ‘Dossiers of Alliance 7 Rebel Leaders’. Published by the Cold War International
History Project at the Wilson Centre.
47. Braithwaite, op. cit, p. 289.
48. GRU Report on Massoud and his Panjshir Forces, 11 August 1988. Published by
the Cold War International History Project at the Wilson Centre. Letter from GRU
Officer who Maintained Contact with Massoud, ‘Issues for Discussion with Ahmad
Shah,’ November 1988. Published by the Cold War International History Project at
the Wilson Centre.
49. Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, Secret Conspiracies, Naked Faces, Peshawar: Mishaq-e Issar,
1999/2000, pp. 19–20. Coll, op. cit, pp. 175–6.
50. CIA, Special Intelligence Estimate, USSR:Withdrawal from Afghanistan, March 1988.
Published by the National Security Archive, George Washington University.
51. Coll, op. cit, p. 184.
52. Hekmatyar, op. cit, p. 21.
53. The Qur’an, 15:74.
54. ‘The Speech of Brother Hekmatyar in the Mosque of Nasrat Mina’, 18 February
1988. Transcribed from YouTube. No longer available.
55. Author interview with Shahrasul Rahmani, Kabul, 4 May 2014.

13. BAGHDAD
1. Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, Secret Conspiracies, Naked Faces, Peshawar: Mishaq-e Issar,
1999/2000, p. 25.
2. Braithwaite, Rodric, Afgantsy, London: Profile Books, 2011, p. 329.
3. Author interview with Sayed Sharif Yousofy Sharify, Kabul, 4 September 2013.
Hekmatyar, op. cit, pp. 26–7. Tomsen, Peter, The Wars of Afghanistan, New York:
PublicAffairs, 2011, pp. 259–60.
4. Author correspondence with Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, December 2013.
5. Hamid, Mustafa, and Leah Farrall, The Arabs at War in Afghanistan, London: Hurst,
2015, p. 140.
6. Wilder, Bryan, ‘Afghan Guerrilla Criticises Rival’, Associated Press, 10 August 1989.
7. Author interview with Toran Amanullah, Shamshatu, 19 February 2014.
8. ‘The Manifesto of Hizb-e Islami Afghanistan’, Peshawar, Afghanistan Hizb-e Islami
Publications, 1988. The Qur’an, 4:57.

454
pp. [243–258] Notes

9. Author interviews with Abdul Hanan Waheed, Kabul, 11 November 2012;

Mohammed Amin Karim, via Skype, 22 May 2014; author correspondence with
Mohammed Daoud Abedi, 3 November 2013.
10. Author interviews with Sayed Rahim Sattar, Kabul, 26 October 2013; and Qazi
Abdul Hai Faqeri, Kabul, 30 January 2019.
11. Coll, Steve, GhostWars, London: Penguin Books, 2004.
12. ‘Yasser Arafat, Speech at UN General Assembly’, Le Monde diplomatique, 13 December
1988.
13. Author interviews with Sulaiman Layeq, Kabul, 28 December 2013, 22 January
2014, 4 August 2014; Abdul Qadeer Karyab, Kabul, 14 January 2014; Ghairat
Baheer, Islamabad, 7 March 2015.
14. Author interview with Abdul Qadeer Karyab, Kabul, 14 January 2014. Hekmatyar,
op. cit, p. 32. Abdullah Azzam’s role in founding Hamas is discussed by his son in
Schuster, Henry, ‘The First Family of Jihad’, CNN.com, 23 March 2006. The Hamas
quote is taken from Hroub, Khaled, Hamas, Washington D.C: Institute of Palestine
Studies, 2000, p. 183.
15. Author interviews with Qazi Mahmoud ul-Hassan Jahid, Kabul, 17 March 2013; and
Abdul Hafiz Mansoor, Kabul, 17 September 2013.
16. Hekmatyar, op. cit, pp. 33–4.
17. Author interviews with Abdul Qadeer Karyab, Kabul, 14 January 2014; Sulaiman
Layeq, 22 January 2014; Ghairat Baheer, Islamabad, 7 March 2015. Layeq, Sulaiman, A
StartWithout End: the Pattern of Talks in Libya, Markaz-e Khidmat-e Matbati Publications
Services Centre, Peshawar, 1996/1997.
18. ‘Afghanistan Will Only be Ruled by Jihadists’, Al-Jihad, No. 44, July 1988.
19. Coll, op. cit, pp. 192–3.
20. Barnetson, Denholm, ‘British Library Bombed as Howe Arrives in Pakistan’, UPI,
28 March 1989. Barrington, Nicholas, Envoy, London: The Radcliffe Press, 2014,
pp. 368–9.
21. Author interviews with Abdul Wahid Taqat, Kabul, 7 December 2013; Attaullah
Ludin, Kabul, 25 August 2013; Dr Jawad, Jalalabad, 16 January 2014; Anwar-ul-
Haq Mujahid, Jalalabad, 21 September 2015. Lamb, Christina, The Sewing Circles of
Herat, London: HarperCollins, 2002, pp. 70–1. ‘Afghanistan: The Forgotten War’,
New York: Human Rights Watch, 1991, p. 33. On the Occasion of the Fourth Anniversary
of the Death of Dr. Najibullah, President of the Republic and Head of the Watan Party of
Afghanistan, New Delhi: New Horizon Publishers, 2000, p. 42. Coll, op. cit, p. 194.

14. EXIT WOUNDS

1. Coll, Steve, The Bin Ladens, London: Penguin Books, 2008, p. 340. Scheuer, Michael,
Through Our Enemies’ Eyes, Washington D.C: Potomac Books, 2007, pp. 112–13.
Hamid, Mustafa, and Leah Farrall, The Arabs at War in Afghanistan, London: Hurst,
2015, p. 147.
2. Bergen, Peter, The Osama bin Laden I Know, New York: Free Press, 2006, p. 81.
3. ‘Al-Qaeda Founding Minutes’, 11 August 1988, as published by intelwire.com,
http://intelfiles.egoplex.com/1988-08-11-founding-of-al-qaeda.pdf, last accessed
27 May 2019.

455
 NOTES pp. [259–270]

4. Garnstein-Ross, Daveed, and Nathaniel Barr, ‘How Al-Qaeda Works: The Jihadist
Group’s Evolving Organisational Design’, Hudson Institute, 1 June 2018.
5. Author interview with Haji Islamuddin, Hayatabad, 14 June 2014.
6. Wright, Lawrence, The Looming Tower, London: Penguin Books, 2007, pp. 44–7, 124–
6. Bergen, op. cit, p. 63.
7. Interview by Suha Ma’ayeh on behalf of authors with Arab sheikh who wished to
remain anonymous. Russeifa, Jordan, 22 June 2016.
8. Author interview with Mohammed Ali Khan, Gardez, 15 May 2014. The information
about Hizb-ul Mujahideen is from Brown, Vahid, and Don Rassler, Fountainhead of
Jihad, London, Hurst: 2013, pp. 70, 256.
9. Bergen, op. cit, pp. 89–90.
10. The Qur’an, 63:2.
11. Anas, Abdullah, with Tam Hussein, To the Mountains, London: Hurst, 2019, p. 199.
Tawil, Camille, Brothers in Arms, London: Saqi Books, 2010, pp. 23–4. Bergen, op. cit,
pp. 69–70.
12. Author interview with Mohammed Sediq Chakari, London, 13 June 2014; and
author correspondence with Najibullah Lafraie, 13 July 2013 and 18 April 2014. For
another account of Abdullah Azzam’s conversation with Massoud, see Hussein, Tam,
‘When Abdullah Azzam met Ahmad Shah Massoud,’ 8 August 2018: http://www.
tamhussein.co.uk/2018/08/when-abdullah-azzam-met-ahmed-shah-massoud/, last
accessed 27 May 2019.
13. Author interviews with Mohammed Zaman Muzamil, Kabul, 22 August 2013; Haji
Islamuddin, Hayatabad, 14 June 2014; Mohammed Amin Karim, Kabul, 7 September
2014. Karim recalled Abdullah Azzam likening Massoud to pork. Also ‘‘I’m proud
if Masood Permits me to sit Beside him and Discuss … Jehad’’ - Martyr Abdullah
Ezam, AFGHANews, Vol. 6 No. 2, 15 January 1990. Interview originally published by
Okaz in Saudi Arabia on 26 November 1989.
14. Weintraub, Craig, ‘Ferkhar Massacre of Jami’at Commanders Gives a Sad Air to Eid
Celebrations’, AFGHANews, Vol. 5 No. 15, 1 August 1989.
15. Author interview with Fazel Karim Aimaq, Kabul, 1 December 2014. Peter Tomsen
describes the incident with the US consul in Tomsen, Peter, The Wars of Afghanistan,
New York: PublicAffairs, 2011, p. 326. ‘Jami’at Victim of Organised Terror’,
AFGHANews, Vol. 5 No. 15, 1 August 1989. ‘AIG Tribunal Starts Hearing of Farkhar
Killing’, AFGHANews, Vol 5. Nos. 18 & 19, 1 October 1989.
16. Burns, John F., ‘Afghan Rebel Disavows Role in Ambush of Rivals’, The NewYork Times,
6 August 1989.
17. Author interview with Mohammed Sediq Chakari, London, 25 June 2014.
18. ‘Mujahideen Have Ability to Defeat Kabul Regime: Comr. Masood.’, AFGHANews,
Vol. 5 Nos. 18 & 19, 1 October 1989.
19. Azzam’s comments on the case are taken from ‘‘I’m proud if Masood Permits me to
sit Beside him and Discuss…Jehad’’—Martyr Abdullah Ezam, AFGHANews, Vol. 6
No. 2, 15 January 1990. Interview originally published by Okaz in Saudi Arabia on
26 November 1989. His trip to Panjshir to see Massoud again is described in Anas,
op. cit, pp. 110–111.
20. Author interview with Jan Baz Sarfaraz, Kabul, 24 May 2014.

456
pp. [270–281] Notes

21. Author interview with Mohammed Es’haq, Kabul, 2 December 2013; and
Mohammed Sediq Chakari, London, 25 June 2014.
22. Anas, op. cit, p. 207.

15. ‘THE CENTURY OF ISLAM’

1. The quotes are taken from a speech available on YouTube, http://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=_FfQuaWnjoc, last accessed 27 May 2019.
2. Tomsen, Peter, The Wars of Afghanistan, New York: PublicAffairs, 2011, p. 359.
3. Author interview with General Muzaferuddin, Kabul, 1 October 2013. Also
Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, Secret Conspiracies, Naked Faces, Peshawar: Mishaq-e Issar,
1999/2000, pp. 61–2.
4. Author interviews with Nasser Jamal Madanyar, Kabul, 7 April 2014; Sulaiman Layeq,
Kabul, 8 April 2014 and 14 May 2014; Abdul Rashid Waziri, Kabul, 13 May 2014.
5. Author interviews with Shahnawaz Tanai, Kabul, 27 December 2014; Ghairat Baheer,
Islamabad, 7 March 2015. Also Herbaugh, Sharon, ‘Afghan Coup Leader Joins Forces
with Fundamentalist Guerrillas’, Associated Press, 15 March 1990.
6. Hekmatyar, op. cit, p. 64. Tomsen, op. cit, p. 362. Coll, Steve, Ghost Wars, London:
Penguin Books, 2004, p. 212. Cogan, Charles, ‘Shawl of Lead’, Conflict, Vol. 10,
1990, p. 197.
7. Transcript of interview with Massoud by Sandy Gall: ‘Masood Reviews History of
Victory,’ AFGHANews, Vol. 9 No. 16, November 1993.
8 Author interviews with Mohammed Arif Sarwari, Kabul, 17 August 2013; Sulaiman
Layeq, Kabul, 22 January 2014; Mohammed Sediq Chakari, London, 13 June 2014
and 25 June 2014.
9. Author interview with Fazel Maula Latun, Kabul, 18 March 2014.
10. Author interviews with Mohammed Zaman Muzamil, Kabul, 22 August 2013; Dr.
Anwar, Kabul 27 October 2013; Engineer Obaidullah, Kabul, 9 December 2013.
11. Author interview with Dr. Rahmanullah, Asadabad, 21 April 2015.
12. Author interviews with Mohammed Amin Weqad, 5 May 2014; and Kashmir Khan,
4 June 2016.
13. ‘Afghan Jihad’, Journeyman Pictures, 1979. The film is available onYouTube, http://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKlHa-J1vIQ, last accessed 27 May 2019.
14. Edwards, David B., Before the Taliban, London: University of California Press, 2002,
p. 271.
15. Author interviews with Haji Rohullah, Jalalabad, 1 May 2014; and Malim Sayed
Jamal, 21 April 2015. Majrooh, Naim, ‘A Report from Kunar Province’, Afghan
Information Centre, No. 91, October 1988. Bell, Kevin, ‘The First Islamic State:
A Look Back at the Islamic Emirate of Kunar’, CTCSentinel, Vol. 9, Issue 2, February
2016.
16. Author interview with Haji Sultan Sayed, Hadwal Valley, 12 January 2017. Tomsen,
op. cit, pp. 387–9.
17. The spy was Asial Khan, who had played a lead role in the 1979 Asmar mutiny. Author
interview with Asial Khan, Kabul, 29 August 2013.
18. Author interviews with Haji Rohullah, Jalalabad, 1 May 2014; and Mohammed Sediq
Chakari, 25 June 2014. Haji Rohullah insisted that Rumi was shot while trying to

457
 NOTES pp. [281–294]

escape. Chakari disputed this, saying he was told that Rumi was executed to stop
him talking. Given the difficulties Rumi would have encountered trying to escape
his captors and Hizb’s formidable reputation at the time, the authors believe he was
killed while in the Salafis’ custody.
19. Author interview with Shir Khan Jalalkhil, Kabul, 9 August 2014.
20. Ahmad, Qazi Hussain, Afghan Jihad is the Morning of Hope for the Islamic Ummah,
Peshawar: Hizb-e Islami, 1991, p. 25.
21. Tomsen, op. cit, p. 274.
22. Tomsen, op. cit, p. 350.
23. Tomsen, op. cit, pp. 396–8.
24. Tomsen, op. cit, pp. 331, 419. ‘The Message of Brother Hekmatyar on the Gulf
Crisis’, Shahadat, 15 January 1991.
25. Tomsen, op. cit, pp. 253, 419. Brown, Vahid, and Don Rassler, Fountainhead of Jihad,
London, Hurst: 2013, p. 88.
26. Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, Jihad is the Secret of Success, Peshawar: Hizb-e Islami, 1991,
pp. 42–3. Coll, op. cit, p. 226.
27. Atwan, Abdel Bari, The Secret History of Al-Qa’ida, London: Abacus, 2007, p. 40.
28. Coll, op. cit, pp. 22–3.
29. Bergen, Peter, The Osama bin Laden I Know, New York: Free Press, 2006, pp. 116–20.
Garnstein-Ross, Daveed, and Nathaniel Barr, ‘How Al-Qaeda Works: The Jihadist
Group’s Evolving Organisational Design’, Hudson Institute, 1 June 2018.

16. THE FALL

1. Kendall, Bridget, ‘Moscow 1991: A Coup that Seemed Doomed from the Start,’
BBC News, 18 August 2011. Bohlen, Celestine, ‘Soviet Disarray; In Moscow, Too, a
Liberal Mayor Feels Besieged’, The NewYork Times, 18 December 1991. Gray, Francine
Du Plessix, ‘Palaces and Pleasures; Moscow: Light and Shadow’, The New York Times
Magazine, 20 October 1991. Schmidt, William E., ‘Heavy-Metal Groups Shake
Moscow’, The New York Times, 29 September 1991.
2. Author interviews with Mohammed Amin Weqad, Kabul, 5 May 2014; Sayed
Mohammed Hadi Hadi, Kabul, 7 January 2014 and 12 January 2014. Burke, Justin,
‘Afghan Rebels Aim for Concessions in Moscow’, The Christian Science Monitor, 15
November 1991. ‘Mujahideen Meet with Soviets in Moscow’, AFGHANews,Vol. 7 No.
22, 15 November 1991. ‘Mujahideen, Soviets find Common Ground’, AFGHANews,
Vol. 7 No. 23, 1 December 1991. Rubin, Barnett R., The Fragmentation of Afghanistan,
New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 2002, p. 267.
3. Rubin, op. cit, p. 109.
4. Rubin, op. cit, pp. 152–67.
5. Author interview with Sulaiman Layeq, Kabul, 8 April 2014 and 2 May 2016. Reeves,
William, ‘Obituary: Dr Najibullah,’ Independent, 28 September 1996.
6. Transcript of interview with Massoud by Sandy Gall: ‘Masood Reviews History of
Victory,’ AFGHANews, Vol. 9 No. 16, November 1993.
7. Author interviews with Mohammed Iqbal Safi, Kabul, 19 September 2013; and
Abdul Rauf, Kohistan, 26 January 2014. Information also taken from authors’
correspondence with Ustad Farid’s father, Ustad Abdul Shakoor Shakoor, January

458
pp. [295–302] Notes

2014. Mir, Sayed Edris, Crossing Through Fire, publisher unknown, 2013/2014.
Information taken from an English language version in PDF format, p. 16.
8. Wahdat’s links with Massoud were established in 1989 by Akbar Khan Nargis. The
1992 delegation to Panjshir was led by Mohammed Akbari. As well as Massoud, the
five-man team met Abdul Rahman and Mohammed Qasim Fahim during their visit.
Author interviews with Khadim Hussein Natiqi, Kabul, 5 December 2010; Qurban
Ali Urfani, Kabul, 12 August 2013; Mohammed Akbari, Kabul, 13 May 2014 and 6
December 2014.
9. The air force officer was Hilaluddin Hilal. Author interview with Hilaluddin Hilal,
Kabul, 3 December 2013.
10. Rubin, op. cit, p. 270.
11. Williams, Brian Glyn, The Last  Warlord, Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2013,
pp. 87–106.
12. Author interview with Toran Amanullah, Shamshatu, 19 February 2014. Also Azimi,
Supreme General Mohammed Nabi, Army and Politics, Peshawar: Maiwand Publishing
Centre, 1998, p. 470.
13. Author interview with Hilaluddin Hilal, Kabul, 30 November 2014.
14. Coll, Steve, GhostWars, London: Penguin Books, 2004, p. 235.
15. Corwin, Phillip, Doomed in Afghanistan, New Brunswick, New Jersey and London:
Rutgers University Press, 2003, pp. 88–91.
16. Transcript of interview with Massoud by Sandy Gall: ‘Masood Reviews History of
Victory,’ AFGHANews, Vol. 9 No. 16, November 1993.
17. Author interviews with Hilaluddin Hilal, Kabul, 30 November 2014; Nasser Jamal
Madanyar 7 April 2014; Mohammed Sediq Chakari, London, 16 October 2014;
General Khodaidad, Kabul, 23 April 2016. Also ‘Despite Rebels’ Tug of War, Afghan
Talks Advance’, The NewYork Times, 19 April 1992.
18. ‘In the Election for the Emirate of HIA Engineer Hekmatyar was again elected as
Emir of HIA’, Shahadat, 9 February 1992. ‘In its Final Meeting the Central Council
of Hizb-e Islami Afghanistan appointed the members of the Executive Council
according to policy,’ Shahadat, 31 March 1992.
19. The descriptions of Spin-e Shiga are taken from a map drawn for the authors by Sayed
Rahman Wahidyar. Also: author interviews with Esmat Qani, Kabul, 4 June 2013;
and Haji Islamuddin, Hayatabad, 14 June 2014.
20. Author interview with Engineer Tareq, Hayatabad, 17 February 2014.
21. Recruits were trained in Peshawar and given false identities. Hizb’s head of intelligence
at this time was Haji Eshanullah. However, Hekmatyar took a close interest in the
Volunteer Army and personally briefed recruits in Sorkh Ab before their mission.
Author interview with Maya Fazel Karim, Kabul, 4 January 2014.
22. Details of Hizb’s plan of attack are taken from author conversations and interviews
with multiple commanders and party members including Sayed Rahman Wahidyar,
Kabul, 13 May 2013; Engineer Tareq, Hayatabad, 17 February 2014; Fazel Maula
Latun, 18 March 2014. Also Mir, op. cit, p. 11.
23. Author interview with Dr. Toryali, Kabul, 27 October 2018.
24. Corwin, op. cit, p. 80. ‘Despite Rebels’ Tug of War, Afghan Talks Advance’, The New
York Times, 19 April 1992.

459
 NOTES pp. [303–312]

25. Tanwir, Mohammed Halim, Afghanistan, Vol. 2, US: self-published, 2013, pp. 650–9.
Ansary, Tamim, Games Without Rules, New York, PublicAffairs, 2012, pp. 220–1.
26. Lorch, Donatella, ‘Rebels Agree on Interim Rule for Kabul’, The New  York  Times,
25 April 1992.
27. Author interviews with Engineer Tareq, Hayatabad, 17 February 2014; and Abdul
Hanan Sharafmal, Kabul, 27 October 2018.
28. Author interview with Mohammed Arif Sarwari, Kabul, 17 August 2013.

17. THE ISLAMIC STATE

1. Toran Amanullah (author interview, Shamshatu, 19 February 2014) and Haji Abubakr
(author interview, Kabul, 2 November 2013) both said they entered the palace
grounds while Hizb was briefly in control of the compound. The description of the
palace is taken from Gargan, Edward A., ‘Rival Rebels Fight in Afghan Capital Day
After Its Fall’, The New York Times, 27 April 1992.
2. Author interview with Sayed Rahman Wahidyar, Kabul, 13 May 2013. Tanwir,
Mohammed Halim, Afghanistan, Vol. 2, US: self-published, 2013, p. 661.
3. Author interview with Sayed Rahman Wahidyar, 13 May 2013.
4. ‘A Press Conference of Brother Hekmatyar by Radio from a Part of Kabul’, Shahadat,
26 April 1992.
5. Author interview with Sayed Mohammed Ali Jawid, Kabul, 20 August 2013.
6. Coll, Steve, ‘Afghanistan’s Capital Falls to Muslim Rebels’, The Washington Post, 26
April 1992. Gargan, Edward A., ‘After 14 years, Afghan Guerrillas Easily Take Prize’,
The NewYork Times, 26 April 1992.
7. Mir, Sayed Edris, Crossing Through Fire, publisher unknown, 2013/2014. Information
taken from an English language version in PDF format, p. 24. Mir states this happened
on the evening of 26 April. However, the authors believe this is a mistake and that it is
likely to have happened on 25 April.
8. Gargan, Edward A., ‘Rival Rebels Fight in Afghan Capital Day After its Fall’, The New
York Times, 27 April 1992.
9. Gargan, Edward A., ‘Fighting is Heavy in Kabul, Which Awaits New Leaders’, The
New York Times, 28 April 1992.
10. Taken from several informal conversations between the authors and senior Hizbis.
11. Author interview with Sayed Sharif Yousofy Sharify, Kabul, 4 September 2013.
12. Author interviews with Noor-ul-Haq Uloomi, Kabul, 19 May 2012; and Abdul
Rahim Wardak, Kabul, 3 August 2014.
13. Gargan, Edward A., ‘Rebels’ Leader Arrives in Kabul and Forms an Islamic Republic’,
The NewYork Times, 29 April 1992.
14. Massoud travelled into Kabul with General Mumin, commander of a garrison at
Hairatan under the Najib regime. Author interview with Hilaluddin Hilal, Kabul, 30
November 2013.
15. Abdul Qadir Imami Ghori, a Hizbi who had fallen out with Hekmatyar, was among
those at the meeting. Author interview with Ghori, Kabul, 20 May 2013.
16. UN Mapping Report, 2005, p. 220. Coll, Steve, ‘Civilians Bear Brunt of Kabul
Battle’, TheWashington Post, 30 April 1992. Herbaugh, Sharon, ‘Government Imposes
Islamic Law; Negotiators Fear New Fighting’, Associated Press, 8 May 1992.

460
pp. [312–323] Notes

17. Corwin, Phillip, Doomed in Afghanistan, New Brunswick, New Jersey and London:
Rutgers University Press, 2003, p. 107.
18. Author interviews with Ahmad Bashir Royga, Kabul, 24 December 2013; and Abdul
Rashid Waziri, Kabul, 18 May 2014.
19. Weiner, Tim, ‘Kabul’s Chaotic Command Men Fire Rockets and Rifles in the air in a
Celebration That Takes Lives Nightly’, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 13 May 1992.
20. Author interviews with Sayed Rahman Wahidyar, Kabul, 13 May 2013; and General
Muzaferuddin, Kabul, 1 October 2013.
21. Mir, op. cit, pp. 21–2.
22. Among those Hizbis accused of facilitating Massoud’s entrance to Kabul are
Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman’s childhood friend Dr. Anwar and Mohammed Zaman
Muzamil, who accompanied Hekmatyar on his trip to Turkey. Dr. Anwar denied any
involvement. Author interviews with Mohammed Arif Sarwari, Kabul, 18 August
2013; Sayed Rahman Wahidyar, Kabul, 3 October 2013; Dr. Anwar, Kabul, 27
October 2013; Abdul Qadeer Karyab, 3 November 2013; Waheedullah Sabawoon,
Kabul, 12 May 2014.
23. Author interview with Kashmir Khan, Shaygal, 4 June 2016.
24. Author interviews with Sayed Rahman Wahidyar, Kabul, 13 May 2013; and General
Muzaferuddin, Kabul, 1 October 2013.
25. Author interviews with Danish Karokhail, Kabul, 21 June 2014; and Abdul Rahim
Wardak, Kabul, 3 August 2014.
26. Author interviews with Waheedullah Sabawoon, Kabul, 12 May 2014 and 5 August
2014; Chaman, Kabul, 3 September 2013.
27. Author interview with Haji Amer, Shamshatu, 15 June 2014.
28. Weiner, Tim, ‘Afghan Promises More War’, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 12 May 1992.
29. Author interview with Fazel Maula Latun, Kabul, 18 March 2014.
30. ‘2 Afghan Guerrilla Rivals Agree to Peace Plan’, The NewYork Times, 26 May 1992.
31. Herbaugh, Sharon, ‘Former General Under Najibullah Promoted by New Regime’,
Associated Press, 23 May 1992.
32. Herbaugh, Sharon, ‘Militia Leader Rejects Pressure to Leave War-Weary Capital’,
Associated Press, 27 May 1992.
33. Author correspondence with Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, December 2013; author
interview with Sayed Sharif Yousofy Sharify, Kabul, 4 September 2013. Both men
confirmed Hizb did not carry out the attack; Mojaddedi directly blamed Massoud.
Also, Herbaugh, Sharon, ‘President Accuses Rebels, Communists of Trying to Kill
Him’, Associated Press, 31 May 1992.

18. ‘VICTORY OR MARTYRDOM’

1. ‘For Once, Afghanistan sees a Peaceful Transition’, Associated Press, 29 June 1992.
2. The scene was recalled by Abdul Qadeer Karyab, who accompanied Farid on the
journey into Kabul. Author interview, Kabul, 3 November 2013.
3. Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, ‘Secret Conspiracies, Naked Faces’, Peshawar: Mishaq-e
Issar, 1999/2000, pp. 102, 109.
4. Jennings, John, ‘Government Says it Pushed Rebels Back, but Rocket Attacks
Continue’, Associated Press, 11 August 1992; ’Afghan Factions Bombs the Capital,

461
 NOTES pp. [323–330]

Killing 100’, The New York Times, 14 August 1992; ’Government Says Another
Rebel Assault Repulsed,’ The Associated Press, 17 August 1992; Herbaugh, Sharon,
‘Government Forces Launch Offensive Against Hekmatyar; More Rockets Hit
Kabul’, Associated Press, 19 August 1992. ‘Blood-Stained Hands’, Human Rights Watch,
2005, p. 32.
5. Crile, George, Charlie Wilson’s War, London: Atlantic Books, 2007, p. 319.
6. Author interview with Abdul Qadeer Karyab, Kabul, 3 November 2013.
7. Author interviews with Abdul Qadeer Karyab, Kabul, 18 December 2013; and
Mohammed Amin Karim, Kabul, 7 September 2014. However, friends of Mazari
deny he was ever a member of Hizb.
8. Mazari’s preferred candidate was General Khodaidad, who joined the communist
movement in the early 1970s. Massoud appointed Mohammed Qasim Fahim instead.
Author interviews with Sayed Hussein Anwari, Kabul, 13 August 2013; Mohiuddin
Mehdi, Kabul, 17 September 2013; General Khodaidad, Kabul, 5 May 2015.
9. The Jamiat officials Mohiuddin Mehdi and Mohammed Qasim Fahim were also
present at this meeting. Author interview with Mohiuddin Mehdi, Kabul, 17
September 2013.
10. ‘Regional Leaders Set Sunday Deadline for Removal of Ex-Communist Militias’,
Associated Press, 2 October 1992.
11. Tanwir, Mohammed Halim, Afghanistan, Vol. 2, US: self-published, 2013, pp. 687–8.
12. ‘Kashmir Khan: An Islamic Army Can Establish Peace’, Shahadat, 13 December 1992.
13. Point three of the Peshawar Accord, 24 April 1992.
14. ‘Prof. Rabbani Elected President for 2 Years’, AFGHANews, Vol. 9 No. 1, 1 January
1993.
15. Author interview with Sayed Mohammed Hadi Hadi, Kabul, 8 March 2014. Also
Rabbani, Burhanuddin, ‘An Islamic Government is a Government of Brotherhood
and National Unity’, Kabul: the Media Department of the Islamic State of
Afghanistan,1996, p. 11.
16. Author interview with Mohammed Arif Sarwari, Kabul, 17 August 2013.
17. ‘Blood-Stained Hands’, Human Rights Watch, 2005, pp. 66–8.
18. Hekmatyar, op. cit, p. 110.
19. Author interviews with Mohammed Sediq Chakari, London, 6 April 2015 and 9
October 2015.
20. The details about the Afshar campaign are taken from author interviews with Haji
Ramazan Hussein Zada, Kabul, 2 May 2015 and 6 May 2015; General Khodaidad,
Kabul, 5 May 2015. Also ‘Blood-Stained Hands’, Human Rights Watch, 2005, pp. 70–
97; ‘War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity: 1978–2001’, The Afghanistan Justice
Project, 2005, p. 87. For further insight, the authors drew on the recollections of a
relative who lived in Kabul at the time and witnessed some of the devastation.
21. Authors’ correspondence with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, June 2015.
22. Author’s own memories of living in Kabul at the time. Also author interview with
Qadratullah Amiri, Kabul, 21 March 2015.
23. Author interviews with Sayed Mohammed Ali Jawid, Kabul, 11 January 2014; and
Mohammed Sediq Chakari, London, 6 April 2015.
24. ‘1989: Soviet Troops Pull Out of Afghanistan’, BBC News, 15 February 1989.
25. Tomsen, Peter, TheWars of Afghanistan, New York: PublicAffairs, 2011, pp. 510–12.

462
pp. [330–339] Notes

26. Author interview with Nicholas Barrington, Cambridge, 28 February 2014.

27. Author interview with Farouq Azam, Kabul, 2 September 2013.
28. Herbaugh, Sharon, ‘Hekmatyar Dismisses Islamic Government to Form New One’,
Associated Press, 2 April 1993.
29. Tanwir, op. cit, p. 699.
30. ‘Rabbani Sabotaging Peace Accord Says Hikmatyar’, AFP, 16 April 1993.
31. The Qur’an, 3:104.
32. Author interviews with Fazel Maula Latun, Kabul, 18 March 2014; Habib-ur-
Rahman Hekmatyar, Peshawar, 18 February 2014; Mohammed Anwar Kakar, Chahar
Asyab, 29 December 2014; Ahmad Nur Barakzai, Chahar Asyab, 29 December 2014.
Also: map drawn for the authors by Sayed Rahman Wahidyar.
33. ‘The First Meeting of the Cabinet was Held Under the Directorship of Brother
Hekmatyar’, Shahadat, 8 June 1993. ‘The Second Meeting of the Cabinet has been
Delayed’, Shahadat, 24 June 1993. Joshi, Vijay, ‘Hekmatyar Convenes Cabinet
Meeting but Rivals Absent,’ Associated Press, 6 June 1993.
34. Hekmatyar, op. cit, p. 167.
35. Author interview with Mohammed Amin Karim via Skype, 22 May 2014.
36. Sebe, Berny, ‘Siege Awakens Ghosts of Algeria’s ‘Dirty War’, BBC News, 18 January
2013.
37. All the information about the resources available to Hekmatyar’s bodyguards, and the
training given to them by the GIA, is from author interview with Haji Islamuddin,
Hayatabad, 14 June 2014. The 1,200–2,000 number is taken from Tawil, Camille,
Brothers in Arms, London: Saqi Books, 2010, p. 70.
38. ‘Mokhtar Belmokhtar and Afghanistan’, Bost Bastan News Agency, 2013.
39. Rashid, Ahmed, Jihad, London:Yale University Press, 2002.
40. Author interview with Jan Baz Sarfaraz, Kabul, 16 June 2013.
41. ‘The Message of Hekmatyar on the Destruction of the Babri Mosque’, Shahadat, 9
December 1992.
42. Gannon, Kathy, ‘Afghan Prime Minister Defends Sheik Abdel-Rahman’, Associated
Press, 18 August 1993. Also Kohlmann, Evan F., Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe, Oxford:
Berg, 2004, p. 151.
43. Author interview with Ustad Mohammed Ali Khan, Paktia, 15 May 2014. Also
‘Hekmatyar Met with Hassan Al-Turabi, the Islamic Leader of Sudan’, Shahadat, 21
November 1993.
44. Hekmatyar, op. cit, p. 15.
45. Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, House Republican Research
Committee, The New Islamist International, 1 February 1993.
46. US State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research, The Wandering Mujahidin:
Armed and Dangerous, 21–22 August 1993. Also Hazarika, Sanjoy, ‘Afghans Joining
Rebels in Kashmir, The NewYork Times, 24 August 1993.
47. Dean, Aimen, Nine Lives, London: Oneworld, 2018, pp. 60–2 and 98–106. Also
Nasiri, Omar, Inside the Jihad, New York: Basic Books, 2006, pp. 220–7.
48. Author interview with Mohammed Arif Sarwari, Kabul, 17 August 2014. ‘President
Visits Friendly Countries’, AFGHANews, Vol. 10 No. 1, January 1994. Transcript of
interview with Massoud by Sandy Gall:‘Masood Explains New Strategy’, AFGHANews,
Vol. 9 No. 17, December 1993. Tomsen, op. cit, p. 530.

463
 NOTES pp. [342–349]

19. COLLUSION
1. Author interviews with Mohammed Arif Sarwari, Kabul, 17 August 2013; and
Waheedullah Sabawoon, Kabul, 5 August 2014.
2. Herbaugh, Sharon, ‘Islamic Groups to Monitor Tense Capital’, Associated Press, 10
April 1993.
3. Author interview with Engineer Obaidullah, Kabul, 9 December 2013.
4. Authors’ correspondence with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, June 2015.
5. Author interviews with General Muzaferuddin, Kabul, 1 October 2013;Waheedullah
Sabawoon, Kabul, 12 May 2014 and 5 August 2014; Roghman, Shaygal, 4 June 2016;
Fazel Mohammed, Sirkanay, 7 March 2016. All of them were deployed to Azerbaijan
on behalf of Hizb. Further information about the Afghan fighters in Azerbaijan can
be found in Taarnby, Michael, ‘The Mujahedin in Nagorno-Karabakh’, Real Instituto
Elcano, 9 May 2008. Sneider, Daniel, ‘Afghan Fighters Join Azeri-Armenian War’, The
Christian Science Monitor, 16 November 1993.
6. Dean, Aimen, Nine Lives, London: Oneworld, 2018, pp. 50–2.
7. US Department of Justice, Benevolence Director Indicted for Racketeering Conspiracy:
Providing Material Support to Al-Qaeda and Other Violent Groups, 9 October 2002;
United States District Court, Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division: United
States of America v. Enaam M. Arnaout, Government’s Evidentiary Proffer Supporting the
Admissibility of Coconspirator Statements, No. 02 CR 892.
8. Author interviews with Mohammed Arif Sarwari, Kabul, 17 August 2013; and
Hilaluddin Hilal, 30 November 2014. ‘Hikmatyar Exports Mercenaries to Finance
War Against the State’, AFGHANews, Vol. 9 No. 17, December 1993.
9. The aide who went to Jalalabad was General Khodaidad. He said the Wahdat forces
who went to Azerbaijan were under the command of Wahdat’s political officer, Sayed
Amini. Author interview with General Khodaidad, Kabul, 5 May 2015.
10. Author interviews with Abdul Qadeer Karyab, Kabul, 14 January 2014; Waheedullah
Sabawoon, Kabul, 12 May 2014; Mohammed Amin Karim, Kabul, 7 September
2014. Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, Secret Conspiracies, Naked Faces, Peshawar: Mishaq-e
Issar, 1999/2000, p. 150.
11. Author interview with Mohammed Akbari, Kabul, 3 May 2014.
12. Author interviews with Sulaiman (Zardad’s cook), Surobi, 3 June 2014; and Izatullah
Nasratyar, Surobi, 3 June 2014.
13. For a more detailed account of the abuses meted out by Zardad’s fighters, including
the killing of civilians, see Regina v Faryadi Sarwar Zardad, No: 200505339/D3, 7
February 2007.
14. Author conversation with family member who lived in Kabul during the civil war,
December 2018.
15. Author interviews with Waheedullah Sabawoon, Kabul, 5 August 2014, and Hassan
Khan, Kabul, 26 June 2014.
16. Several Hizbis said Massoud made a number of attempts to bribe the Ahmadzai
commanders into switching sides to Jamiat. Author interviews with Qalam, Kabul, 3
September 2013; Hassan Khan, Kabul, 26 June 2014.
17. Author interview with Mawlawi Muslim, Mahmoud Raqi, 19 April 2014. ‘Hezb
Wages Tribal War to Steal Capital Power’, AFGHANews, Vol. 9 No. 16, November

464
pp. [349–359] Notes

1993. Myre, Greg, ‘Afghan Rivals Wage Pitched Battle for Strategic Town’, Associated
Press, 14 November 1993.
18. Author interviews with Izatullah Miri, Kabul, 14 December 2010; and Sayed
Mohammed Ali Jawid, 4 January 2014. Shahid, Shamim, ‘Fierce Fighting Erupts
Amid Rival Afghan Factions’, The Nation, 2 January 1994.
19. Author interviews with Abdul Qadir Imami Ghori, Kabul, 21 January 2014; and
Mohammed Sediq Chakari, London, 25 June 2014.
20. Jennings, John, ‘Food Shortages Worsening in Afghan Capital’, Associated Press,
20 February 1994. Gannon, Kathy, ‘Prime Minister Mulls Over UN Plea, Food
Convoy Remains Parked’, Associated Press, 5 March 1994. Abdullah, Zaheeruddin,
‘Warlord Responds with Air Strikes After Being Chased from Kabul’, Associated
Press, 27 June 1994.
21. Author interview with Ettore Mo, Amport, 19 February 2014. ‘Eyewitness Blames
Hezb for Mirwais’ Murder’, AFGHANews, Vol. 10 No. 10, October 1994. The
‘poisonous propaganda’ quote is taken from Hekmatyar’s 27 February 1990 speech
in Hayatabad.
22. Author interview with Sayed Hussein Anwari, Kabul, 13 August 2013.
23. Author interview with Barat Tafancha, Kabul, 6 February 2014.
24. Zaeef, Abdul Salam, My Life with the Taliban, London: Hurst, 2010, p. 68.
25. Rashid, Ahmed, Taliban, London: I.B. Tauris, 2001, p. 27.
26. Rabbani said this to Sayed Mohammed Ali Jawid. Author interview with Jawid,
Kabul, 11 January 2014.
27. Author interview with Modir Ghaffar, Kabul, 26 August 2016.
28. Rashid, op. cit, p. 29.
29. ‘Raees Abdul Wahid’, AFGHANews, Vol. 7 No. 15, 1 August 1991.
30. Author interview with Mohammed Sediq Chakari, London, 25 June 2014.
31. Author interviews with Abdul Hafiz Mansoor, Kabul, 17 September 2013; Sakhi Dad
Fayez, Kabul, 14 April 2014; Mohammed Sediq Chakari, London, 25 June 2014 and
16 October 2014; Modir Ghaffar, Kabul, 26 August 2016.
32. Author interviews with Mohammed Sediq Chakari, London, 25 June 2014, and 16
October 2014; Modir Ghaffar, Kabul, 26 August 2016.
33. Author interview with Mohammed Sediq Chakari, London, 16 October 2014.
Another payment was made to the Taliban in Ghazni: from author interviews with
Sayed Mohammed Ali Jawid, 11 January 2014; and Sakhi Dad Fayez, Kabul, 14 April
2014.
34. Author interviews with Char Gul Nasser, Kabul, 19 June 2013; and Hassan Khan,
Kabul, 26 June 2014.
35. Author interviews with Char Gul Nasser, Kabul, 19 June 2013; Mohammed Halim
Tanwir, Kabul, 5 December 2013; Qalam, Kabul, 3 September 2013.
36. Hamid, Mustafa, and Leah Farrall, The Arabs at War in Afghanistan, London, Hurst:
2015, p. 222.
37. Author interview with Toran Amanullah, Shamshatu, 19 February 2014.
38. Author interview with Abdul Hafiz Mansoor, Kabul, 17 September 2013.
39. Author interviews with Izatullah Nasratyar, Surobi, 3 June 2014; and Engineer Tareq,
Shamshatu, 12 June 2014. Also Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, Secret Conspiracies, Naked Faces,
Peshawar: Mishaq-e Isssar, 1999/2000, p. 189.

465
 NOTES pp. [360–372]

40. US Consulate Peshawar Cable: New Fighting and New Forces in Kandahar, 3 November
1994. Also US Embassy Dushanbe Cable: Rabbani Emissary States Rabbani Will Not
Surrender Power to Interim Council Until Taliban Join, 21 February 1995. Published by the
National Security Archive, George Washington University.
41. The Hizbi who sent to see Mazari was Haji Amer. Author interview with Haji Amer,
Shamshatu, 15 June 2014.
42. Author interview with Haji Ramazan Hussein Zada, Kabul, 9 May 2015. He was part
of this team. Also General Khodaidad, who was in London as the Taliban approached
Kabul, recalled speaking to Mazari over the telephone. Mazari told him, ‘I am
prepared to join the Taliban but I will not go to Massoud and Rabbani; I will not join
their government.’ Author interview with General Khodaidad, Kabul, 23 April 2016.
43. Author interview with Sayed Mohammed Hadi, Kabul, 26 April 2015.
44. Author interview with Sayed Mohammed Ali Jawid, Kabul, 11 January 2014. Jawid
was at the meeting with Massoud and the Iranian diplomat.

20. THE GREAT GAME

1. Author interviews with Char Gul Nasser, Kabul, 19 June 2013; and Qazi Abdul Hai
Faqeri, Shamshatu, 19 February 2014.
2. Author interview with Anwar-ul-Haq Mujahid, Jalalabad, 21 September 2015.
3. Author interview with Mir Mohammed Amin Farhang, Kabul, 11 August 2014.
4. Author interviews with Qazi Abdul Hai Faqeri, Shamshatu, 19 February 2014; and
Qazi Mohammed Hakim Hakim, Peshawar, 19 February 2014.
5. Author interview with Izatullah Nasratyar, Surobi, 3 June 2014.
6. Author interview with Haji Naqib Mohammed Farid, Peshawar, 18 February 2014.
7. Author interview with Sayed Mohammed Ali Jawid, Kabul, 11 November 2014.
8. Author interview with Qazi Abdul Hai Faqeri, Shamshatu, 19 February 2014.
9. Author interview with Kashmir Khan, Shaygal, 4 June 2016.
10. Author interview with Haji Abubakr, Kabul, 2 November 2013.
11. Dean, Aimen, Nine Lives, London: Oneworld, 2018, p. 69.
12. Dean, op. cit, pp. 55–6. Also Nasiri, Omar, Inside the Jihad, New York: Basic Books,
2006, p. 129.
13. Coll, Steve, GhostWars, London: Penguin Books, 2004, p. 320.
14. Coll, op. cit, pp. 268–76, 323.
15. The details of the trip to Sudan are taken from a letter written by an Afghan mujahid,
Dr. Amin-ul-Haq, who was part of the Khartoum delegation. Haq was a member of the
Yunis Khalis breakaway faction of Hizb at the time of the trip; he is now in the Taliban.
His letter was written in response to criticisms of Hekmatyar made by a former
Egyptian jihadist, Mustafa Hamid, in June 2017. Sent to militants in Afghanistan,
the letter was shared with the authors. The other main members of the delegation
to Khartoum were Haji Abdul Qadeer, the warlord from the Khalis faction of Hizb
who once clashed with Zardad, and Ustad Saznoor, a senior commander from Sayyaf’s
Ittehad party.They were accompanied by two translators. Fazel Haq Mujahid’s decisive
role in bringing bin Laden back to Afghanistan was confirmed by his son, Anwar-ul-
Haq Mujahid (author interview, Jalalabad, 21 September 2015) and a member of
Hekmatyar’s inner circle who wished to remain anonymous (interviewed January

466
pp. [372–385] Notes

2019). Anwar-ul-Haq described the episode with the Russian blankets. The date of bin
Laden’s return is from Burke, Jason, Al-Qaeda, London: Penguin Books, 2004, p. 160.
16. Ruttig, Thomas, ‘Gulbuddin Ante Portas - again (Updated)’, Afghanistan Analysts
Network, 22 March 2010.
17. Author interviews with Qazi Abdul Hai Faqeri, Shamshatu, 19 February 2014; and
Kabul, 30 January 2019; Qazi Mahmoud ul-Hassan Jahid, Kabul, 17 March 2014.
18. The son was Habib-ur-Rahman Hekmatyar, named after Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman.
19. Author interviews with Sayed Mohammed Ali Jawid, Kabul, 11 January 2014;
Habib-ur-Rahman Hekmatyar, Peshawar, 18 February 2014; Qazi Abdul Hai Faqeri,
Shamshatu, 19 February 2014; Mohammed Sediq Chakari, London, 6 April 2015;
Anwar-ul-Haq Mujahid, Jalalabad, 21 September 2015.
20. Author interview with Haji Naqib Mohammed Farid, Peshawar, 18 February 2014.
Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, Secret Conspiracies, Naked Faces, Peshawar: Mishaq-e Issar,
1999/2000, p. 221.
21. Burke, op. cit, p. 163.
22. Author interviews with Toran Amanullah, Shamshatu, 19 February 2014; Habib-ur-
Rahman Hekmatyar, Peshawar, 18 February 2014; Haji Islamuddin, Hayatabad, 14
June 2014.
23. Author interview with Cheragh Ali Cheragh, Kabul, 4 May 2013.

21. THE NEXT WAR

1. Author interviews with Izatullah Nasratyar, Surobi, 3 June 2014; Qalam, 3
September 2013, Anwar-ul-Haq Mujahid, Jalalabad, 21 September 2015. The dates
the Taliban seized Jalalabad and Surobi are taken from Rashid, Ahmed, Taliban,
London: I.B.Tauris, 2001, p. 228.
2. Author interview with Qazi Abdul Hai Faqeri, Shamshatu, 19 February 2014.
3. Author interview with Waheedullah Sabawoon, Kabul, 5 August 2014.
4. The visitor was Qazi Mahmoud ul-Hassan Jahid. He spent one night in Parwan before
feeling guilty and deciding to return to Kabul. Jarir continued on to Mazar-e Sharif.
Author interview with Jahid, Kabul, 17 March 2014.
5. Author interviews with Habib-ur-Rahman Hekmatyar, Peshawar, 18 February 2014;
and Qazi Abdul Hai Faqeri, Shamshatu, 19 February 2014.
6. Author interviews with Sayed Mohammed Ali Jawid, Kabul, 21 February 2014; Qazi
Mahmoud ul-Hassan Jahid, Kabul, 17 March 2014; Waheedullah Sabawoon, Kabul, 5
August 2014.
7. The concerned Jamiati was Mohammed Sediq Chakari. Author interviews with
Chakari, London, 13 June 2014 and 25 June 2014.
8. Mohammed Sediq Chakari was in the same vehicle as Hekmatyar. Author interview
with Chakari, London, 25 June 2014.
9. Sayed Mohammed Ali Jawid was the minister who fled Kabul in a Toyota Corolla. He
told the authors about the discussions at Jabal-e Saraj, Kabul, 21 January 2014.
10. Rashid, op. cit, pp. 49–50.
11. Author interview with Sulaiman Layeq, Kabul, 2 May 2016.
12. The decree is from Van Linschoten, Alex Strick, and Felix Kuehn (eds), The Taliban
Reader, London: Hurst, 2018, p. 129. The description of the thief is from Burns, John

467
 NOTES pp. [385–397]

F., ‘New Afghan Rulers Impose Harsh Mores of the Islamic Code’, The NewYork Times,
1 October 1996.
13. Author interviews with Mawlawi Mohammed Qalamuddin, Kabul, 9 July 2011; and
Mawlawi Pir Mohammed Rohani, Kabul, 14 October 2012.
14. Author interviews with Toran Amanullah, Shamshatu, 19 February 2014; and
Kashmir Khan, Shaygal, 4 June 2016.
15. Author interviews with Fazel Maula Latun, Kabul, 17 March 2014; and Engineer
Mahmoud Ahmadi, Baghlan, 23 August 2015.
16. Author interviews with Abdul Qadeer Karyab, Kabul, 3 November 2014; and
Engineer Mahmoud Ahmadi, Baghlan, 23 August 2015.
17. Author interview with Anwar-ul-Haq Mujahid, Jalalabad, 21 September 2015.
According to Anwar-ul-Haq, Fazel Haq was reluctant to stay in Peshawar. At one
point he considered moving to Pakistan-administered Kashmir. He even travelled
to Muzaffarabad and met Sayed Salahuddin, the leader of the militant group Hizb-ul
Mujahideen, to explore the idea further.
18. Author interviews with Char Gul Nasser, Kabul, 19 June 2013; Toran Amanullah,
Shamshatu, 19 February 2014; Haji Islamuddin, Hayatabad, 14 June 2014.
19. Author interview with Abdul Qadeer Karyab, Kabul, 3 November 2013.
20. Author interview with Habib-ur-Rahman Hekmatyar, Peshawar, 18 February 2014.
21. ‘War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity: 1978-2001’, The Afghanistan Justice
Project, 2005, p. 120.
22. Author interview with Kashmir Khan, Shaygal, 4 June 2016.
23. Author interview with Aziz-ur-Rahman Tawab, Mahmoud Raqi, 26 January 2014.
24. Van Linschoten, op. cit, p. 161.
25. US State Department cable, Dealing with the Taliban in Kabul, 28 September 1996.
Published by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
26. Flaherty, Mary Pat, ‘How Afghanistan Went Unlisted as Terrorist Sponsor’, The
Washington Post, 5 November 2001.
27. Coll, Steve, GhostWars, London: Penguin Books, 2004, pp. 340–2. Wright, Lawrence,
The Looming Tower, London: Penguin Books, 2007, p. 247.
28. Cowell, Alan, and Douglas Jehl, ‘Luxor Survivors Say Killers Fired Methodically’,
The NewYork Times, 24 November 1997.
29. Bergen, Peter, The Osama bin Laden I Know, New York: Free Press, 2006, pp. 204–5.
30. Coll, op. cit, p. 411.
31. Sasson, Jean, and Najwa bin Laden and Omar bin Laden, Growing up Bin Laden,
London: Oneworld, 2014, pp. 308–10.
32. Hamid, Mustafa, and Leah Farrall, The Arabs at War in Afghanistan, London: Hurst,
2015, p. 251.
33. Author interview with Habib-ur-Rahman Hekmatyar, Peshawar, 18 February 2014.
34. Author interview with Jan Baz Sarfaraz, Kabul, 24 May 2014.
35. Author interview with Haji Naqib Mohammed Farid, Peshawar, 18 February 2014.
36. Author interview with Kashmir Khan, Shaygal, 4 June 2016.
37. The precise details of Hekmatyar’s trip to Baghdad were described to the authors by
a member of his inner circle who wished to remain anonymous. That the trip took
place was confirmed by Ghairat Baheer (author interview, Islamabad, 7 March 2015)
and Qazi Zabiullah Ibrahimi (author interview, Kandahar, 27 July 2018).

468
pp. [397–409] Notes

38. Author interview with Habib-ur-Rahman Hekmatyar, Peshawar, 18 February 2014.

39. Bergen, op. cit, p. 287.
40. Coll, op. cit, p. 561.
41. Anas, Abdullah, with Tam Hussein, To the Mountains, London: Hurst, 2019,
pp. 135–6.

22. THE GUESTS

1. The White House: Presidential Address to the Nation, 7 October 2001. Hizb’s
political representative in America, Mohammed Daoud Abedi, told the authors
that the US government contacted him on 13 September 2001 to try to enlist
Hizb’s help in toppling the Taliban regime. In follow-up talks that month, he met
with representatives of the CIA and FBI in Los Angeles. He passed the request to
Hekmatyar, who rejected it out of hand. Author correspondence with Abedi, 3
November 2013 and 4 November 2013.
2. Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, September 11th Interviews and Articles, Peshawar: Mishaq-e
Issar, 2002, pp. 9–10.
3. With Baheer in the three-man delegation were Haji Malik and Haji Jamil. Author
interview with Ghairat Baheer, Islamabad, 7 March 2015.
4. Hekmatyar receives just one cursory mention in the 9/11 Commission Report.
5. Finn, Peter, ‘Hamburg’s Cauldron of Terror’, The  Washington Post, 11 September
2002. Kareb, Syara, ‘I didn’t Know Anything, With God As My Witness’, Spiegel
Online, 23 November 2018.
6. Author interviews with Obaidullah Mujahid, Jalalabad, 26 June 2018 and 5 August
2018.
7. Dr Amin ul-Haq was part of the delegation that went to Sudan in 1996 just before bin
Laden left the country with the help of the Hizb commander Fazel Haq Mujahid. ‘I
am not a Hizbi, nor am I a supporter of Hekmatyar, but everyone knows that no one
has loved, supported and helped the Arabs in Afghanistan as much as Hekmatyar,’ he
wrote in a letter seen by the authors. The letter was sent to militants in Afghanistan
in response to criticisms of Hekmatyar made by the former Egyptian jihadist Mustafa
Hamid. In a three-part article posted on his blog in June 2017 (www.mafa.world,
last accessed 27 May 2019) Hamid tried to downplay Hizb’s role in helping bin
Laden escape.
8. Bergen, Peter, ‘The Account of How We Nearly Caught Osama bin Laden in 2001’,
New Republic, 30 December 2009. Also Corera, Gordon, ‘Bin Laden’s Escape, Just
Months After 9/11’, BBC News, 21 July 2011.
9. The information about bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora and his brief return to
Jalalabad is from a source who wished to remain anonymous. Author interviews,
summer 2018. For more on Awal Gul see: JTF-GTMO Detainee Assessment,
20330115, and US Department of Defence Unclassified Summary of Evidence for
Administrative Review Board in the Case of Gul, Awal.
10. Author interview with Haji Nurrahman, Shaygal, 14 January 2017.
11. Author interview with Qazi Zabiullah Ibrahimi, Kandahar, 27 July 2018.
12. Senior Hizbis told the authors they often met Soleimani during their time in Iran.
13. Author interview with Qazi Abdul Hai Faqeri, Kabul, 27 October 2018.

469
 NOTES pp. [409–420]

14. Al-Adel, Saif, Jihadist Biography of the Slaughtering Leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
copy in PDF format, p. 13, http://scholarship.tricolib.brynmawr.edu/bitstream/
handle/10066/5092/ZAR20090817.pdf, last accessed 27 May 2019. Fishman,
Brian H., The Master Plan, New Haven:Yale University Press, 2016, pp. 33–8.
15. Al-Hakaymah, Mohammed Khalil, Journeys of a Jihadi. Also Naji, Abu Bakr, The
Management of Savagery, translated by William McCants via a grant from the John M.
Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, 2006, pp. 72, 108.
16. ‘Dialogue with Imam Al-Zarqawi’, Al Muwahideen Media, last accessed on 11 May
2016.
17. The precise details about Zarqawi’s relationship with Hizb and the help the party
gave him in Iran were provided by a member of Hekmatyar’s inner circle who
wished to remain anonymous (author interview, Kabul, 2018). The information
about Zarqawi’s youth in Jordan is from Weaver, Mary Anne, ‘The Short, Violent Life
of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’, The Atlantic, July/August 2006. See also Warrick, Joby,
Black Flags, London: Penguin Random House, 2015. In his biography of Zarqawi, the
Jordanian journalist Fouad Hussein also states that Hekmatyar sheltered Zarqawi in
Iran. Hussein, Fouad, ‘Al-Zarqawi: The Second Generation of Al-Qaeda’, http://
atc2005.blogspot.com/2006/06/al-zarqawi-second-generation-of-al.html,  last
accessed 27 May 2019.
18. The memorial ceremony was for Abdul Haq, a moderate mujahideen commander
killed by the Taliban on 26 October 2001.
19. Author interview with Kashmir Khan, Shaygal, 4 June 2016.
20. Gul was subsequently sent to Guantanamo Bay, where he died in February 2011.
21. Author interviews with Haji Naqib Mohammed Farid, Peshawar, 18 February 2014;
and Qazi Zabiullah Ibrahimi, Kandahar, 27 July 2018.
22. The exact route Hekmatyar took is unclear but he was accompanied by Haji Sharafat,
a Hizb commander who would later adopt the pseudonym Haroon Zarghon and
become the spokesman for the insurgent wing of the party. Even then, Sharafat
remained involved in planning military operations.
23. Author interview with Habib-ur-Rahman Hekmatyar, Peshawar, 18 February 2014.
24. Kashmir Khan assumed the codename they had been using—‘Engineer twenty-
two’—was for Qutbuddin Hilal, an experienced Hizbi who was in temporary charge
of the party in Peshawar.
25 Author interview with Haji Nurrahman, Shaygal, 14 January 2017.

23. THE RECKONING

1. The Qur’an, 18:9-26.
2. Author interviews with Qazi Abdul Hai Faqeri, 19 February 2014; Haji Nurrahman,
Shaygal, 14 January 2017; and Haji Amanullah, Shaygal, 4 November 2017.
Also author conversations with local residents during numerous trips to Shaygal.
Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, Dreams and Interpretations, publisher unknown, 2014, pp. 86–
7. While the book mainly focuses on the religious significance of dreams, it offers a
brief glimpse into Hekmatyar’s time with bin Laden in Shaygal.The Hekmatyar quote
about the drone strike is taken from Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, September 11th Interviews
and Articles, Peshawar: Mishaq-e Issar, 2002, p. 253.

470
pp. [420–426] Notes

3. Morgan, Wesley, ‘Ten Years in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley’, United States Institute of
Peace, September 2015.
4. Author interview with Haji Sultan Sayed, Hadwal Valley, 12 January 2017.
5. Information about Haji Khan Jan and the fugitives’ time in Dangam is from author
interviews with Haji Nurrahman, Shaygal, 14 January 2017; Haji Sultan Sayed,
Hadwal Valley, 12 January 2017; Qazi Abdul Hai Faqeri, Kabul, 30 January 2019.
Also Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, ‘The Letter of Condolence from Brother Hekmatyar
About the Recent Painful Incidents in Kunar’, Shahadat website, 4 March 2016;
‘The Haji Khan Jan I Have Heard About’, Shahadat website, 1 March 2016. The
details about Hekmatyar learning how to make roadside bombs is from author
conversations with Hizb commanders in Shaygal. Sulaiman Abu Ghaith’s writing
was published on Al-Qaeda’s Al Neda website. Bergen, Peter, The Longest War, New
York: Free Press, 2011, p. 217. In 2002 Hekmatyar republished a fatwa from radical
Afghan scholars that described jihad against US troops as a religious obligation for
all Muslims, male and female. The fatwa said that anyone supporting the Afghan
government ‘should be considered as communists’ and punished accordingly.
Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, September 11th Interviews and Articles, Peshawar: Mishaq-e
Issar, 2002, pp. 239–40.
6. Author conversations with Hizb fighters in Shaygal.
7. ‘Shahi Kot Battle: Interview with Al-Qaeda’s Field Commander Abu Laith Al-Libi’,
Global Terrorism Research Project, 10 July 2002.
8. Author interview with Qazi Abdul Hai Faqeri, Kabul, 30 January 2019.
9. Author interview with Kashmir Khan, Shaygal, 4 June 2016. That hundreds of US
Special Forces troops were involved in the operation was confirmed by the American
journalist Wesley Morgan (conversation with author via Signal, 19 April 2019).
10. The details about Gul Rahman’s background in the Support Group and his ties to bin
Laden are from author interviews with Habib-ur-Rahman Hekmatyar, Shamshatu, 11
June 2014; Haji Islamuddin, Hayatabad, 14 June 2014; Qazi Abdul Hai Faqeri, Kabul,
30 January 2019.
11. Baheer was eventually released from US custody in 2008. His detention in the Salt Pit
is described in Scott-Clark, Kathy, and Adrian Levy, The Exile, London: Bloomsbury,
2017, pp. 176–8.
12. CIA Inspector General report of investigation: ‘Death of a Detainee’, 27 April
2005. For a redacted version of the report see https://www.cia.gov/library/
readingroom/document/6541713, last accessed 27 May 2019. Siems, Larry, ‘Inside
the CIA’s Black Site Torture Room’, The Guardian, 9 October 2017, https://www.
theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/oct/09/cia-torture-black-site-
enhanced-interrogation, last accessed 27 May 2019.
13. Haji Khan Jan was killed in a suicide attack on 27 February 2016. Hekmatyar blamed
the Taliban for his death.
14. Author interview with Haji Nurrahman, Shaygal, 14 January 2017.
15. ‘A Timeline of US Troops Levels in Afghanistan Since 2001’, Associated Press, 6 July
2016.
16. Author interviews with Jan Baz Sarfaraz, Kabul, 27 May 2013 and 17 June 2013.
Copy of visa seen by authors.
17. Author interview with Waheedullah Sabawoon, Kabul, 12 May 2014.

471
 NOTES pp. [427–431]

18. For Chaman see JTF GTMO Detainee Assessment, 20300807. Author interview
with Qalam, Kabul, 3 September 2013.
19. Regina v Faryadi Sarwar Zardad, No: 200505339/D3, 7 February 2007.
20. The details about Shahadat are from an author interview with Mohammed Sarwar
Qayam, Kabul, 29 April 2017. The quote from the night letter is from an Associated
Press photo caption, 25 April 2003.
21. Author interview with Habib-ur-Rahman Hekmatyar, Peshawar, 18 February
2014.
22. Toran Amanullah was also sheltering an Arab fighter who was married to a woman
from Nuristan. In return for his help, the Arab supplied him with weapons (author
interview with Toran Amanullah, Shamshatu, 19 February 2014). He was later
released from Bagram and returned to Pakistan, where he lived in poverty in
Shamshatu. He died from cancer in January 2015. The information about Abu Ikhlas
al-Masri is taken from conversations with Hizb fighters in Shaygal.
23. Haji Islamuddin later took charge of the military committee and increased the
payments. The scheme was eventually scrapped, however, when it became clear
that some fighters were making up reports of attacks just to earn some money.
(Author interviews with Toran Amanullah’s brother, Azizuddin Zomar, Shamshatu,
19 February 2014; Haji Amanullah, Shaygal, 4 November 2017; Haji Sultan Sayed,
Hadwal valley, 12 January 2017).
24. The intermediary was Abdul Hanan Waheed. Author interview with Waheed, Kabul,
11 November 2012. In the interview, Waheed claimed not to have seen Hekmatyar
since 1996. However, Haji Nurrahman said Waheed was with Hekmatyar in Bajaur as
the Hizb leader prepared to cross into Kunar in February 2002.
25. Author interviews with Sayed Rahman Wahidyar, Kabul, 3 October 2013; Jan Baz
Sarfaraz, Kabul, 24 May 2014; Engineer Tareq, Shamshatu, 12 June 2014.
26. ‘Suicide Attacks in Afghanistan (2001-2007)’, UNAMA, 1 September 2007, p. 10.
Later in the war, one of Professor Ghulam Mohammed Niazi’s grandsons carried out
a suicide bombing in Maidan Wardak on behalf of the Taliban. Named Abdullah, he
was nineteen years old. Several of Professor Niazi’s other relatives also fought against
US troops. His great nephew Sayed-ur-Rahman was killed in a drone strike in Andar,
Ghazni. He was eighteen years old (author interview with Mustafa Niazi, Kabul, 23
May 2016).
27. ‘Afghan Rebel’s Pledge to  Al-Qaeda’, BBC News, 4 May 2006. A source in Hekmatyar’s
inner circle confirmed that the Hizb leader stayed in touch with Zarqawi until the
Jordanian was killed in a US air strike on 7 June 2006 near Baqubah in Iraq. The
source wished to remain anonymous.
28. The target of the raid was Haji Ghafoor. A Hizb commander from Nuristan, he was
with Mohammed Amin Weqad and Kashmir Khan when they rallied worshippers
in a local mosque soon after the 1979 Soviet invasion. Weiss, Mitch, and Kevin
Maurer, No Way Out, New York: Berkley Caliber, 2012. The entire book is the story
of the mission.
29. Gall, Carlotta, ‘Insurgent Faction Presents Afghan Peace Plan’, The NewYork Times, 23
March 2010. Livingston, Ian S., and Michael O’Hanlon, Afghanistan Index, Brookings,
29 September 2017.
30. Author interview with Qazi Abdul Hai Faqeri, Kabul, 30 January 2019.

472
pp. [432] Notes

31. Johnson, Thomas H., Taliban Narratives, London: Hurst, 2017, p. 198. Mashal, Mujib,
‘Hekmatyar’s Never-Ending Afghan War’, aljazeera.com, 28 June 2012. Hekmatyar,
Gulbuddin, The Real Faith, Peshawar: Mishaq-e Issar, 2012/2013, p. 45.
32. Author interview with Haji Nurrahman, Shaygal, 14 January 2017.
33. Ustad Abdul Saboor Farid, Hizb’s prime minister during the mujahideen government,
was shot dead in Kabul on 2 May 2007.
34. According to high-level sources in Hizb, Fatima volunteered for the attack in
Shamshatu. The deputy head of Hizb’s military committee at the time, Toran Salaam,
rejected the idea and asked her to marry him instead. She made several more
attempts to get his approval for the mission, but each time he pressured her to marry
him. Eventually she complained to the party leadership about his conduct. Senior
Hizbis were furious and dismissed Salaam from his job; Fatima was then allowed to
go through with the attack.

473
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank everyone we interviewed for this book,

regardless of their political affiliation. Some of them have since died of
natural causes, others from the violence that still plagues Afghanistan.
We are grateful to them all for sharing their histories. Particular thanks
must go to Qazi Abdul Hai Faqeri, Jan Baz Sarfaraz, Sayed Rahman
Wahidyar, Kashmir Khan, General Muzaferuddin, Mawlawi Storay,
Qazi Mahmoud ul-Hassan Jahid, Qazi Mohammed Hakim Hakim,
Haji Atiqulah Safi, Mohammed Amin Karim, Qazi Nazir and Sulaiman
Layeq. Several people put themselves in danger to help us. For their
courage, we thank Haji Sayed Hassan Abed, Engineer Sardar Wali, Shir
Agha Hewad, Fazelullah Qazizai, Fazelrab Qazizai, Wasi Baheer, Nabi
Khan, Esmat Amanzai, Khairullah Shinwari and Abdul Qahar Hotak.
Afghans are well known for their hospitality but the people of Shaygal
have been extraordinarily kind to us over the years. We hope this book
goes some way towards repaying their generosity. A project of this scale
is a team effort and we are indebted to friends and colleagues who have
helped us along the way. Phil Sands has been a great editor and brother.
Wendy Kristianasen and Jonathan Lessware have always believed in our
journalism. Emma Findlen LeBlanc, Patricia Gossman and HodanYusuf
offered useful advice and much needed encouragement. Rajeshree
Sisodia’s faith never wavered. Thank you to Mohammed Alzuabi and
Suadad al-Salhy for their Arabic translations, and Suha Ma’ayeh for her
475
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

work in Jordan. Nancy Hatch Dupree and Irene Jones passed away
before this book was finished but they were both sources of inspiration
until the very last word. Finally, thanks to our families. We love you.

476
 FURTHER READING

Alexievich, Svetlana, Zinky Boys, New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1992.
Armstrong, Karen, Muhammad, London: Harper Perennial, 2007.
Bergen, Peter, The Osama bin Laden I Know, New York: Free Press, 2006.
Braithwaite, Rodric, Afgantsy, London: Profile Books, 2011.
Burke, Jason, Al-Qaeda, London: Penguin Books, 2004.
Calvert, John, Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism, London: Hurst,
2010.
Coll, Steve, GhostWars, London: Penguin Books, 2004.
Coll, Steve, The Bin Ladens, London: Penguin Books, 2009.
Crile, George, Charlie Wilson’s War, London: Atlantic Books, 2007.
Dean, Aimen, Nine Lives, London: Oneworld, 2018.
Eaton, Charles Le Gai, The Book of Hadith, Bristol: The Book Foundation,
2008.
Edwards, David.B, Before the Taliban, London: University of California Press,
2002.
Kepel, Gilles, and Jean-Pierre Milelli, Al-Qaeda in its Own Words, Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2009.
Nasiri, Omar, Inside the Jihad, New York: Basic Books, 2006.
Packer, George, Our Man, London: Penguin Random House, 2019.
Rashid, Ahmed, Taliban, London: I.B. Tauris, 2001.
Rubin, Barnett, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 2002.
Tomsen, Peter, TheWars of Afghanistan, New York: PublicAffairs, 2011.

477
 FURTHER READING

Warrick, Joby, Black Flags, London: Penguin Random House, 2015.

Wright, Lawrence, The Looming Tower, London: Penguin Books, 2007.
The Qur’an.

478
 INDEX
Note: Page numbers followed by “n”
refer to notes.
Abdul Ghani, Khalifa Mullah,
(father of Layeq), 40, 44, 51, 124
Abdullah (Amin’s older brother),
168
Abedi, Mohammed Daoud, 469n1
Abu Abdullah. See bin Laden, Osama
Abu Dhabi, 203
Abu Hanifa madrassa (Paghman),
19, 21, 131
Abubakr, Haji, 128, 130, 142, 163,
218, 226, 309, 369, 395
against Massoud, 129
Army of Sacrifice, 226, 241, 264,
296, 301, 369
training course, 226
Afghan government
aircraft bomb (Derai), 126
Hekmatyar’s army, fear for, 169
Afghan madrassas, 164
Afghan policy group, 282
Afghan refugees (Pakistan), 187
479
Afghan royals, 19
Afghanistan Liberation
Organisation, 228
Afghanistan, a battleground in the
Cold War, 62
Afghanistan, new flag, 178
Afghanistan’s communists, 61
Afghanistan’s first Islamist party,
75–6
Afshar campaign, 327, 328, 462n20
Agha, Sayed Abdul Rahman,
436–7n11, 459n8
agrarian reforms, 132
AGSA intelligence service, 141,
152, 446n29
torture techniques, 141–2
Ahl al-Hall wa’l-Aqd, 326, 328
Ahmad, Faiz, 228
Ahmad, Qazi Hussain, 78, 83, 281,
331, 368, 440n17
Ahmad, Sayed, 438–9n33
Ahmadzai Jihadi Council, 316, 348,
351, 374
Ahmadzai tribe, 316
 INDEX
Ahmadzai, Ahmad Shah, 53,
438n17, 438–9n33
air assault battalion, 159
air strike, Kandahar (2001), 411
airport (Bagram), 29
AK-74s, 187
Akbar Khan, Wazir, 367
Akbari, Mohammed, 459n8
Akhtar Mohammed, 142
AKS-74U Krinkov short assault
rifle, 226
Al amr bil ma’ruf wa nahy an al-
munkar, 322
Al-Jihad (magazine), 251, 260, 280
al- Zawahiri, Ayman, 260, 335, 336,
345, 368, 370, 392, 405, 425
Al’a Jirga, 151
Alaeddin Boroujerdi, 331
al-Afghani, Sayyid Jamaluddin, 165
Al-Azhar University (Cairo), 21–2,
24, 202
Al-Azhar University (Egypt), 58, 75
al-Banna, Hassan, 22–3, 43, 51, 164
meeting with Mojaddedi, 58
al-Bashir, Omar, 243, 371
al-Bukhari, Mohammed ibn Ismail,
25
al-Fatih, Mohammed, tomb of, 214
al-Hakaymah, Mohammed Khalil,
409–10
Ali, Hazrat, 405, 407
Aliabad Hospital (Kabul), 53, 110
Al-Imam Mohammed Ibn Saud
Islamic University, 203
al-Khalayleh, Ahmed Fadil. See al-
Zarqawi, Abu Musab
All India Institute of Medical
Sciences, 54
Allahu Akbar, 231
al-Libi, Abu Laith, 422
al-Majid, Ali Hassan, 397
480
al-Masri, Abu Ikhlas, 428, 472n22
al-Masri, Abu Khabab, 339, 358
Al-Muhajir, Abu Abdullah, 338
Al-Qaeda, 140, 251, 359, 370, 418,
422
055 Brigade (Al-Qaeda), 393
established (1988), 258
foreign shores attack, first, 285,
286
Hizb and Al-Qaeda, 258, 259,
260
Taliban, influence over, 392
trained Support Group, 299
Al-Rasheed Hotel (Baghdad), 246,
247, 396
al-Rawi, Abdulsattar, 396
al-Sadr, Mohammed Baqir, 439n40
al-Sahhaf, Mohammed Saeed, 397
Al-Sobh (Morning), 208
Al-Suri, Abu Burhan, 260, 334
al-Suri, Abu Mus’ab, 262
al-Tilmisani, Umar, 188
al-Turabi, Hassan, 243, 244, 284,
337, 371
al-Utaybi, Juhayman, 171
al-Zarqawi, Abu Musab, 410–2,
429, 432, 470n17
Amanullah, Toran, 241, 264, 300,
304, 309, 375, 385, 386, 387,
388–9, 409, 411, 428, 441n22,
472n22
Hekmatyar and Amanullah,
146
rebellion, 146–7
Taliban stealing Amanullah
vehicle, 358, 365
Amer, Haji, 466n41
America, 18, 28, 63, 66, 239
Afghanistan, involvement in, 292
American embassies, 1998
bombings of, 409
 INDEX
arms supplies request, rejection
of, 28
Vietnam, defeat in, 179
Vietnam, involvement in, 123
American counterparts, 61
American embassy (Kabul), 133
American embassy (Tajikistan), 360
Amin, Hafizullah, 41, 62, 107,
115–9, 135, 167, 168–9, 171,
172, 174, 292
against Taraki, 167
end of regime, 176
head of the state, as, 168–9
Hekmatyar and Amin, 62, 167–8,
167–70
house arrest (1978), 115
illness, 172
Karmal and Amin, 119
patience snapped, 118
Revolution planning, 115–9
secret Marxist cells, 107
Andar (Ghazni), 30
Andarab valley (Baghlan), 104, 233
Andy Skrzypkowiak, 230, 233, 234
Anglo-Afghan war I (1839-1842),
28
Anglo-Afghan war II, 344
Anglo-French company (Suez
Canal), 24
Annan, Kofi, 401–2
Ansar al-Islam, 412
Antanov An-12 (cargo plane), 195
anti-aircraft gun, 151
anti-American statements
Habib-ur-Rahman and Nasratyar,
68
anti-communist rallies, 181
anti-communist resentment, 158
anti-Islamic element, 178
anti-Najib forces, 274
anti-US international terrorism, 282
Anwar, 450–1n20, 461n22
Anwar-ul-Haq Mujahid, 466–7n15,
468n17
April 1978 coup, 169
Arab extremists, 191
Arab mujahideen, 140
Arab nationalism, 245
Arab sheikh, 456n7
Arab training camps (Darunta),
380
Arafat,Yasser, 247, 284, 396
Hekmatyar and Arafat, 244
peace deal (Israel), 248
Arc de Triomphe, replica of, 19
armed diversion units, 158
Armed Islamic Group of Algeria
(GIA)
bombing campaign, 334
armed struggle, 63, 99
Armenia, 345
Army of Sacrifice, 369
Arnaout, Enaam, 345
Asadullah (nephew of Amin), 41,
168, 172, 173, 241, 279, 407,
420
Asial Khan, 457n17
Asmar, 155, 240
Asmar battle, 155–8
Asmar mutiny (1979), 169,
457n17
garrison’s fall, 156
Hizb captured communist
garrison, 277
military brigade, 155
Aspheron Hotel (Baku), 344
Atfaya (jail), 69
Attesh, Ghulam Rabbani, 436–
7n11, 438n20, 438–9n33
Ayoub, Engineer, 104
Azerbaijan and Armenia dispute,
341
481
 INDEX
Azerbaijan, 341–4, 363, 464n5
Azeri government, 346
Aziz Khan, 444n15
Azzam, Abdullah, 204, 205, 249,
257, 258, 262, 263, 452n4,
456n13
assassination of, 270
Hekmatyar and Azzam, 264, 265
Hizb admiration, 216
Massoud meeting (Takhar), 263
radicalization, role in, 216
Ba’ath parties, 25
Baba Jan, 302
Babri mosque (Uttar Pradesh), 336
bacha bazi, 353
Badakhshan, 74, 233
Badakhshi, Tahir, 435n1
Baghdad, 245
Baghlan, 19, 44, 52, 159, 177, 355,
385
Baheer, Ghairat, 246, 247, 248,
250, 274, 402, 404, 423, 424,
468n37, 469n3, 471n11
Islamabad, detention in, 424
Bajaur, 278
Baku, 345
Bala Hissar fort, 98, 317
Balkh, 148
ballot boxes, 278
Balochistan, 62, 344, 423
Bangladesh, 83
creation of, 62
Habib-ur-Rahman speech, 62–3
Barelvi, Sayyid Ahmad, 166
Barrington, Nicholas, 230, 330
Basir, Abdul (school friend of
Engineer Habib-ur-Rahman),
78–9, 84, 276, 441 n19
bay’ah, 244
Bazarak, 104
482
Bazargan, Mehdi, 439n40
BBC, 350, 373
Bearden, Milton, 224, 229–30, 237
Bedouin militia, 166
Beg, Mirza Aslam, 274
Beijing, 282
Belgian atrocities (Congo), 18
Belgrade, 164
Belmokhtar, Mokhtar, 335
Benevolence International
Foundation, 345
Bhutto, Benazir, 248
Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali, 106
Big Valley, 35
Bikhoda, Nizamuddin, 156
bin Laden, Osama, 217, 218, 244,
257, 258, 264, 269, 274, 285,
338, 345, 370–2, 379, 391–2,
403, 411, 419–20, 429, 466–
7n15, 469n7, 471n10
Ayman al-Zawahiri and bin
Laden, 416–8
camp, 405
escape of, 469n9
Hekmatyar and bin Laden,
370–1, 395, 397, 422
Jalalabad, 404
killed by US Special Forces
(2011), 432
Massoud and bin Laden, 398
open threatening of, 393
Spin-e Shiga, visit to, 218
statement, 374–5
Sudan, left to (1996), 371
US and bin Laden, 393
war against US, declaration of,
375
Zawahiri and bin Laden, 407–8,
416, 417, 420, 425
black Room, 141
Black Tulips, 195
 INDEX
blessed movement, 22
Blue Club (Ansari Square), 56
Blue Nile (river), 371
blueprint for ISIS, 409
Borjan, Mullah, 356, 361
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, 350
Brandt, Willy, 214
Brezhnev, Leonid, 171
Brigade 055 (Al-Qaeda), 393
Britain, 26, 28, 330
British Empire, 28
British redrew the border (1893),
91
Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 120, 178, 179
Bush, George H.W., 281, 391, 397,
401, 411, 414
buzkashi, 296
Buzorg, Mawlawi, 442n11
Byzantine Empires, 56
Cairo, 33, 191, 202, 207
California, 212
Carlos the Jackal, 284
carpet thieves, 323
Carter, Jimmy, 153, 154, 179
Caspian Sea, 345
ceasefire committee, 323
Central Committee of the
Communist Party, 106
central jail, new (1973), 137–40
Chaga Serai, 157
Chah Ab, 437n16
Chahar Asyab, 309, 332, 341,
350–1, 357, 360, 361, 362, 364,
365, 412
Chak, 264
Chakari, Mohammed Sediq, 355,
451n23, 457–8n18, 467n7
Chaman, 317
Chardahi, 88
Che Guevara, 18, 184
Chechnya, 374
Chihil Sutun, 318
China, 327
Chinar Road, 243
Chitral, 90
Chitrali, Abdul Rahim, 144, 182
Christopher, Warren, 359
CIA, 62, 115, 141, 170, 177, 179,
370, 395, 414, 469n1
arms shipping to mujahideen,
170
budget, 209
CIA’s first secret weapons
shipment (1980), 209
CIA-ISI raid, 423
permission, 223
plan, 153
primary objective, 180
cinemas, 30
city-wide protest, 181
civil war (Afghan), 342
civil war (Kapisa), 233
civil war (Hekmatyar and Massoud),
263
civil war, 234, 248, 364
clandestine meetings, 78
Clinton, Bill, 330, 391
Cobalt, 424
Coca-Cola, 56
Cold War, 18, 62, 74
Colonialism, 16, 166
Columbia University (US), 62
Communist Party (Soviet Union),
26, 39, 46, 52, 71, 106
aggressive modernization, 133
aims, 120
Amin’s strategy, 117
communiqué, 158
communist coup, 250
communist plot, 326
communists’ struggle, 110
483
 INDEX
coup against Daoud, 107
fighter jet attack, 151
founding meeting, 29–30
Hizbis meeting in Jamiat-ul-
Dawat-ul Islamia’s office, 250
jealousies and disappointments,
105–6
new regime formation, 119
policies, 131
political vision, 132
radical reform programme, 132
radical speeches, 49
regime, 149
Revolution planning, 115–9
seized power (1978), 220
troop against Kashmir Khan, 125
war machine, 126
Zarnigar Park’s speech, 49
communist regime, 266, 296
central committee, 305
regime abandoned Kunar (1988),
278
communist revolution (1978), 273
Coral Khartoum Hotel, 371
Corriere Della Sera, 350
courts and schools, 278
Cuba, 168
Czechoslovakia, 72
daisy cutter bomb, 406
Dangam, 421
Daoud Khan, Mohammed, 28–9,
71–3, 74, 75, 77, 79, 82, 83, 84,
86, 89, 101, 105–6, 108, 141,
442–3n18
bloodless coup, 72
coup, 80, 105
coup, second anniversary of, 86
death of, 119
demoted Niazi, 74
fascist, 120
fight for life, 119
484
first Republic declaration, 72
lost patience, 106
Moscow visit (June 1974), 106
Muslim Youth rebellion, 86
oppression, 84–5
radio station speech, 72
resignation, 29, 72
senior Parcham members
relationship, 73
vengeful security forces, 91
Daoud regime, 83–4, 90, 95, 96,
99, 100, 104, 115, 116, 146,
276, 443n26
early 1970s, 56
economic cooperation (Kabul
and Tehran), 343–4
free speech, decline of, 161
Hekmatyar plot against, 81, 141
MuslimYouth, reprisals against, 99
three mujahideen, arrest of, 96
dar al-harb, 57
Dara-e Hazara, 185
Dari (language), 20, 118
Darra Adem Khel, 84
Darulaman, 197
Dar-ul-Uloom Sarhad madrassa,
121
Darunta, 338, 348, 366, 370
Das Kapital, 36
Day, Doris, 30
Defence of Muslim Lands,The, 205
defensive jihad, 205
Deh Dana, 181
Deh Mazang square, 94, 96, 117,
139, 352
Deh Sabz, 196
Delawar, Asif, 302
Delhi, 54, 438n17
Dictatorship, 16
Dih Khwaja, 438–9n33
 INDEX
Dih Yak, 356
Do Bandi, 364
Don Ritter, 268
Doroud, 45
Dostum, Abdul Rashid, 296, 309
clandestine meetings, 347
Dostum and Massoud, 303, 309,
347
Dostum came to Kabul (1993),
347
Dostum’s gunmen, 385–6
Dostum’s Uzbek militia, 319,
322, 323, 329, 346–50
expectation of, 346
Hekmatyar’s alliance with
Dostum, 364
joined Taliban, 387
Najib and Dostum’s militia, 297
drought, 56
Dubs, Adolph, 153, 169
Durand Line, 28
education system (Kabul), 164
Egypt, 80
attack on Israel, 80
brotherhood, 23, 79
Ehsan, Mullah Ehsanullah, 365
Ehsanullah, Haji, 276, 459n21
Eid al-Adha, 415
election, 134
first parliamentary elections
(1965), 30
parliament (1969), 62
parliamentary campaign (1965),
159
parliamentary campaign (1969),
45
parliamentary elections, Algeria
(1991), 334
equipment buying, 154–5
Erbakan, Necmettin, 214
Erdog˘ an, Recep Tayyip, 214
Esh’aq, Mohammed, 449n20
Executioner, The, 108
Fahim, Mohammed Qasim, 459n8,
462n8, 462n9
Faisalabad, 419
Fanta, 56
Faqeri, Qazi Abdul Hai, 381, 396,
419, 422, 423
Faqir Mohammed Faqir, 115–9,
135–6, 140, 168, 172, 173, 292
arrest of, 173–4
Pul-e Charkhi report, 140
Revolution planning, 115–9
Tapa-e Taj Beg meeting, 172–4
Taraki and Faqir (since 1960),
135
fard al-ayn, 204
Fared, Haji Naqib Mohammed, 367,
442n11
Farid, Ustad Abdul Saboor, 314,
321, 331, 347, 366, 395,
458–9n7, 466–7n15, 473n33
Faryab province, 38, 54
fascism, 23
Fatima, 473n34
fatwa, 204, 205, 392, 471n5
FBI, 469n1
feudalism, 41
Firdous, 130
FIS. See Islamic Salvation Front
(FIS)
fitna, 277
flames of Islamism, 261
foreign policy, 375
Fornication, 23
France, 334
Frankfurt, 208
Franks, Tommy, 406
Free Officers coup (1952), 23–4, 79
485
 INDEX

Free Officers movement, 22, 23, Gorbachev, Mikhail, 222, 289

64, 79 Gorky, Maxim, 36
Frontier Corps, 83 Goro, 96
Goshta, 146, 181
Gaddafi, 249–50 Grand Mosque, Mecca, 171
Gahiz (newspaper), 60, 67, 183, Great Game,The, 375
201, 438–9n33 Greece, 179
Gahiz, Minhajuddin, 60–7, 161, Guantanamo Bay (Cuba), 427,
438–9n33 470n20
gunned down (1972), 61 guerrilla war, 92, 107, 124, 154,
Gamal Abdel Nasser, 17, 22 194, 249, 254, 334, 380
death (1970), 80 campaign, 77, 121, 129, 152
game of offer and counter-offer, religious nature of, 158
365–9 tactics, 258
Gandhi, Mahatma, 84 training courses, Sarfaraz, 203
Ganja, 344 training, 83–4
Gates, Robert, 234 Gul Baz, Haji, (father of Jan
Gaza, 36 Mohammed), 102
General Intelligence Directorate, Gul Mohammed, 436–7n11
204 Gul Rahman, 423, 424, 471n10
Geneva accords, 237 Gul, Amani, 447n20
Gereshk, 355 Gul, Awal, 404–5, 407, 414,
Germany, 198 470n20
Ghaffar, Engineer, 224, 344 Gulbahar Colony, 104
Ghaffar, Modir, 224, 354–5 Gulf War, 283, 285
Ghafoor, Haji, 448–9n1, 472n28
Ghaith, Sulaiman Abu, 418, 421–2 Habibia High School (Kabul), 19
Ghani, Ashraf, 433 Habib-ur-Rahman (Mawlawi Sahib),
Gharzai, 110 (son of Layeq) 81–2, 84, 88, 94, 99, 252,
Ghaus, Mullah Mohammed, 356 436–7n11, 438n20, 440n17
Ghazni, 22, 51, 74, 141, 238, 356, execution of, 99
362 Laghman rebellion, 88
Ghilzai tribe, 40, 167 studies, 81, 84
Ghorband, 265 Habib-ur-Rahman, Engineer, 34–5,
Ghori, Abdul Qadir Imami, 460n15 38, 46, 48, 68–9, 75–7, 78,
GIA. See Armed Islamic Group of 79, 83, 88, 93, 104, 123, 124,
Algeria (GIA) 135, 144, 209, 216, 436n4,
Giro, 133 436–7n11, 438n20, 440n17,
Golan Heights, 36 440–1n18, 461n22
gold mine (Takhar), 36 Abul-A’la Maududi secret
golden Qur’an, 119 meeting (Lahore), 83, 97
486
 INDEX
arrest, 68–9, 79–80, 167
death sentence, 85
early life of, 34–7, 85, 97
executive council election, 55
meeting with Maududi (Lahore),
78
Zarnigar Park’s speech, 48,
62–3
Hachani, Abdelkader, 334
Hadith, 24, 25, 55, 200, 246
Hafiz, 96, 99, 102
hajj pilgrimage, 204
Hamas, rise of, 248
Hamas’s formation, 249
Hamid, Mustafa, 466–7n15, 469n7
Hamza, 419, 425
Hanafi school of jurisprudence,
138
Hanani, Abdul Habib, 436–7n11
Hanif, 201
Hanifa, Imam Abu, 138
Haq, Abdul, 470n18
Haqqani, Jalaluddin, 98, 101, 103,
121, 128, 163, 183, 203, 281,
318, 331, 444n13, 444n15
Harakat-e Inqilab Islami, 134
Harakat-e Islami-yi Afghanistan, 309,
327
Haram, 56
Hashimi, Abdul Salaam (Engineer),
189, 190, 299, 313, 314
Hayatabad, 388
Hazara-e Baghal, 380
Hazaras, 26, 147, 324
Hedayat, Qazi, 100, 101, 442–3n18
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,
43–4
Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, 14, 31, 46,
58–9, 61, 63, 84, 90, 95, 101,
102–3, 108, 110, 121, 123, 124,
130, 152, 154, 161–5, 176, 190,
191, 194, 195, 206, 207, 215,
226, 234, 239, 242, 246, 248,
252, 268, 275, 306, 310, 314,
331, 335, 363, 386–9, 418 –20,
423, 430, 436–7n11, 438n20,
442n11, 450–1n20, 451n27,
451–2n38, 452n4, 453n32,
453n37, 460n15, 461n22, 466–
7n15, 469n1, 470n22, 471n5,
471n13, 472n24
1990 coup attempt, 315
Abuybakr and Hekmatyar, 369
Afghan Shia allies, 343
Afghanistan, hopes of ruling, 352
Algerian followers in training
camps, 338
alliance with Dostum, 364
Amanullah and Hekmatyar, 146
America, visit to, 211
Amin and Hekmatyar, 167–8,
448n13
Amin’s government, negotiations
with, 170
anti-Americanism, 404–5
Arafat and Hekmatyar, 244
arrested and taken to KhAD’s,
221–2
assassination attempt on, 259
Azzam and Hekmatyar, 264, 265,
451n23
Baghdad, trip to, 468n37
BBC journalists interview, 350–1
Bearden meeting, 229–30
bin Laden and Hekmatyar,
370–1, 395, 397, 422
bomb-making classes, 422
cabinet meeting, 333
Chahar Asyab (1993) meeting,
348
clandestine trips to Kabul, 85
country’s president, as the, 79
487
 INDEX
decamped to Surobi, 366
dispute with Rabbani, 98
dominance of party, 135
donated funds, misappropriation
of, 134
early life, 40–3
Edmund McWilliams and
Hekmatyar, 282
executive council election, 55
fanaticism, 211
fundamentalism, 143–4
game of offer and counter-offer,
365–9
Gardez, trip to, 56–7
Germany tour, 213
global ambitions, 179
Gul, urgent message for, 405
Hayatabad rally address, 271
Hekmatyar-Massoud
reconciliation, 269, 270
Howe and Hekmatyar, 253
international drugs trade, 235
international jihad, dream of an,
372
Iran travel, 343
jail life, 69
Jalalabad with Nasratyar, 65
Javadov, Azerbaijan project,
342
Javadov, sword gift (1993), 341
Jihad University address, 283
Kabul trips, 85
Kabul, fled to, 80 –1
Kalakani and Hekmatyar, 166–7
Kunar meeting, 170
letter to General Muzaferuddin,
155
liaison to, 216
marital life, 143–4
Massoud and Hekmatyar, 145,
380
488
Mawlawi Sahib, first meeting
with, 81–2
military and propaganda
operations, 196
Minhajuddin and Hekmatyar, 60
Mojaddedi and Hekmatyar,
157–8
Najib and Hekmatyar, 220
Nasratyar and Hekmatyar, 43, 51
new cabinet, 374
new competition, 183
Nurrahman and Hekmatyar,
414–6
Omar, perfunctory trial, 69
Peshawar speech, 99–100
Peshawar, hid out in, 91, 414
police detention, 57
press conference (1989), 261
press conference (Munich
mosque), 213
puritanical lectures, 65–6
Rabbani and Hekmatyar, 75, 100,
205
Rabbani’s underground hideout,
381
radical project, 244
released from prison, 76–7
responsibility for the
insurrection, 92–3
role in 9/11, 403
Saddam meeting, 397
Scud missiles capture, 351–2
Sokhandan’s murder, prime
suspect 68
Specially Designated Global
Terrorist, 427
struggle between good and evil,
143
surprise, 82
Tanai and Hekmatyar, 274
Tarun and Hekmatyar, 168
 INDEX
Tehran, 394
triumphant speech, 308
visitors in jail, 69
Zardad and Hekmatyar, 348–9,
351–2
Zarnigar Park, 48
Zarqawi and Hekmatyar, 410–1,
412
Hekmatyar, Habib-ur-Rahman,
467n18
Hellfire missile, 420
Helmand province, 354, 361
Hemat, Bashir, 447n7
Hemat, Mohammed Qasim, 208
Hemingway, Ernest, 20
Herat uprising (March 1979),
144–5
Herat, 144
heroin, 235
Hezbollah, 284
hijrah, 130
Hilal, Hilaluddin, 459n9
Hillier, Rick, 429
Hindu Kush, 385
Hindus, 26
hired judges, 231
Hizb. See Hizb-e Islami (1976)
Hizb-e Islami (1976), 14, 37, 42–3,
83, 94, 95, 97, 100–1, 106,
110, 121, 122, 127, 130, 137,
140, 145, 152, 155–8, 161, 175,
176, 189, 240, 241, 251, 271,
305, 322, 322, 444n15, 461n22,
469n7, 473n34
administration, 242
against Massoud’s troops, 277
Al-Qaeda and Hizb, 218, 343,
425
army expansion, 198
Asmar battle, 155–8
Azerbaijan project, 342
Azerbaijan, involvement in, 346
bin Laden, aligned with, 219
brink of war, within, 101
captured communist garrison
Asmar, 277
Chahar Asyab 350
communists meet (Libya), 249
creation of, 326
critics of Hizb murders, 226–9
disciplined organisational
structure, 200
district centre attack (Goshta),
146
dramatic start to war (Paktika
and Kunar), 127
establish a media wing, 164
fighters, 189
first leader (1976), 201
first operation against Taraki
regime, 121
foreign jihadists, camp for, 206–7
founding meeting (June 1976),
277
geographical zones separation,
147
Ghazni rebellion, 133
green flag, 181
guerrilla army, 135
guerrilla war, 107–8
guerrillas, 241
hit-and-run attacks (Russian
troops), 197
Hizb leadership fled Chahar
Asyab (1995), 359
Hizb leadership, 176, 333
Hizb manifesto, 242
Hizb paid mujahideen
(Azerbaijan), 345
Hizb’s war, 213
Hizb-controlled camp at
Darunta, 339
489
 INDEX
influence on anti-government
unrest, 144
internal protocols, 275
international project, 243
internationalist agenda, 245
Islamic Renaissance Party, 335
Jamiat and Hizb, 269, 307
Jamil-ur-Rahman and Hizb, 278
Jan Mohammed arrest, 124
Jihadwal camp, 335
Kabul, attacks on, 322
logistical improvements, 199
logo, 162–3
military training course, 145
mobile radio station, Payam-e
Azadi (Message of Freedom),
318
Mother Party, as a, 215, 261
new headquarters (Chahar
Asyab), 315, 386
new umbrella organization,
formation of, 134
newspaper publishing, 163
night letter, 272, 349, 372–3
open Schools, 164–5
operational command centre,
299
Panjshir, fled to, 184
party formation, 94
presidential palace, seizing the,
308
printing press, 386
radio station (Kunar), 155
rocket attacks, 330
Russia and Hizb, 223
Sikh extremists ‘terrorist
campaign’, 337
student movement to guerrilla
army, 140
thirst for revenge, 152
township, creation of, 190
490
training (young Hizbis),
130–1
training camps, 216
twin-track approach, 169
US arms supplies, 153–4, 198
Hizb-eWahdat-e Islami Afghanistan,
294, 324, 328, 346, 367
Northern Alliance’s counter-
attack, 309
Wahdat and Massoud, links
between, 295
Hizb-ul Mujahideen, 261
Hizb-Wahdat alliance, 327
Ho Chi Minh, 184
holy war, 158
Hoover Dam (Kabul), 28
Hopkirk, Peter, 375
Howe, Geoffrey, 253
Hudson, Rock, 30
Hussein, Mohammed, 277
Hussein, Saddam, 396, 411, 423
ibn Abd al-Aziz, Umar, 217
Ibn Abdullah, Mohammed Ahmad,
166
Ibn Haran, Lut, 237
Ibn Sina High School, 123
Ibrahim (son of Azzam), 270
Ibrahim, Anwar, 244
iconic moment of defiance, 181
Ikhwan, Bashir, 411
Ikhwanis, 49, 75, 136, 220, 246,
446n29
Imam Sahib uprising, 180
Imam Sahib, 40, 57
In the Shade of the Qur’an (Sayyid
Qutb), 65
India, 53, 62, 72, 158, 179, 189,
261, 327
nuclear weapons test (18 May
1974), 83
 INDEX
infidel 40th Army, 171, 176, 187,
193, 194, 222, 232, 235, 236,
238, 372
military operations against, 236
insurrection (1975), 87–8, 108,
123
Intercontinental Hotel (Khyber),
102, 188
Intercontinental Hotel, 56, 172,
328, 367, 373
international arms trading, 154
International Crimes Unit, 446n29
International Islamic University, 205
International politics, 18
International Workers’ Day (1 May),
65
Iran and Iraq conflict (1980–1988),
343
Iran, 158, 331, 470n17
Iranian-backed movement, 295
Iraq, 408, 410, 411–2
Kuwait invasion, 283
Iraqi artillery, 284
Iraqi regime, 339
Isha, 39
ISI intelligence agency, 179, 211,
225
ISIS, 166, 395, 413 423, 432
formation, of, 166
operations in West, 338
Islam, 25, 38, 62–3, 80, 166, 257
Islamabad attack (1995), 370
Islamabad, 29, 78, 189, 205, 253,
331
secret meeting, 248
Islambouli, Khalid, 191, 207
Islambouli, Mohammed Shawqi,
207
Islamia College (Peshawar), 425
Islamic army, 323, 326
Islamic caliphates, 22
Islamic change, 37
Islamic conference (Moscow), 74
Islamic conquest (Constantinople),
214
Islamic faith, 17
Islamic fashion, 312
Islamic history, 24
Islamic interim government
(Kabul), 291
Islamic Movement of Afghanistan.
See Harakat-e Islami-yi Afghanistan
Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan,
393
Islamic revolution (1979), 439n40
Islamic Revolutionary Movement.
See Harakat-e Inqilab Islami
Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), 334
Islamic schools, 225
Islamic state, 63, 338
Islamic students’ union, 208
Islamic Union for the Freedom of
Afghanistan. See Ittehad-e Islami
Baraye Azadi-ye Afghanistan
Islamic Unity Party of Afghanistan.
See Hizb-eWahdat-e Islami
Afghanistan
Islamists, 26, 46
Islamist extremism, 84
Islamist group (1969), 44
Islamists and the communists,
gang warfare (early 1970s), 50
new breed of, 57–8
Islamophobia, 159
Islamuddin, Haji, 259, 264, 299,
364, 375, 396, 472n23
Support Group, 265
Israel, 245
Arab and Israel wars, 202
creation of (14 May 1948), 22,
244
Egypt and Syria attack, 80
491
 INDEX

Egypt attack (October 1956), 24 Jamal, Sayed, 268

foreign intelligence agency—the Jamiat. See Jamiat-e Islami
SAVAK, 141 Jamiat-ul-Dawat-ul Islamia, 250
Israel and West, 24 Jamil, Abdul, 149
Lebanon, invasion of (1982), 244 Jamil, Haji, 469n3
plane hijack, 36 Jamil-ur-Rahman, 96, 103, 155,
Itlahat, 229 277, 278, 279, 280, 444n13,
Ittehad fighters, 328 448–9n1
Ittehad-e Islami Baraye Azadi-ye Jamrud, 274
Afghanistan, 188, 189, 323, Jamshid, 154
466–7n15 Jan Mohammed, 96–7, 99, 100,
104, 105, 107, 442n11
Jabal-e Saraj, 265, 298, 381, arrest, 102, 105
383–4 case of, 121, 145
Jabha-ye Nejat-e Mili, 134, 157 confession, 98
Jack London, 20 death (1977), 99, 101–2
Jadi Maiwand, 181 spying case, 134
Jahid, Qazi Mahmoud ul-Hassan taped confession, 103
467n4 Jan, Haji Khan, 421, 425, 471n5,
Jahiliyah, 64 471n13
Jalalabad, 129, 251, 344, 363–4, Jani Khel (Paktia), 170
464n9 Jarir, Humayoun, 327, 343, 347,
airport, 224 381
battle for 257, 300 Javadov, Rovshan, 341–2, 346
bin Laden, Osama, 404 sword gift (1993), 341
Hekmatyar and Nasratyar, 65 Jawid, Sayed Mohammed Ali,
mutiny, 146 467n9
operation, 252 Jehangir, Haji (father of Abubakr),
siege of, 258 129, 142
Jalil, Mirwais, 350 Jehanzeb, 445n20
Jama’at al-Da’wa ila al-Qur’an wal- Jerian-e Democratic-e Khalq, 16
Sunnah, 278 Jerusalem, 164
Jamaat al-Ikhwan al Muslimin. See Jews, 26, 329
Muslim Brotherhood Jhelum, 198
Jamaat-e Islami, 64, 75–6, 78, 83, Jihad University, 198, 225
95, 145, 189, 199, 216, 326 Jihad, 63, 90, 108, 121, 127, 163,
formation of, 75 167, 225, 452n4
Hizb and Jamiat, 269, 307 Jihadwal, Asadullah, 261
leadership, 184 Jinn, 329
youth section, 76 John F. Kennedy International
Jamal Mina, 77 Airport, 292
492
 INDEX
Join The Caravan, 217
Jordan, 470n17
Juma Khail, 35
Jumu’ah prayer, 122, 175
Kaaba, 284
Kabir Akhtari, 208
Kabul (1960s), 26–8, 31
Kabul airport, 297, 312
Kabul hotel, 153
Kabul municipality, 115
Kabul New Times, 178, 197
Kabul police academy, 109
Kabul Polytechnic, 37, 47, 55, 57,
97, 186, 189
Kabul River, 301
Kabul Times, The, 85, 89, 99, 137
Panjshir rebel article, 89–90
Kabul University (1946), 20, 21,
25, 33–4, 43, 47, 52, 53, 75, 81,
196, 446n29
divergent beliefs (Layeq and
Niazi), 34
Maoists and Muslim Youth, clash
between, 68–9
Muslim Youth’s influence, 52
Sharia faculty, 33–4
strike in, 31
Kabul, 18, 33, 36, 43, 61, 62, 66,
76, 96, 102, 108, 109, 119, 123,
158, 159, 164, 166, 171, 236,
311, 312, 318, 329
19th and 20th century, 28–31
abuses in, 141–2
cinemas, 30
development projects, 29
early 1970s, 56
growing cosmopolitanism, 30
house’s infrastructure, 27
in 1960s 26–8, 31
Kabul street, attacks on, 57
Kalakani, Habibullah, 166, 265
Kalashnikov assault rifles, 125, 126,
129, 150, 152, 185, 276, 307,
317
Kashmir Khan, prize possession
of, 129
Kamdesh, Nuristan, 126
Kandahar airport, 29, 66
Kandahar, 26, 60, 353, 369, 379, 390
airport, 29, 66
Muslim Youth’s infiltration, 60
Taliban control over, 354
Kapisa province, 34–5, 90, 225,
233, 236
Karachi, 102
Karim, Mohammed Amin, 69, 208,
456n13
Karmal, Babrak, 15–6, 30, 31, 39,
45, 49, 61, 105, 106–7, 109,
110, 111, 119, 136, 159, 171,
176, 196, 219, 222, 292, 435n1
Hizb, main threat, 196
Karmal and Amin, 119
Karmal regime, 219
newspaper report, 178
parliamentary elections (1965),
30–1
presidential guard, employment
of, 196
press conference (1980), 177–8
propaganda campaign against
Hekmatyar’s men, 197
radio address, 176
regime’s amnesty, 177
Kart-e Char, 13, 106
Kart-e Parwan, 13, 16, 71, 79, 86,
110, 117, 361, 375
Kart-e Se, 331
Karyab, Abdul Qadeer, 154–5, 246,
250, 251, 323, 429, 461n2
Karzai, Hamid, 42, 412
493
 INDEX
Kashmir Khan, 124, 152, 155,
156, 157, 158, 162, 163, 175,
240, 277, 299, 315, 318, 358,
366, 374, 380, 386, 389–90,
395, 414, 417, 418, 420, 421,
425, 442n11, 444n18, 448–9n1,
470n24, 472n28
AK-47 Kalashnikov, capture, 126
Bikhoda’s corpse, 156
communist troops raid, 125–6
early life of, 122–3
insurrection (1975), role of, 123
letter from Zawahiri, 432
to Peshawar, 423, 428
to Shaygal (2002), 413
Zarnigar Park, rally, 123
Kashmir, 374
Katyusha rockets, 323
Keshtmand, Sultan Ali, 45
KGB, 119, 132, 158, 159, 197, 270,
272
KhAD intelligence service, 221, 255
Khair Khana, 51, 181, 329
Khalid, Abu, 245
Najib and Hekmatyar, peace deal,
245
Khalifa Sahib, 40
Khalilzad, Zalmay, 212
Khalis,Yunis, 183, 188
Khalq, 39, 61, 62, 73, 107, 131,
135
Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, 120
Khan Abdul Wali Khan, 84, 312
Khan, Adam, 88, 93, 105
death of, 182
ill-tempered extremism, 183
Khan, Asail, 157, 169
Khan, Aziz, 121
Khan, Hassan, 348
Khan, Massoum, 445n19
Khans, 18, 19, 146, 148, 296
494
Khartoum delegation, 466–7n15
Khartoum, 166, 371
Khatami, Mohammed, 414
Khawak Pass, 187
Khil, Hassan, 194
Khmer Rouge (Cambodia), 177
Khodaidad, 462n8, 464n9, 466n42
Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah, 158,
343
Islamic Revolution, 161
Khomeini’s tomb, 343
Khost, 281
Khuddam ul-Furqan movement, 59,
90, 391
Khurram hostage, 107
Khurram, Ali Ahmad, 107
Khushal Khan Baba High School,
97
Khwarr, 420
Khyber, Mir Akbar, 45, 177,
443n40, 460n7
gun fired, 109–10
married Layeq sister, 108
minister of interior, 119
rise of, 108
coffin, 110Kilara massacre, 156
Kimya (mother of Hekmatyar),
40
Kohi Safi, 196
Kohistan, 88
Kremlin, 119, 158, 159, 255, 289,
290, 291
Kryuchkov, Vladimir, 235
Kunar fighters, 99
Kunar River, 157
Kunar, 88, 122, 123, 124, 156, 195,
241, 277, 418, 448n13
Hizb, control of, 282
meeting, 169
radio station, 155
Kunduz, 40, 41, 57, 142, 443n34
 INDEX
Kurram agency, 172, 206
L1A1 Self-Loading Rifle, 181
La Hussein valley, 155
Laghman province, 81, 88, 185
Lahore, 163
Lal Pur, 181
land and air offensive (1985), 195
land mines, 130
Lashkar-e Issar. See Army of Sacrifice,
226
Latif, Dr 107
Latif, Abdul, 452n18
Layeq, Sulaiman, 13–6, 19, 21, 30,
39, 42, 44, 45, 49, 50, 51, 58,
61, 71, 106–7, 110–1, 117–9,
131, 136–7, 159, 176, 177, 178,
197, 221, 236, 246, 273, 292,
293, 312, 385, 429, 443n34
Abu Hanifa madrassa school visit,
131
arrest of, 117
broadcasting coup news
responsibility, 118
early life of, 19–21
his twenty-six comrades, 16
imprisonment (Pul-e Charkhi),
138, 220
intelligent than Faqir, 136
jailed in Pul-e Charkhi, 138
joined Taraki (1978), 445n21
mill opened (Baghlan), 61
minister of radio and television,
119
nephew’s assault, 52
night letter, 40, 44, 177
Parcham editor, 44–5
parliamentary elections (1965),
30
students address, 131
Zarnigar Park, 48
Lee Enfield rifles (303), 179, 209
Lenin statue, 291
Lenin, 65
liberals, 49
Libyan embassy, 249
Lion of Panjshir, 275
Lion’s Den, 218, 219
Logar mission, 218
Logar province, 109, 127, 163, 264,
274
Logar, Abubakr, 129
Long Live Islam, 149
Los Angeles, 243, 469n1
loyalty, 135
Ludin, Attaullah, 344
Ma’ayeh, Suha, 456n7
madrassa (Ghazni), 59
madrassa (Karachi), 102
madrassas (Pakistan), 225
Maghrib, 207
Mahajerzad, Abdul Karim, 246,
438n17
Mahaz-e Mili-ye Islami-ye Afghanistan
281, 316, 317
Mahdi, 166, 171
Mahera (wife of Layeq), 71, 72, 177
Mahipar canyon, 252
Maidan Shahr, 264, 358
Maiwand Division, 344
Maiwandwal, Mohammed Hashim,
31, 49
suicide of, 73
Majrooh, Sayid Bahauddin, 227
anonymous, night letters from,
228
Makarov pistol, 185, 234
Maktab al-Khidamat (Services
Bureau), 206
Maktabah Shamilah, 431
Malik, Abdul, 414
495
 INDEX
Malik, Haji, 469n3
maliks, 18, 19, 148
Management of Savagery,The, 409
Mansour, Khwaja Mahfouz, 99, 101,
104, 436–7n11, 443n26
Mansour, Nasrullah, 98, 101, 103,
128, 189, 328, 444n13
Mao Zedong, 184
Maoists, 49, 51, 68
Marid, 171
Marjan, Mohammed, 107
Maruf, 151
Marxism, 44, 132, 292
Marxist, 49
central committee selection, 16
fringe group, 153
guerrilla campaign (1970), 176
guerrilla war against Shah, 161
Kart-e Char meeting, 14, 15,
17
Marxist propaganda, 36
Marxist rule (Kabul), 171
Palestinian militants hijacked,
36
Mashal, Khaled, 284
Mashal-e Haq (Light of Truth), 241
Mashhad international airport, 388
Massoud, Ahmad Shah, 103–4,
129, 145, 183, 196, 230–1, 234,
262, 275, 293, 302, 311, 322,
327, 331, 366, 381, 398, 402,
443n27, 459n8, 460n14, 461n22,
462n8, 464n16
against Hizb emir, 184–5
Azzam meeting (Takhar), 263
control over Kabul (1992), 352
counter-attack, 308, 361
Dostum and Massoud, 303, 309
early life of, 103
failings of, 314
fled to Pakistan, 104–5
496
game of offer and counter-offer,
365–9
guerrilla campaign against Najib
regime, 267
Hekmatyar and Massoud, 302
letter to Tareq, 186
new recruits, political ideologies
of, 294
new strategy of, 361
occupation and expansion, recent
tactics of, 268
rivalry with Mazari, 324
Sabawoon and Massoud, 380–1
smuggled night letters, 184
Wahdat and Massoud, links
between, 295
Maududi, Abul-A’la, 64, 65, 78,
144, 439n40
Mazar-e Sharif, 35, 78, 295, 381,
387, 403, 404, 462n8, 467n4
Mazari, Abdul Ali, 324, 325, 346–7,
360–1, 364
Dostum and Mazari, 347
escape and death, 362
Massoud, rivalry with, 324
McWilliams, Edmund, 237, 244,
282
Mecca, 56, 130, 204, 283
Medina, 204, 283
Meena (wife of Faiz Ahmad), 228
Mehdi, Mohiuddin, 462n9
Mehtar Lam, 88, 369
Mercedes-Benz, 367
micro-managing affairs, 255
Middle East, 258
mihrab, 162
Mikrorayon, 197
Milestones (Sayyid Qutb), 65
military academy (Kabul), 41
military brigade (Asmar), 155
Military University (Kabul), 108
 INDEX
Mir Akbar Khyber (brother-in-law
of Layeq), 108, 109, 111, 115,
119, 120, 132, 136, 177
Mir, Agha, 127, 128
transformative moment, 128–9
Mirza, Mawlawi, 442n11
Mo, Ettore, 350
mobile radio station (Chahar
Asyab), 333
Mohammed (son of Azzam), 270
Mohammed, Deen (Massoud’s half-
brother), 234
Mohammed, Faiz, 301
Mohammed, Haji Wazir, 416
Mohammed, Khalid Sheikh, 408,
425
Mohammedi, Mohammed Nabi, 134
Mohmand tribe, 146
Mojaddedi, Sibghatullah, 59, 134,
157, 158, 223, 268, 303, 309,
240, 310, 347, 412, 461n33
early life of, 58
Hassan al-Banna meeting, 58
Hekmatyar and Mojaddedi,
157–8
Hizb’s hit squads, targeted by, 240
Northern Alliance plane shoot,
319
Pakistan peace agreement, 319
monarchy’s demise, 73
Moscow, 29, 105–6, 105, 120, 138,
145, 153, 158, 159, 168, 170,
171, 172, 195, 219, 235, 255,
289, 290
contingency plans, 158–9
emotional and financial capital
into Taraki’s, 159
Islamic conference, 74
military assistance, offer of, 29
military equipment sales (Kabul),
159
Moscow’s agents, 61
Moscow’s retreat, 226
peace talks, 289
Moses involvement in Egypt and
Israel dispute, 41–2
Mossad (Israel’s foreign intelligence
agency), 141
Mother Party, 215, 261
Mubarak, Hosni, 339, 370
Mubarez Division, 152
mufti’s denunciation, 331
Mughniyah, Imad, 284
Mujahid, 61
Mujahid, Abdul Samad, 110
sleeper cells, smuggled weapons
to, 107
Mujahid, Fazel Haq, 252, 253, 346,
363, 374, 379–80, 466–7n15,
468n17, 469n7
bin Laden, meeting with, 371
Fazel Haq’s home, 371, 364
shot dead, 388
Mujahida Khor, 208
Mujahideen, 91, 94, 108, 121,
133–4, 153, 154
acts of resistance, 127
communications squad, 301
formation, 89
interim administration, 249
interim government, parties vote
for 239
living undercover (Kabul), 107
Moscow visit, 290–1
mujahideen sided with Rabbani,
100
operation against the Taraki
regime, 121–6
rival faction, 92–3
tunnel Digging (Deh Mazang),
94–5
Mujahideen-e Khalq, 161
497
 INDEX
Mumin, 460n14
Munafiqun, 262
Muqtada al-Sadr, 439n40
Muslim Battalion, 159, 174
Muslim Brotherhood (1920), 22–4,
25, 36, 38, 49, 57, 63–4, 65,
137, 167
banning of, 23–4
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood,
79, 167, 188, 198, 202, 213
Islamabad attack (1995), 370
Muslim Brotherhood-style
revolution, 148
Muslim Brothers, 158
Muslim Youth Organisation (1969),
34, 37–8, 43, 46, 50, 55, 63, 67,
75, 79, 83, 84, 86, 161, 167
attack on Layeq’s nephew, 52
clash between Maoists and, 68–9
coded language, 85–6
conduct Islamic insurrection,
87–9
escape from insect-infested jail,
94
executive council, 55, 78
failed coup, 85
formal Islamic qualifications, lack
of, 58
guerrilla warfare course (1974),
83
Habib-ur-Rahman, progress
reports to, 79
head of recruitment (Kunar), 123
infiltration of Kandahar (1970),
60
insurrection against Daoud, 121
insurrection failure of (1975), 96
lost their chance of escape, 94–5
Maoists and Islamist fight, 68
Muslim Youth, 78, 82, 83
newspaper, need of, 161
498
night letter, 37–8
notoriety, 57
Panjshir valley rebellion, 87
Rahim, death notice of, 54
Sayyid Qutb’s contribution to,
64–5
threat and opportunity aftermath
of coup, 73
training camps (Pakistan), 104
tried to stage a coup twice, 167
Zarnigar Park, 136
Muslims, 144
Muzaferuddin, 149, 150, 151, 152,
153, 241, 273, 313, 344–5
mujahideen parties, meeting,
151–2
Zabul mutiny, 149–50
Muzamil, Mohammed Zaman, 276
Nabi Azimi, Mohammed, 302
Nabi, Abdul (father of Niazi), 21
Naderi High School, 36
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, 341,
343
Nahrin, 233
Najib regime, 248, 251, 254, 265,
282, 293
Najib, 49–50, 110, 119, 136, 220,
221, 235, 246, 273, 297
communist regime, 332
death of, 384
presidency, 298
reconciliation programme, 292
Zarnigar Park’s speech, 49
Najibullah Lafraie (2013), 442–
3n18
Najibullah. See Najib
Najmuddin Kawiani, 246, 250
Nangarhar province, 53, 88, 145,
146, 181, 193, 344
Naqibullah, Mullah, 354
 INDEX
Nargis, Akbar Khan, 459n8
nasheed, 165, 264
Nasim, Mohammed Tahir, 250
Nasosnaya Air Base, 344
Nasrat Mina (Victory Quarter). See
Shamshatu
Nasratyar, Saifuddin, 40, 43, 52, 55,
68, 75, 77, 84, 94, 96, 139, 140,
386, 436–7n11, 438n20, 446n29
arrest of, 68–9
executive council election, 55
Herat, captured in, 84
interior minister, 79
Jamiat’s youth section, 76–7
Zarnigar Park’s speech, 48–9,
66
life imprisonment, 99 Nasrullah,
Mullah, 438–9n33
Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 17–8, 22
National Islamic Front of
Afghanistan. See Mahaz-e Mili-ye
Islami-ye Afghanistan
National Liberation Front. See
Jabha-ye Nejat-e Mili
national unity government, 246
Nationalists, 49
NATO-led international force, 428
Nazism, 23
neighboring countries
(Afghanistan), 28
Nesa (magazine), 163
Netherlands National Police,
446n29
Neumann, Robert G.,
Schifferdecker’s report to
Washington, 68
three-page report (1972), 66
New Islamist International,The, 337
new regime, 119
new socialist government, 72
New York, 292
Niazi, Abdul Rahim, 38–9, 49,
53–5, 61, 110, 181, 209, 216,
251, 372, 436–7n11, 438n17
death of (June 1971), 54, 61, 92
memorial ceremony, 59
Nangarhar’s speech, 53
schooling, 164–5
student movement under, 188
Niazi, Ghulam Mohammed
(Professor), 30, 31, 33–4, 37,
38, 39, 46, 50–1, 54, 59, 73–4,
75, 79, 81, 82, 94, 131, 139–40,
178, 216, 436n3, 472n26
career, 25
childhood and graduation, 21–2,
24
Islamic conference (Moscow), 74
Islamic Studies, dean of, 33
political and religious
contribution, 73–4
prime minister, as a, 79
regime forces raid (1974), 84
Nida-yi Haq (newspaper), 59
Night letters, 161, 261
anonymous, 228
Hekmatyar, 177
Hizb-e Islami, 272, 349, 372–3
Layeq, 40, 44, 177
Muslim Youth Organisation, 37–8
Nijrab, 35, 152
battle for, 185
Nimroz province, 89
Nishtarabad meeting, 93, 94
Nkrumah, Kwame, 20
nom de guerre
Abdullah, Abu, 334, 335
Abubakr, Haji, 128
Amanullah, Toran, 146
Kashmir Khan, 122, 123, 124,
125, 126, 156, 158
499
 INDEX
Muzaferuddin, 149
Noor Ahmad Noor, 111, 117, 119,
136, 177
Noor Ahmad, Mawlawi, 233
Noor Jahan (mother of Habib-ur-
Rahman), 35
Nooruddin, 170
North Waziristan, 102
Northern Alliance, 304, 308
formation of, 298, 300
Mojaddedi’s plane shoot down,
319
seize Kabul, 324
Nowshera, 98, 99, 442n11
Nuristan, 278
Nuristan rebellion, 133
Nurkh, 358
Nurrahman, Haji, 414–6, 417, 418,
425, 472n24
Oakley, Robert, 237, 252
Obaidullah, Mullah, 402, 443n35
Obama, Barack, 430, 433
old colonialists’, 43
old Silk Road, 30
Omar, Mullah Mohammed. See
Omar, Mullah
Omar, Mullah, 99, 353, 354, 356,
361, 365, 368, 379, 385, 390,
391–2, 393, 423, 436–7n11
arrest of, 68–69, 99
summon to bin Laden, 392
operation ‘a bloodless coup’, 72
operation Badr, 80
Orgakov, Nikolai, 171
Organisation for the Defence of the
Interests of Afghanistan, 140
Organisation of Islamic
Cooperation, 250, 284, 342
Osman, 419
Osman, Abu, 423
500
Ottoman Empire, 164, 165, 214,
244
Owdan desert, 142
Paghman, 22, 131, 324, 452n18
Pahstun, 96
Pakistan, 26, 78, 120, 189, 225,
303, 312, 331, 395
army camp (Rawalpindi), 224
creation and history, 83
F-16 fighter jets, 274
government of, 189, 190
ISI (military intelligence service),
83
Jamaat-e Islami, 95
military base, 99
national identity cards, 199
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, 318
Pakistani-Canadian project, 131
Pakteen, Raz Mohammed, 302
Paktia, 80, 88
Palestine Liberation Organisation
(PLO), 206, 210, 270
Palestinian embassy, 246
Pallas’s gulls, 35
Pandora’s Box, 236
pan-Islamic awakening, 166
Panjshir, 99, 104, 183, 187, 231,
259, 380, 443n26
Panjshir mountains, 104
Panjshir uprising, 123
Panjshir valley, 87
Panjshiri, Ghulam Dastagir, 443n34
Parcham (group) 39, 73, 131, 138
Parcham (newspaper), 39, 40, 44–5,
72, 73
communist protest against,
45–6
editorial board meeting, 45
shutdown of, 46
Parcham faction, 61, 171
 INDEX
Parcham wing (communist party),
109
Paris of the East, 56
parochial mullahs, 359
Party Responsibilities (book), 199
Parwan, 236, 381
Pashto (language), 20, 118, 165
Pashtun Kot, 38, 54
Pashtun militia, 147
Pashtun nationalism, 29, 132
Pashtun tribes, 17, 18, 19, 26, 40,
53, 91–2, 222, 266, 453n27
Pashtunistan Square, 62, 65
Pashtunwali, 80–1
Payem-e Zan-e Muslimeen (magazine),
163
peace deal, 433
Pearl Intercontinental Hotel, 210
Pech Valley (Kunar), 96–7, 126
Pentagon, 398
People’s Democratic Current. See
Jerian-e Democratic-e Khalq
People’s Democratic Party of
Afghanistan, 106
Peshawar Club, 188
Peshawar, 91–2, 96, 99–100,
102, 105, 124, 134, 154, 155,
188, 190, 198, 200, 205, 210,
226, 231, 242, 251, 266, 267,
359, 370, 406, 423, 426, 428,
450–1n20, 459n21, 468n17
1830 Peshawar, 166
recruiting centres, 260
Piekney, William, 211
Pillow Talk (film), 30
PKM machine gun, 276–7
PLO. See Palestine
Liberation Organisation (PLO)
poem, 45
political and economic dominance
(Afghanistan), 28
political Islam, 57–8
post-Cold War, 338
power-sharing deal, 254, 332
pragmatism, 167
pre-internet age, 155
presidential palace, 305
Priority of Sense Over Matter,The,
43–4
pro-Lenin poem, 109, 119
protest against, 50, 54
Prophet Mohammed, 24, 35, 45,
53, 56, 60, 68, 80, 97, 100, 128,
130, 143, 144, 158, 165, 201,
208, 215, 216, 225, 244, 251,
336, 365, 368, 432
Pul-e Alam (Logar), 218
Pul-e Charkhi jail (Kabul), 137,
138, 139, 140, 310, 373
prisoners encounter, 139–40
structure of, 138
Pul-e Khishti mosque, 45, 54, 110,
110, 372
Pul-e Khumri, 30, 386
Pul-e Sokhta, 86
Puritanism, 167
Qabil, 26
Qadeer, Haji Abdul, 317, 466–7n15
Qader Khan, Abdul, (father of
Hekmatyar), 40–1, 142
Qalacha, 347
Qala-e Jadid jail, 69, 137
Qalam, 357
Qarabagh (Ghazni), 40, 133, 327
Qasr-e Shirin, 396
Qazi Nazir, 447n7
Quetta, 228
Qur’an, 39, 46, 51, 53, 99, 108,
120, 122, 131, 132, 144, 162,
182, 200, 207, 243, 246, 262,
265, 277
501
 INDEX
Qurban Mohammed, Mawlawi,
437n16
Qutb, Sayyid, 64, 65, 74, 89, 138,
140, 164, 261, 439n40
hanged to death (1966), 65
Rabbani, Burhanuddin, 74–5, 76,
77, 82, 92–3, 95, 100–1, 103,
104, 107–8, 121, 134, 202, 216,
235, 240, 227, 228, 290, 321,
325, 339, 432
daoud regime and Rabbani, 99
education minister, 79
game of offer and counter-offer,
365–9
Hekmatyar dispute, 98
Kabul, left with Hekmatyar to,
382–3
left Hizb-e Islami, 108
new national currency
(Afghanistan), 329
pedigree, 74, 75
Rabbani government and Taliban,
366
Taliban and Rabbani, 354
Rabbani, Salahuddin, 442–3n18
radical Arabs, 237
radical interpretation of Marxism,
132
radical interpretation of Sharia, 166
Radio Afghanistan, 20, 54
Rafi, Mohammed, 302
Rafsanjani, Akbar Hashemi, 343
Rahim Khail (Andar), 21
Rahman, Abdul, 293, 304, 308,
325, 366
Rahman, Akhtar Abdur, 229
Rahman, Nur, 156
Rahman, Sheikh Omar Abdel, 207,
336, 337, 338, 392, 393, 451n27
Rahmani, 453n27
502
Rahmatyar, Fazel Rahman, 122
Raj, 17, 19, 28
Raphel, Arnold, 236
rapprochement to Ghazni, 178
Rauf Khan, Abdul, 157
RAWA. See Revolutionary
Association of the Women of
Afghanistan (RAWA)
Rawalpindi, 239, 425
meeting, 240
vote, 249, 281
Reading (London), 154
Reagan, Ronald, 209, 212, 236,
453n37
Real Faith,The, 431
realpolitik, 165, 248
rebellion communist regime, 140
Red Army soldiers, 145
Red Cross hospital, 352
Redi, Francesco, 40, 44
Rehal, 162
revolution, last phase of, 119
Revolutionary Association of the
Women of Afghanistan (RAWA),
228
Revolutionary Council of the
Armed Forces, 118, 119, 135,
135, 140, 177
Revolutionary Guard Corps, 343,
388, 409, 414
Riyadh, 80, 203, 283, 331
Rohullah,Haji, 457–8n18
RPG grenade launcher, 194
Rumi, Abdullah, 281
Rushdie, Salman, 253
Russia, 28, 194, 291
against Afghanistan, 172
blaming Karmal, 219
Russian invasion, 170, 219
Russian military intelligence, 234
Russian Tsarists, 75
 INDEX
withdrawal from Afghanistan,
239
Sabawoon, 375
Sabawoon, Waheedullah, 122, 124,
316, 343, 344, 366, 374, 375,
380, 383, 395, 426
Sabz-e Parsa, 265
Sadat, Anwar, 80, 191, 339
Sadiq (younger brother of Najib),
50, 221
Saeed, Qarib-ur-Rahman, 95, 95,
162, 163
Safi tribe, 96
Saif al-Adel, 2, 409
Saigon, 179
Sakhi Dad Fayez, 355
Salaam, Toran, 473n34
Salahuddin (son of Hekmatyar), 364
Salahuddin, Sayed, 468n17
Salang highway, 29
Salang tunnel, 385
Salim, 451–2n38
Salim, Nawab, 451–2n38
Salt Pit, 424, 471n11
Sama Division, 300
Sami, Wafiullah, 100, 442–3n18
San Francisco, 212
Santos, Paulo Jose de Almeida, 285
Sarfaraz, Jan Baz, 98, 99, 203, 206,
216, 217, 243, 269, 283, 299,
314, 323, 336, 361, 394, 426,
429
SAS commandos, 230
Sasanian Empire 56
Satanic Brotherhood, 123
SatanicVerses,The, 253
Saudi Arabia, 80, 283, 331, 370,
371, 387, 392, 396
Saudi donors, 154
Saudi intelligence service, 204
Saudi National Guard, 171
Saur 7 Revolution, 132, 445n21
SAVAK, 141
Sayed, Haji Sultan, 279
Sayed, Rahman, 445n19
Sayed-ur-Rahman, 472n26
Sayeem, Abdul Ghaffar. See Modir
Ghaffar
Sayid Karam (Paktia), 170
Sayyaf, Abdul Rab Rasul, 76, 188,
203, 204, 205, 323, 355,
383–4
Sazman-e Jawanan-e Muslimin. See
Muslim Youth Organisation
Sazman-e Mujahideen-e Khalq-e
Iran (the People’s Mujahideen
Organisation of Iran), 161, 162
Schifferdecker, Arnold Paul, 66–7,
68
Sefat Khan (father of Habib-ur-
Rahman), 35
Shafa, 229
Shafaqyar, Abdul Jalil, 301
murder of, 351
Shafiee, Hassan Bareq, 45, 119
Shah, Nadir (father of Zahir Shah),
47, 166, 265
Shah, Zahir (King of Afghanistan),
14, 29, 47, 71–2, 265, 272, 285
constitution (1964), 56
Rome visit, 71
Marxist meeting against, 14–6
democratic project (1964), 18–9
Shagyal district (Kunar), 168
Shahada Salaheen cemetery, 110
shahada, 133 (Islamic profession of
faith)
Shahadat (newspaper), 124, 162,
167, 176, 198, 208, 276, 336,
427, 472n20
Europe publications, 208
503
 INDEX
logo, 162–3
printing partner, 163
publishing, 163
Shahar-e Kohna, 86
Shakeeb, 85
Shakoor, Abdul, 84
Shamod Khan, Regi, 404
Shamshatu, 189, 190, 472n22
Sharafat, Haji, 470n22
Sharafmal, Mohammed Barat, 303
Sharana, 19
Shar-e Naw, 66
Sharia faculty, 33–4, 38, 81, 84,
436n3
Sharia penal codes, 312
Shariati, Ali, 439n40
Shashdarak, 174
Shaygal, 122, 124, 227, 421, 423,
472n22
Shevardnadze, Eduard, 235
Shewaki, 317
Shia mujahideen, 290
Shia Muslims, 13, 63, 158, 241
Shinkay, 146
Shir Khan High School, 41
Shirazi, Naser Makarem, 439n40
Shok valley raid, 430
Shoor, Asif, 272, 273
Short Samad, 107
short shackling, 424
Shura-e Nizar, 294
Siberian cranes, 35
Sikhs, 26
Sirkanay, 279
sixteen-point section, 200
sleeper cells, 275
Social Justice in Islam, 64
social liberalis, 29
Socialist Ba’ath parties, 25
Society for the Call to the Qur’an
and Sunnah. See Jama’at al-Da’wa
504
ila al-Qur’an wal-Sunnah
Sokhandan, Saydal, 68
Soleimani, Qasem, 409
Sorkh Ab camp, 301, 313, 459n21
Soviet Union, 18, 28, 48, 61, 72,
77, 158, 258, 289
104th Guards Airborne Division,
344
40th Army, 171, 176, 187, 193,
194, 222, 232, 235, 236, 238,
372
adversaries of Islam, 63
Afghanistan, plans for, 61
against Hizbis, 181–2
aircraft, 233
atrocities ravaged Afghanistan,
193
four major offensives (Panjshir),
232
Friendship, treaty of (1921), 29
MI-24D helicopters, 224
military intelligence, 236
Ministry of Defence, 159
occupation, 227, 301
Panjshir attack (early 1980), 186
Politburo, 171
Soviet invasion, 172–4, 178, 179
Soviet tank, 238, 264
tactical adjustments, raft of, 224
Tapa-e Taj Beg assault, 174
withdrawal of troops, 235–6
Spin Boldak, 353
Spin Ghar mountain, 299
Spin-e Shiga, 218, 264, 293, 299,
364, 459n19
Spiro Agnew, 293
Stalin, Joseph, 136
Stinger missiles, 224, 234
Stinger programme, 225
Stingers’ arrival, 224
Storay, Mawlawi 198
 INDEX
Strasbourg, 398
Strauss, Franz Josef, 213
students protest (1965), 31
students’ union (1970), 52
Sudan, 284, 370, 372, 466–7n15,
469n7
Suez Canal Crisis, 24
Sufism, 35
suicide bombing (2012), 339, 432
suicide mission, 150–3
Sultan Abdulhamid, mausoleum of,
214
Sultan Ahmed Mosque, 214
Sunnah, 24, 55
Sunni Muslims, 13, 63, 158, 244
Support Group, 259, 260, 264, 334
Supreme Coordination Council,
347
surface-to-air Stinger missiles, 264,
294, 334
Surobi, 348, 359
Swan Lake, 289
Swiss bank, 209
Syria, 80
T-55 tanks, 284
Tagab attack, 349
taghut, 47
tahajjud (prayer), 97, 215
Tajik, 26, 35, 74, 166, 236
Tajik-majority Parcham faction, 302
Takfir, 64, 241, 261, 313
takfiri trial (Peshawar), 266, 267
Takhar ambush, 269
Takhar meeting, 267
Takhar province, 107, 263, 437n16
Taleghani, Mahmoud, 439n40
Taliban, 358, 359, 402
Amanullah vehicle, stealing of,
358, 365
control over Kandahar, 354
Dostum and Taliban, 387
eastern Afghanistan attack
(1996), 379–81
Hizb, attack on, 353–7
Kabul attack, 373–4
principle, 356
recaptured Mazar (1998), 389
suicide bombings, 429
Taliban and Hizb-e Islami –
mutual respect, 390
Taliban regime, 469n1
Taliban-Hizb meeting, 364–5
talibs, 353, 384
Tanai and Shoor operation 1990, 273
Tanai coup, 274, 299
Tanai, Shahnawaz, 273, 315
Tangi Farkhar gorge massacre, 267
Tanzim ul-Momineen (Organisation of
the Faithful), 206
Tapa Maranjan, 317
Tapa-e Taj Beg, 172
Taraki, Noor Mohammed, 15, 16,
20, 30, 39, 61, 96, 105, 106–7,
110, 111, 115, 119, 120, 131,
136, 140, 145, 159, 167, 168,
435n1
Amin plan, 168
‘compulsory and free’ primary
education, 120
death of, 168
execution, 102
Faqir and Taraki (since 1960),
135
first national speech, 120–1
Hizb first operation against,
121–6
Layeq joined Taraki (1978),
445n21
mujahideen, vision of, 137
parliamentary elections (1965),
30
505
 INDEX
regime, 168
Revolutionary Council
(Chairman) and head of state,
119
rumoured Soviet spy, 39
Taraki’s regime, 159
Tareq (Engineer), 185, 186, 209,
230, 265, 300, 366, 395
Tari Mangal, 299
Tarun, Sayed Daoud, 168, 448n13
Task Force on Terrorism and
Unconventional Warfare, 42,
282, 337
Tawaf, 284
Tawana, Abdul Qadir, 436–7n11
Tehran,
Mehrabad International Airport,
204
Tajrish bazaar, 397
weapon support to Azerbaijan,
343
Tet Offensive, 36
Tilmisani and six mujahideen
parties, 188
Tkachev, Anatoli, 232
ceasefire (deal), 232, 290
Tomsen, Peter, 282, 330
Tora Bora, 404, 406, 408, 417,
469n9
Toyota Corolla, 467n9
Toyota Land Cruiser, 365, 372, 396,
405, 407
transnational insurgency, 166
Trump, Donald, 433
Turkey, 214, 327, 451–2n38,
461n22
Turkish Islamist Welfare Party, 214
Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republics,
74
Turkmen, 26
506
Ulfat, Aziz-ur-Rahman, 226, 227
ul-Haq, Amin, 406, 466–7n15,
469n7
umbrella organization, 134
UN convoy, 297
UN General Assembly, 18, 245
UN Security Council, 179
UN transition, 295
UN’s plan, 303
Unconventional Warfare, 42
Underground Marxist movement,
14–5
United Arab Emirates, 203, 387
United States (US), 153, 170, 178
anti-Islamic foreign policy
agenda, 337
chargé d’affaires, 169
closed Kabul embassy (1989), 329
focus on Kunar, 421
geopolitical dominance, 307
Hizb’s march (Kabul), 236
House of Representatives, 42
Moscow and the Taraki regime,
153
Muslim Youth’s, 66
secret weapon shipping to
Afghan, 179
smouldering conflict, 133
State Department, 66
Taliban, support for, 359
US Army, 307
US Congress report, 338
US invasion (2003), 429
US invasion (Afghanistan), 428
US reward, 408
US troops in Nuristan, 448–9n1
Vietanamese, 179–80
Unocal, 391
US - 9/11 attack, 211, 398, 404, 408
Hekmatyar role, 403
planning, 396
 INDEX
US consulate, Peshawar (1994),
359, 426
US Department of Justice, 345
US embassy (Kabul), 153
US embassy (Pakistan), 267, 274
US embassy (Pashtunistan Square),
110
US National Security Council,
223
US Special Forces, 420, 423
US State Department’s Bureau of
Intelligence and Research, 66,
337
Ushr, 431
US-led invasion of Afghanistan
(2001), 401
Uzbek militia, 313, 347
Uzbekistan, 347
Uzbeks, 26, 74
Varennikov, Valentin, 236
Vietnam, 66, 123, 179, 188
Volga, 51
Wahdat party. See Hizb-e Wahdat-e
Islami Afghanistan
Waheed, Abdul Hanan, 472n24
Wahid, Rayes Abdul, 355
Wahidyar, Sayed Rahman, 217, 309,
429, 459n19
Fatah Division, 241, 299, 300,
304
Wakil, Mohammed Abdul, 298
Wali Khan (son of Ghaffar Khan),
120, 316
Wali, Mohammed, 148
Wardak battle, 358
Wardak province, 147, 241
Warsak Division, 197, 198, 206
Washington, 62, 66, 153, 235, 249,
290
Wata Pur mosque, 175, 176,
448–9n1
Watanjar, Aslam, 302
Watson, Cynthia Gale, 210
weapons, fight for, 157
Welfare Party, 214
Weqad, Mohammed Amin, 93–4,
95, 98, 100, 101, 103, 117, 121,
130, 134, 144, 175, 200, 201,
290, 331, 364, 368, 448n13,
448–9n1, 450–1n20, 472n28
Hekmatyar and Weqad, 201
west travel, 175
West Bank, 36
West Point-style military academy,
198, 225
Westminster, 155
white banner, 278
White House, 179, 223, 224, 236,
401, 469n1
Wilson, Charlie, 210, 211
Woodod Khan, 233
World Trade Centre (New York),
336, 398
World War I, 164, 343
World War II, 28, 129
writers’ association (Kabul), 20–1
Yaqoob, captain, 169
Yaqoub, Mohammed, 173
Yaqubi, Ghulam Faruq, 246
Yemen, 371
Yousef Abad refugee camp, 415
Yousuf, Mohammed, 30
Yuldashev, Tahir, 393
Yuri Andropov, 171
Zabul, 40, 41
Zadran, 128
Zaheb, Merajuddin, 66–7
Zahedan, 344
507
 INDEX

Zahir, Ahmad, 22 Zarnigar Park, 47–50, 73, 117, 374

Zakat, 38–9 Zia-ul-Haq, Mohammed, 99, 189,
Zammar, Mohammed Haydar, 403 225, 236
Zardad, 317, 348, 380, 427, Zindani, Abdul Majeed, 262, 337
466–7n15 Zionism, 25
hydroelectric dam capture Ziruk, 121
(1993), 349 Zmari China, 82
Zarghon, Haroon, 470n22 Zubaydah, Abu, 370, 419

508
Fig. 1: Senior members of Hizb-e Islami including Jan Baz Sarfaraz (far left), Haji Abubakr
(fourth from left) and Mohammed Amin Weqad (third from right) pose for a rare
group photograph.
Figs 2–4: Communist politician Sulaiman Layeq of the
People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan.
 Fig. 5: Senior communist officials attend the funeral of the Pashtun
nationalist leader Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan in Jalalabad in 1988. They
include Sulaiman Layeq (back to camera) and Najib (in suit and tie).

Fig. 6: Afghan communist officials Najmuddin Kawiani (left), Aslam

Watanjar (centre) and Sulaiman Layeq meet with PLO emissary Abu Khalid
(second left) in Kabul in 1989.
Fig. 7: Shahnawaz Tanai pins a medal on another senior communist official,
Akbar Shah Wali, during an awards ceremony in Kabul.

Fig. 8: Communist demonstrators mark International Workers’ Day,

1 May, in Kabul.
Fig. 9: Babrak Karmal (in dark glasses) and Noor Mohammed Taraki (right)
escort the body of Mir Akbar Khyber from his apartment for burial
(19 April 1978).

Fig. 10: The body of Mir Akbar Khyber, whose assassination triggered the
1978 communist coup, is laid to rest.
Fig. 11: Thousands of mourners trail the funeral cortege of Mir Akbar
Khyber as it makes its way to Shahada-e Salaheen cemetery.
 Fig. 12: The Hizb commander General Muzaferuddin in
Al’a Jirga in the mid-1980s.

Fig. 13: General Muzaferuddin with his mujahideen in the Maruf district of
Kandahar, early on in the Soviet occupation.
 Fig. 14: General Muzaferuddin’s mujahideen in Al’a Jirga.

Fig. 15: Hizb fighters under the command of General Muzaferuddin parade
through Al’a Jirga to mark the anniversary of the Russian invasion.
Figs 16 and 17: Hizb military commander Fazel Haq Mujahid.
Fig. 18: Hizb commanders Toran Amanullah (second right) and Fazel Haq Mujahid (third right)
relax in Toran Amanullah’s base in Wardak.
 Fig. 19: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar at Hizb’s base in Spin-e Shiga.

Fig. 20: Hekmatyar speaks over a military radio at his home in Chahar
Asyab as Hizb commanders prepare for a strategy meeting at the party’s
headquarters during the 1992–1996 civil war.
 Fig. 21: Hekmatyar delivers a speech in Jalalabad during the civil war.

Fig. 22: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and fellow mujahideen leader Yunis Khalis
meet in Jalalabad, soon after the city’s fall from communist control in 1992.
Fig. 23: Sayed Rahman Wahidyar, commander of Hizb’s Fatah division.

Fig. 24: Haji Abubakr, commander of Hizb’s Army of Sacrifice

(Lashkar-e Issar), during fighting against Abdul Rashid Dostum’s militia
in Logar in 1991.
Fig. 25: Wahidyar moves from Spin-e Shiga to Logar to support the Army of
Sacrifice in its struggle against Dostum’s militia in 1991.

Fig. 26: Members of the Army of Sacrifice gather at their main base near
Spin-e Shiga, in Jaji, Paktia, soon after the force was created by Pakistan.
Fig. 27: Ustad Abdul Saboor Farid in Kabul after being sworn in as
prime minister in 1992.

Fig. 28: In early 1992, Hizbis prepare to capture part of Logar and
move towards Kabul.