1940 -
Afghan resistance leader; prime minister of Afghanistan from 1993 - 1994.
Born in 1940 in the city of Baghlan in northern Afghanistan to a Kharoti Gilzai Pushtun family, Hekmatyar attended college at Kabul University's faculty of engineering in the 1960s and became active in campus politics. In 1970 he joined the Muslim Youth movement and was imprisoned in Kabul (1972 - 1973) because of his political activities. He was released after the Daud coup (1973) and fled to Pakistan, where he began his antigovernment activities. In Pakistan, he became a leader in the Jami'at-e Islami (1975) but left this group to form his own party, Hezb-e Islami (1978). After gaining the support of Pakistan and other Islamic countries, he turned his party into an effective force in Afghanistan, and by the 1980s Hekmatyar's guerrilla fighters controlled large parts of Afghanistan.
In 1992, after the collapse of the Najibullah government, he returned to Afghanistan to take part in the Islamic government in Kabul. He attempted unsuccessfully to seize control of the government by forming a coalition with Dustom, an Uzbek warlord. The effort was eventually defeated by the troops of Ahmad Shah Masʿud. He later accepted the post of prime minister in the government of Burhanuddin Rabbani (1993), but never fully occupied that position; instead, he joined other leaders in the attempt to form an alternative government and continued to attack Masʿud's troops in Kabul. When the Taliban drove the Rabbani government from Kabul in 1996, Hekmatyar fled to Tehran, where he continued his activities in exile. In 2002, after the Taliban had been driven from Kabul, Hekmatyar was expelled by Iran and was thought to have returned to Jabal Saraj, his former stronghold. He has been strongly anti-American and hostile to the interim government of Hamid Karzai.
Bibliography
Ewans, Martin. Afghanistan: A Short History of Its History and Politics. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.
Roy, Olivier. Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan. New York; Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
— GRANT FARR
