Rise of the warlords in the Afghan north.

[Nagalfar]

In Afghanistan's chaotic security situation one trend has remained relatively stable. Violence has largely been concentrated in the south and east of the country, while the north and west have remained relatively peaceful. Yet, since early 2007, the number of suicide bombings, political assassinations and armed clashes has risen in these previously quiet areas as government control is increasingly challenged.

However, although militancy is undoubtedly on the rise in these areas, the main drivers of instability are the powerful regional warlords and smaller commanders. They maintain a latent threat to the fragile Afghan government because of their stockpiles of weapons and private militias. They range from one-time members of the Taliban and other extremist political groups to disenchanted mujahideen commanders of the Northern Alliance that helped remove the Taliban from government in 2001.

One man in particular has taken a leading role in seeking to engender anti-government and anti-Western sentiments in northern Afghanistan. Currently in hiding somewhere in the mountainous regions of north eastern Afghanistan bordering Pakistan, former prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar consistently sends messages to influential former mujahideen commanders in these provinces, inviting them to join him in the struggle against the Western forces currently in Afghanistan.

Hekmatyar was a leader of Muslim Brotherhood movement in Kabul in the early 1970s. He later relocated to Pakistan to organise an Islamic opposition movement against the Mohammad Daud Khan regime in Afghanistan and was one of the major mujahideen commanders in the war against the former Soviet Union. In the early 1990s, Hekmatyar ran several radical Islamist training camps in Afghanistan and was a pioneer in sending mercenaries to fight jihad in other Islamic conflicts. He is thought to have returned to Afghanistan from Iran in 2002.