Two days after the Taliban took power, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, co-founder and number two of the armed Islamist fundamentalist movement, returned to Afghanistan on Tuesday from Qatar where he headed the political bureau.
“A high-level delegation led by Mullah Baradar left Qatar and reached our beloved country this afternoon and landed at Kandahar Airport,” in southern Afghanistan, Mohammad Naeem said on Twitter, a spokesperson for the Taliban.
A first since 2001
This is the first time that an active top Taliban leader has publicly returned to Afghanistan since they were ousted from power by a US-led coalition in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Kandahar a was the capital of the Taliban when they were in power between 1996 and 2001. It was in the province of the same name that the movement was born in the early 1990s.
Abdul Ghani Baradar, born in Uruzgan province (south) and raised in Kandahar, is the co-founder of the Taliban with Mullah Omar, who died in 2013 but whose death had been hidden for two years. As with many Afghans, his life was marked by the Soviet invasion in 1979 which made him a mujahid, and he is believed to have fought alongside Mullah Omar.
Negotiations with the Americans
In 2001, after the American intervention and the fall of the Taliban regime, he was said to have been part of a small group of insurgents ready for an agreement in which they recognized the administration of Kabul. But this initiative turned out to be unsuccessful. He was the Taliban’s military leader when he was arrested in 2010 in Karachi, Pakistan. He was released in 2018, especially under pressure from Washington.
Listened to and respected by the various Taliban factions, he was then appointed head of their political office, located in Qatar. From there, he led the negotiations with the Americans leading to the withdrawal of foreign forces from Afghanistan, then to peace talks with the Afghan government, which came to nothing. The Taliban seized power in Afghanistan on Sunday after a meteoric offensive launched in May after the start of the withdrawal of foreign troops.
