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.
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.
This article on the history of Afghanistan covers the period from the fall of the Najibullah government in 1992 to the end of the international military presence in Afghanistan.
The Islamic State of Afghanistan was the government of Afghanistan, established by the Peshawar Accords on 26 April 1992 by many, but not all, Afghan mujahideen parties, after the fall of the communist government. Its power was limited due to civil war. When the Taliban took control of Kabul in 1996, it transitioned to a government in exile and led the Northern Alliance against the partially recognized Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. In the aftermath of the 2001 United States-led invasion of Afghanistan and victory by the Northern Alliance, the Islamic State briefly regained control of the country. In 2002, it was formally succeeded by the Transitional Islamic State of Afghanistan.
Abdul Ali Mazari (Dari: عبدالعلی مزاری) was an ethnic Hazara militia and political leader of the Hezb-e Wahdat party during and following the Soviet-Afghan War. Mazari believed that the solution to the internal divisions in Afghanistan was in a federal system of governance, with each ethnic group having specific constitutional rights and able to govern their land and people. He was murdered by the Taliban in 1995, and posthumously given the title ‘Martyr Of National Unity’ in 2016 by Ashraf Ghani government. He supported equal representation of all ethnic groups of Afghanistan, especially Hazaras, who are still being persecuted in Afghanistan.
The Islamic Dawah Organization of Afghanistan is a political party in Afghanistan led by Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. Founded in the early 1980s as the Islamic Union for the Liberation of Afghanistan, it was originally an attempt to bring unity amongst Islamist opposition forces in Afghanistan. However, the creation of the new umbrella organization effectively created a split and the organization became a political party of its own. The organization was part of the 'Peshawar Seven', the coalition of mujahedin forces supported by the United States, Pakistan and various Arab states of the Persian Gulf in the war against the PDPA government, Soviet forces and Ba'athist Iraq. Through the financial aid received from Saudi sources, the organization was able to attract a considerable military following. Arab volunteers fought in the militia forces of the organisation.
Jamayat-E-Islami, sometimes shortened to Jamiat, is a predominantly Tajik political party in Afghanistan. It was originally formed as a student political society at Kabul University. It has a communitarian ideology based on Islamic law. During the Soviet–Afghan War and the following Afghan Civil War against the communist government, Jamiat-e Islami was one of the most powerful of the Afghan mujahideen groups. Burhanuddin Rabbani led the party from 1968 to 2011, and served as President of the Islamic State of Afghanistan from 1992 to 2001, on exile from 1996.
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.
The Northern Alliance, officially known as the United Islamic National Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, was a military alliance of groups that operated between late 1996 to 2001 after the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (Taliban) took over Kabul. The United Front was originally assembled by key leaders of the Islamic State of Afghanistan, particularly president Burhanuddin Rabbani and former Defense Minister Ahmad Shah Massoud. Initially it included mostly Tajiks but by 2000, leaders of other ethnic groups had joined the Northern Alliance. This included Karim Khalili, Abdul Rashid Dostum, Abdullah Abdullah, Mohammad Mohaqiq, Abdul Qadir, Asif Mohseni, Amrullah Saleh and others.
The Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, also referred to as Hezb-e-Islami or Hezb-i-Islami Afghanistan (HIA), is an Afghan political party and former militia, originally founded in 1976 as Hezb-e-Islami and led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In 1979, Mulavi Younas Khalis split with Hekmatyar and established his own group, which became known as Hezb-i Islami Khalis; the remaining part of Hezb-e Islami, still headed by Hekmatyar, became known as Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin. Hezbi Islami seeks to emulate the Muslim Brotherhood and to replace the various tribal factions of Afghanistan with one unified Islamic state. This puts them at odds with the more tribe-oriented Taliban.
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.
The 1996–2001 Afghan Civil War took place between the Taliban's conquest of Kabul and their establishing of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan on 27 September 1996, and the US and UK invasion of Afghanistan on 7 October 2001: a period that was part of the Afghan Civil War that had started in 1989, and also part of the war in Afghanistan that had started in 1978.
The Afshar Operation was a military operation in Afghanistan that took place on February 11–12, 1993 during the Afghan Civil War (1992-96). The operation was launched by Ahmad Shah Massoud and Burhanuddin Rabbani's Islamic State of Afghanistan government and the allied Abdul Rasul Sayyaf's Ittehad-i Islami paramilitary forces against Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezbe Islami and Abdul Ali Mazari's Hezbe Wahdat militias in the densely populated Afshar district in west Kabul. The Hazara-Hezbe Wahdat together with the Pashtun-Hezbe Islami of Hekmatyar had been shelling densely populated areas in northern Kabul from their positions in Afshar, killing thousands. To counter the shelling, government forces attacked Afshar in order to capture the positions of Wahdat and its leader Mazari, and to consolidate parts of the city controlled by the government.
The Battle of Kabul was a series of intermittent battles and sieges over the city of Kabul during the period of 1992–1996.
The Afghan mujahideen were various armed Islamist rebel groups that fought against the government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and the Soviet Union during the Soviet–Afghan War and the subsequent First Afghan Civil War. The term mujahideen is used in a religious context by Muslims to refer to those engaged in a struggle of any nature for the sake of Islam, commonly referred to as jihad (جهاد). The Afghan mujahideen consisted of numerous groups that differed from each other across ethnic and/or ideological lines, but were united by their anti-communist and pro-Islamic goals. The union was also widely referred to by their Western backers as the Afghan resistance, while Western press often referred to them as Muslim rebels, guerrillas, or "Mountain Men". They were popularly referred to by Soviet troops as dukhi as derivation from Dari word دشمان dushman, which turned into short dukh and also was suitable due to their guerrilla tactics; Afghan civilians often referred to them as the tanzim, while the Afghan government called them dushman, a term also employed by the Soviets.
The Shura-e Nazar was created by Ahmad Shah Massoud in 1984 at the northern provinces of Takhar, Badakhshan, Balkh and Kunduz, during the Soviet-Afghan War. It comprised and united about 130 resistance commanders from 12 northern, eastern and central regions of Afghanistan. Though operating autonomously, Shura-e Nazar was technically an offshoot of Rabbani's Jamiat-e Islami and hence operated within the framework of the Peshawar Seven against the Soviet-supported Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.
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.
The Islamabad Accord was a peace and power-sharing agreement signed on 7 March 1993 between the warring parties in the War in Afghanistan (1992–1996), one party being the Islamic State of Afghanistan and the other an alliance of militias led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The Defense Minister of Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Massoud, resigned his position in exchange for peace, as requested by Hekmatyar who saw Massoud as a personal rival. Hekmatyar took the long-offered position of prime minister. The agreement proved short-lived, however, as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and his allies soon resumed the bombardment of Kabul.
Pakistan 
