Gulbuddin Hekmatyar

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is an Afghan politician and warlord.

A warlord is a leader able to exercise military, economic, and political control over a subnational territory within a sovereign state due to his ability to mobilize loyal armed forces.

Afghan refers to someone or something from Afghanistan, in particular a citizen of that country.

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar New Interview with Amin Karim 2013 by Amin Karim

He is the founder and current leader of the Hezb-e Islami political party,, ideologically influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood and more specifically Sayyid Qutb, having served as former Prime Minister of Afghanistan.

The Society of the Muslim Brothers, shortened to the Muslim Brotherhood, is a transnational Sunni Islamist organization founded in Egypt by Islamic scholar and schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna in 1928.

Sayyid Qutb was an Egyptian author, educator, Islamic theorist, poet, and the leading member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s.

Afghanistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, is a landlocked country located within South Asia and Central Asia.

Afghanistan - Arrival Mestiri To Broker Peace by AP Archive

After escaping from prison in Afghanistan in 1973, he moved to Pakistan.

When the Soviet occupation began in 1979, the CIA began funding his rapidly growing Hezb-e Islami mujahideen organization through the Pakistani ISI.

The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the United States federal government, tasked with gathering, processing and analyzing national security information from around the world, primarily through the use of human intelligence.

Mujahideen is the plural form of mujahid, the term for one engaged in Jihad.

Following the ouster of Afghan President Mohammad Najibullah in 1992, Hekmatyar and other warlords began a civil war, which led to the deaths of around 50,000 civilians in Kabul alone.

Mohammad Najibullah Ahmadzai, commonly known as Najibullah or Dr. Najib, was the President of Afghanistan from 1987 until 1992, when the mujahideen took over Kabul.

Kabul is the capital of Afghanistan as well as its largest city, located in the eastern section of the country.

In the meantime, Hekmatyar was promoted to becoming Prime Minister of Afghanistan from 1993 to 1994 and again briefly in 1996, before the Taliban takeover of Kabul forcing him to flee to Iran's capital Tehran.

The Taliban, alternatively spelled Taleban, is an Islamic fundamentalist political movement in Afghanistan currently waging war within that country.

Sometime after the Taliban's fall in 2001 he went to Pakistan, leading his party militia to a new armed campaign against Hamid Karzai's government and the international coalition in Afghanistan.

Hamid Karzai served as President of Afghanistan for almost ten years, from 7 December 2004 to 29 September 2014.

A highly controversial commander, Hekmatyar has been dubbed the "Butcher of Kabul", accused of being "almost single-handedly" responsible for the destruction and civilian deaths Kabul experienced in the early 1990s.

He has also been accused of spending "more time fighting other Mujahideen than killing Soviets."

In 2016, he signed a peace deal with the Afghan government, allowing his return to Afghanistan after almost 20 years in exile.