Who is Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s de facto leader?
The group’s co-founder was jailed, then freed, by the Pakistanis after American pressure. He will take an important role in the new Afghanistan
MULLAH ABDUL GHANI BARADAR was not among the Taliban men who strode, unopposed, into the presidential palace in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, on August 15th. But he is credited with getting them there. Having just returned to the country for the first time in over a decade, he is expected to be anointed as the leader of the hastily resurrected Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Who is he?
Born into an influential Pushtun tribe in southern Afghanistan in 1968, in his youth Mullah Baradar fought with mujahideen guerrillas against Soviet troops, and the Afghan government they left behind. After the war he helped Mullah Muhammad Omar, his former commander (and, some say, brother-in-law), found the Taliban (“students”), a posse of hard-line seminarians united to sweep away heathen local warlords, who then swiftly conquered much of the country in 1996.
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