Mullah Naqibullah

The Taleban handed over their weapons in Qandahar to Mullah Naqibullah, a former Mujahideen Commander and a local Tribal Elder. He has a long connection with both the Taleban and Qandahar. Mullah Naqibullah is the archetypal Pashtun Military Commander. He first gained respect as a Mujahideen Leader through the 1980s while fighting to oust the occupying Soviet Troops. When the Russians left, he sided with the then-President Burhanudin Rabbani and became the chief military commander in Qandahar.

But he was disillusioned with the increasingly corrupt Mujahideen fighters, and when the Taleban first emerged in 1994 as a political force, he switched sides by handing the city to the Taleban.

Under the Taleban, the tribal elder stayed as its chief military commander but eventually broke with Mullah Omar to support Hamid Karzai in the battle to remove his old comrades from the city. Mullah Naqibullah is thought of amongst the Pashtun tribes as a honest broker, untarnished by many of the excesses of either the Taleban or the old Mujahideen fighters. His relations on both sides of the conflict had made him ideally placed to take back control of Qandahar.