Arif Khan | |
---|---|
Died | April 4, 2000. |
Battles/wars | War in Afghanistan |
Arif Khan or Mohammad Arif Khan was a Mujahideen warlord in Afghanistan and Pashtun leader from the village of Zakhel. He was a military commander and the Taliban governor of Kunduz province. [1] An account indicated that he might have served under or was associated with the militant commander Eshan-Sayad Mirza. [2]
Khan was reportedly killed on April 4, 2000. [3] His death came with the killing of top Hizb-ul-Mujahideen commanders Ghulam Rasool Khan, Ghulam Rasool Dar, and Saif-ur-Rehman Bajwa. [4]
Ahmad Shah Massoud was an Afghan politician and military commander. He was a powerful guerrilla commander during the resistance against the Soviet occupation between 1979 and 1989. In the 1990s, he led the government's military wing against rival militias; after the Taliban takeover, he was the leading opposition commander against their regime until his assassination in 2001.
Mohammad Ismail Khan is an Afghan former politician who served as Minister of Energy and Water from 2005 to 2013 and before that served as the governor of Herat Province. Originally a captain in the national army, he is widely known as a former warlord as he controlled a large mujahideen force, mainly his fellow Tajiks from western Afghanistan, during the Soviet–Afghan War.
Mullah Muhammad Omar was an Afghan Islamic revolutionary who founded the Taliban and served as the supreme leader of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is an Afghan politician, former mujahideen leader and drug trafficker. He is the founder and current leader of the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin political party, so called after Mohammad Yunus Khalis split from Hezbi Islami in 1979 to found Hezb-i Islami Khalis. He has twice served as Prime Minister during the 1990s.
Kunduz is a city in northern Afghanistan, the capital of Kunduz Province. The city has an estimated population of about 268,893 as of 2015, making it about the 7th-largest city of Afghanistan, and the largest city in northeastern Afghanistan. Kunduz is in the historical Tokharistan region of Bactria, near the confluence of the Kunduz River with the Khanabad River. Kunduz is linked by highways with Kabul to the south, Mazar-i-Sharif to the west, and Badakhshan to the east. Kunduz is also linked with Dushanbe in Tajikistan to the north, via the Afghan dry port of Sherkhan Bandar. This city is famous for its watermelon in Afghanistan
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Mawlawi Mohammad Yunus Khalis was a mujahideen commander in Afghanistan during the Soviet–Afghan War. His party was called Hezb-i-Islami, the same as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's party. The two are commonly differentiated as Hezb-e Islami Khalis and Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin.
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Abdul Haq was an Afghan mujahideen commander who fought against the Soviet-backed People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, the de facto Afghan government in the 1980s. He was killed by the Taliban in October 2001 while trying to create a popular uprising against the Taliban in Afghanistan in the wake of the September 11th attacks.
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The 1989–1992 Afghan Civil War took place between the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan on 15 February 1989 until 27 April 1992, the day after the proclamation of the Peshawar Accords proclaiming a new interim Afghan government which was supposed to start serving on 28 April 1992.
The 1992–1996 Afghan Civil War took place between 28 April 1992—the date a new interim Afghan government was supposed to replace the Republic of Afghanistan of President Mohammad Najibullah—and the Taliban's conquest of Kabul establishing the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan on 27 September 1996.
Brigadier General Rahmatullah Safi is an Afghan former army officer and mujahideen commander who fought during the Soviet–Afghan War. He was later claimed to have been the representative of the Taliban movement in Europe.
Abdul Qayyum "Zakir", also known by the nom de guerre Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, is the current acting Deputy Minister of Defense of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. He previously served as the acting Defense Minister, from 24 August 2021 to 7 September 2021.
Mullah Naqib Alikozai, sometimes called Naqibullah, was an Afghan mujahideen commander and politician from the Kandahar area of southern Afghanistan. He was the leader of the Alikozai Pashtun tribe.
The Afghanistan conflict is a series of events and wars that have kept Afghanistan in a continuous state of armed conflict since 1978. The country's instability began during the time of the Republic of Afghanistan in the 1970s, which had been established following the collapse of the Kingdom of Afghanistan in the 1973 coup d'état; with the overthrow of Afghan monarch Mohammed Zahir Shah, who reigned for almost forty years, Afghanistan’s relatively peaceful period in modern history came to an end. The triggering event for the ongoing Afghanistan conflict was the Saur Revolution of 1978, which overthrew the Republic of Afghanistan and established the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Rampant post-revolution fighting across the country ultimately led to a pro-government military intervention by the Soviet Union, sparking the Soviet–Afghan War in the 1980s.
The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) intelligence agency of Pakistan has been accused of being heavily involved in covertly running military intelligence programs in Afghanistan since before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The first ISI operation in Afghanistan took place in 1975. It was in "retaliation to Republic of Afghanistan's proxy war and support to the militants against Pakistan". Before 1975, ISI did not conduct any operation in Afghanistan and it was only after decade of Republic of Afghanistan's proxy war against Pakistan, support to militants and armed incursion in 1960 and 1961 in Bajaur that Pakistan was forced to retaliate. Later on, in the 1980s, the ISI in Operation Cyclone systematically coordinated the distribution of arms and financial means provided by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to factions of the Afghan mujahideen such as the Hezb-e Islami (HeI) of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the forces of Ahmad Shah Massoud whose forces would later be known as the Northern Alliance. After the Soviet retreat, the different Mujahideen factions turned on each other and were unable to come to a power sharing deal which resulted in a civil war. The United States, along with the ISI and the Pakistani government of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto became the primary source of support for Hekmatyar in his 1992–1994 bombardment campaign against the Islamic State of Afghanistan and the capital Kabul.