Gulbuddin Hekmatyar

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar}} (born 1 August 1949) is an Afghan politician, and 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 twice served as prime minister during the 1990s.

Hekmatyar joined the Muslim Youth organization as a student in the early 1970s, where he was known for his Islamic radicalism rejected by much of the organization. He spent time in Pakistan before returning to Afghanistan when the Soviet–Afghan War began in 1979, at which time the CIA began funding his rapidly growing Hezb-e Islami organization through the Pakistani intelligence service, ISI, one of the largest of the Afghan mujahideen. He received more CIA funding than any other mujahideen leader during the Soviet-Afghan War.

In the late 1980s Hekmatyar and his organization used the funds and weapons provided to them by the CIA to start trafficking opium, and later moved into manufacturing heroin. He established himself and his group amongst the leading heroin suppliers in the Middle East. Given the CIA's connection, this became a subject of diplomatic embarrassment for the US foreign service. Following the ouster of Soviet-backed Afghan President Mohammad Najibullah in 1992, Hekmatyar declined to form part of the new government and, with other warlords, engaged in the Afghan civil war, leading to the death of around 50,000 civilians in Kabul alone. Hekmatyar was accused of bearing the most responsibility for the rocket attacks on the city. In the meantime, as part of the peace and power-sharing efforts led by Ahmad Shah Massoud, Hekmatyar became Prime Minister of Afghanistan from 1993 to 1994 and again briefly in 1996, before the Taliban takeover of Kabul forced him to flee to Iran's capital Tehran.

Sometime after the Taliban's fall in 2001 he went to Pakistan, leading his paramilitary forces into an unsuccessful armed campaign against Hamid Karzai's government and the international coalition in Afghanistan.

In 2016, he signed a peace deal with the Afghan government and was allowed to return to Afghanistan after almost 20 years in exile. Following the collapse of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, on 17 August 2021, Hekmatyar met with both Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, former chairman of the High Council for National Reconciliation and former chief executive, in Doha seeking to form a government. However they were subdued as the Taliban formed a non-inclusive government in September 2021. Hekmatyar remains in Kabul. Provided by Wikipedia