Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin (1948-)

A Kharotay Ghilzay Pashtun from the district of Imam Sahib in the Qunduz province, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar graduated from the Sher Khan high school. His family had migrated there in 1948 from Ghazni, where, like the rest of the Kharotays, they had lived as nomads. Before graduating from high school, Hekmatyar studied for two years in the military high school in Kabul. He entered the College of Engineering of the University of Kabul but left it before completing his studies. In the late 1960s he became active in the campus Islamic Movement, in particular its Muslim Youth branch. He was among its twelve student founders. He made his reputation opposing the communists; in particular, he allegedly killed a Maoist opponent, for which he was jailed. After release from prison in the early 1970s, he fled to Peshawar, where, along with other Afghan Islamists, he became active with the support of Pakistan against the Afghan Republic. In 1975, after the Islamist-instigated uprising against the republic failed, Hekmatyar broke off from the Afghan Islamic Association and formed a separate organization of his own, the Islamic Party. Hekmatyar has made this centralized organization a vehicle for realizing the views of the radical Islamist thinkers in a bid to acquire power and set up an Islamic state. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the support of Pakistan, of the Islamist Jama’at-e-Islami of Pakistan, and of other distant patrons helped Hekmatyar’s party become a major resistance organization. It holds an uncompromising attitude toward internal and external opponents of different shades of opinion, in particular the communists and their Soviet supporters during the jehad.