Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder of the Taliban is said to be one of the most influential people in the group and now, the de-facto head of the group.
However, his journey hasn’t been easy.
He was born into an influential Pashtun tribe in Afghanistan’s Uruzgan province in 1968 and when young, Baradar fought against the Soviet forces with the Pakistan and US-backed mujahideen. Soon after the Soviets were defeated and left, Mullah Omar, the other co-founder of Taliban and Baradar joined forces and created the Taliban, which literally translates to “students”. In this relationship, Omar was seen as the commander and the two were said to be very close, in fact, the nickname “Baradar”, which means brother, apparently came from Omar himself.
Baradar is reportedly not as extremist in his beliefs as some of his colleagues in the group, though he still staunchly believes in violent jihad (fighting the enemies of Islam). He has also been profiled as a relatively calm person. A highly-respected person in the group, he is said to have been the think-tank for the Taliban during its former stint in Afghanistan and now in the run to the takeover.
When the US invaded Afghanistan, Omar and Baradar rode a motorcycle to the hills of Afghanistan to hide. It was reported later that nearly all of the Taliban’s top leadership fled to Quetta city in Pakistan, and later to Karachi. Baradar, for the majority of the 2000s, maintained a low profile and it wasn’t until 2010 that he hogged the headlines again, when the CIA and Pakistani agencies arrested him and he was jailed. Reportedly, this development came shortly after Baradar tried to reach out to the Karzai government independently to discuss some sort of a power-sharing agreement.
During his incarceration, Baradar was reported to have given the US information on how the militant group worked. In a rare media appearance, in 2009, before his incarceration, Baradar said that he would fight till the US was expelled from Afghanistan. “The history of Afghanistan shows that Afghans never get tired of struggling until they have freed their country. We shall continue our jihad till the expulsion of our enemy from our land,” he said in an interview with Newsweek.
Later in 2018, at the insistence of the US to hold talks, he was released. During the negotiations, he was reportedly a quiet person, who only spoke to the point. At the talks, he said that he wanted “a free, independent, united and developed country” with “an Islamic system in which all tribes and ethnicities of the country find themselves without any discrimination and live their lives in love and brotherhood”.
On August 15, he returned to Afghanistan, 20 years after he was forced to leave the country. He is likely to take a very senior position in government, considering he guided Taliban forces to victory in the country.
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