Gunfire erupted from the back window of a car driving past the fairground in Karachi’s Liaquatabad: The blood of the dead was soaked up by posters and buntings calling for support of the jihad in Kashmir. Few people, an American diplomat reported in a secret cable on the February 1995 massacre, had heard of the group that had organised the fundraising event: Harkat-ul-Ansar. The Harkat, he wrote, was made up of Afghan jihad veterans who had served under Islamist warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani. The organisation promised “permanent jihad against Governments which they accuse of persecuting Muslims.”
Four years later, months after their country had bombed his camps in Afghanistan, American diplomats came face-to-face with Jalaluddin, hoping to persuade him to hand over Osama Bin Laden. The warlord was exquisitely polite: It was, he said, “good to meet someone from the country which had destroyed my base, my madrassa, and killed 25 of my mujahideen.” He declined the request to hand over al-Qaeda’s chief.
Earlier this week, Khalil-ur-Rehman Haqqani—brother to Jalaluddin, uncle to his heir Sirajuddin, and a key figure in the network responsible for over 1,000 suicide bombings in Afghanistan—was killed in a suicide attack claimed by the Islamic State.
There’s more to the story, though, than mere irony. Less than a week before his uncle’s assassination, Sirajuddin, the Islamic Emirate’s deputy chief, had lashed out at its Emir, Hibatullah Akhundzada, for labelling the Taliban’s opponents “infidels or apostates.” Tensions also flared over the imposition of taxes in Haqqani-ruled territories, which had been exempted for over a century. Likely, the gushing praise of his errant second-in-command in the Western press further stoked Hibatullah’s rage.
Most importantly, Islamabad has grown increasingly concerned about the Haqqanis’ failure to enforce the ceasefire they negotiated with Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) terrorists, who are regularly striking across the border. Once described by a senior American intelligence officer as a “veritable arm” of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the Haqqanis now appear to be slipping out of Islamabad’s control.
“I do not know who carried out this act,” Sirajuddin proclaimed at his uncle’s funeral—a statement of obvious significance, coming hours after the Islamic State claimed responsibility. Emir Hibatullah chose not to attend the last rites.
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The Haqqanis’ war
From their strongholds in the remote Shah-i Kot mountains, Haqqani wireless operators once relayed news of the trials of war to the ISI. “Brother Jan, you are very waek writer by English [sic.],” one irate message from 1989 reads, perhaps protesting delays in supplies. Following 9/11, the once-powerful jihadist citadel seemed to crumble. Late in 2007, with peace on the horizon, the United States funded the construction of an all-weather asphalt road cutting north-west from Khost to Gardez along paths Haqqani forces had once used to assault Soviet and Afghan troops.
The Indian subcontractors hired for the $176 million project came under relentless terrorist attacks, halting construction. The problem was resolved only when $1 million a month was arranged for the Haqqani network. The warlord whom Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson once called “goodness personified” was now being financed by the very country that had come to Afghanistan to destroy jihad.
Ever since the 1970s, Jalaluddin waged war against Afghanistan’s socialist rulers, providing northeastern access through his Loya Paktia stronghold to ISI-backed Islamists. The network’s leadership was drawn from seminaries linked to the Dar-ul-‘Ulum Haqqaniyya in Akora Khattak, southeast of Peshawar, where Jalaluddin had been a student.
The insurrection by the ISI-backed Islamists was crushed in 1975—but the Haqqanis had positioned themselves to profit from the anti-Soviet Union jihad, which began in 1979. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer in charge of handling the Haqqanis would later record that America and the ISI handed hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and materiel to the organisation. The Haqqani base at Zhawar drew fighters from across the world, including Kashmiri jihadists and the men who would found al-Qaeda.
After the Afghan jihad and the cutoff of American aid, Jalaluddin increasingly relied on Arab jihadists to sustain his empire. Appointed Minister of Justice by the mujahideen forces that seized the country in 1992, he retreated to his Loya Paktia redoubts, staying out of the power struggle in Kabul. Fighters of the Haqqani network later supported the Taliban against ethnic Tajik mujahideen, cementing their place in the Taliban hierarchy. Even though Jalaluddin’s leadership with the Taliban’s Kandahar-based clerics remained tense, he was appointed Minister for Borders.
Then came 9/11—and for some time, it seemed the world had changed.
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The Killing resumes
Early one morning in September 2008, five missiles struck Jalaluddin’s home in Darpa Khail village in Pakistan’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. The explosions killed one of his two wives, his sister, his sister-in-law, and eight of his grandchildren. Following his retreat from Kabul in 2001, Jalaluddin had rebuilt his empire in Pakistan’s Miranshah, south of the Khost border. This region became a mini-emirate controlled by Haqqani gunmen, who levied taxes on farmers and shopkeepers even as it received a steady flow of ISI funding.
Foreign fighters continued to flow into the region—among them David Coleman Headley, the 26/11 perpetrator. “The bazaar is bustling with Chechens, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Russians, Bosnians, some from European Union countries and of course our Arab brothers,” he would recall.
Led by Lieutenant-General Pervez Ashfaq Kayani, the ISI had resumed its support for the Taliban in 2004, hoping to install a pro-Pakistan government in Kabul. Elements of the insurgency grouped together in Taliban shuras, or councils, operating out of Quetta and Peshawar. The most lethal, though, was run by the Haqqanis from Miranshah, who staged bombings and suicide attacks in Kabul—among them, an assault on the Indian Embassy, which was carried out on the orders of ISI.
To secure their lines of access into Afghanistan, the Haqqani network became deeply involved in the Shi’a-Sunni sectarian conflict in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa’s Kurram region. In 2010, Shi’a tribes began to resist the use of Kurram as a transit route for jihadists, fearing it would lead to the loss of their lands. Together with Jalaluddin, Khalil Haqqani negotiated a deal with tribal elders, allowing for limited use of their territories. The agreement fell apart, though, and the Pakistan Army handed the region over to the Haqqani network.
Even as the jihadist offensive neared its high noon, tensions over power and wealth flared up within the Taliban’s rank. Emir Hibatullah Akhundzada sought to avert conflict by dividing operational control of Taliban forces between the Haqqanis and Muhammad Yaqoob, the son of the slain ruler of the First Islamic Emirate, Mullah Muhammad Omar. This denied the Haqqanis control of a military of which they were the principal part, fuelling their resentments.
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Cheated in victory
First past the gates of Kabul in 2021, Khalil and Sirajuddin Haqqani spearheaded the Taliban’s triumph over the Afghan republic. However, the government of the Second Islamic Emirate was dominated by figures who held office before 9/11—mainly from southern Afghanistan. Taliban defence minister Abdul Qayyum Zakir, from Helmand, served in the First Emirate. So did Interior Minister Ibrahim Sadr, Finance Minister Gul Akha Ishakzai, and several others. Though both Khalil and Sirajuddin became ministers, they did not enjoy control of—and revenues from—the country’s major urban centres.
Last year, Sirajuddin publicly criticised the regime’s harsh policies on women. Less visibly, the Haqqanis also allowed the TTP and Islamic State to operate from their territories, avoiding confrontation with the two groups. For its part, the Islamic State focussed its energies on attacks in Kandahar, Bamyan and Afghanistan’s north—leaving Haqqani territory alone.
The Haqqanis, interestingly, have a long history of cooperation with the Islamic State, dating back to a 2017 agreement between the two groups in the Zabul region. The two organisations also cooperated in suicide attacks on Kabul. Late in 2018, the Haqqani Network even brokered a peace deal with the ISI, which gave the Islamic State haven inside Pakistan in return for ending its attacks inside that country.
For decades now, Afghanistan’s jihadist landscape has been a maze of mirrors. Even though an Islamic State assassin might have been responsible for the suicide attack on Khalil, its fallout will fuel the power struggle within the Second Emirate. The Islamic State itself, meanwhile, has capitalised on the power struggle in Afghanistan, leveraging them to create a base from which it can stage attacks across the world. Khalil’s death, just like his brother’s rise, will have consequences across the world.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)