Abdul Waheed Baghrani, 51, a diminutive, soft-spoken man, has more the air of a religious leader than a wanted terrorist.
Yet he is the highest-level Taliban commander to accept the government's recent amnesty offer, coming down from the mountains after three and a half years on the run from U.S. forces.
"My message to those still fighting is they should take this golden chance and come back and build the country," he said in an interview late last month.
"We have an Islamic country and Shariah law, and we should accept the rule of the government," Baghrani said to his former allies.
The U.S. military and the Afghan government have greeted his decision as a sign of the success of the amnesty in undermining the Taliban insurgency. In response, U.S. forces have organized aid shipments to his region and offered to undertake new reconstruction projects.
But the killing Sunday of an anti-Taliban cleric, Maulavi Abdullah Fayaz, and the devastating bombing Tuesday at his funeral, seem to indicate that the Taliban have yet to be vanquished and that speaking against them, as Fayaz did the week before he was fatally shot, remains dangerous.
Also, the ease with which Baghrani evaded U.S. forces and the Soviet army before them, protected by his tribesmen in the mountains of southern Afghanistan and escaping a dozen raids on his home, is a sign of how simple it remains for insurgents to evade capture in this part of the world. "My home is very mountainous," Baghrani said. "I went up to the mountains and never left the country.
"I was among my people, my tribe, and they are very loyal to me," Baghrani explained.
He named half a dozen other senior Taliban commanders who he said were still at large.
The U.S. military once suspected Baghrani of harboring the top Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, in Baghran, his home region, in northern Helmand Province. He denied that, adding that Omar was from a different tribe and would never have trusted his life to a tribe other than his own. He said he did not know where Omar or the Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, were hiding, but suggested that they took refuge in neighboring Pakistan after the fall of the Taliban government in late 2001. Wherever bin Laden was, Baghrani predicted that he would be caught one day, because he was not among his own people and, as a result, risked betrayal.
Although he is a close associate of Omar, Baghrani is a renowned tribal chieftain and resistance leader in his own right. He goes by the name Rais-da-Baghran, or Chief of Baghran, the 160-kilometer long, or 100-mile-long, mountainous valley of northern Helmand where he lives. He fought the Soviet occupation for 10 years and joined the Taliban in the early days of the movement, he said, in the interest of national unity. "Afghans were fighting each other, and Afghanistan faced breaking up into several parts," he said. "As a national leader, I had to join them."
But, he said, he grew disillusioned with Al Qaeda's growing influence over the Taliban leadership. "In the beginning they stood for peace and stability," he said. "But then later there was a lot of foreign interference, and we tried a lot to persuade them to come over to the right way."
Baghrani never held an official post in the Taliban regime but supported its push to gain control of the whole country, sending his fighters into battle in northern Afghanistan.
His high standing in the regime became clear when he was asked by Omar in December 2001 to carry a message of the Taliban surrender to Hamid Karzai, who was then in the mountains north of Kandahar with U.S. Special Forces. "Mullah Omar sent me to Shah Wali Kot," in the mountainous region, Baghrani said. "I had to go two times to work out how to surrender Kandahar in a peaceful way."
The Taliban leadership signed a letter of surrender, agreeing to quit the city, the Taliban's last stronghold, in three days, he said. Omar left on the first night, he said, and on the third day, Baghrani set off for his home valley. He said he stayed there until the Americans started tracking him in 2003, because local rivals informed against him. "I was not opposed to Karzai or his government, but unfortunately after 25 years of war," he said.
He narrowly escaped capture in February 2003 when U.S. forces raided his village and called in airstrikes along the mountain ridges. A State Department official said at the time that Baghrani had escaped to Pakistan. But he said he stayed in the mountains, living with villagers and accompanied only by his second son, Muhammad Ibrahim, 21, and two or three men. "To have taken more men would have been dangerous," he said. He sent his three wives to stay with their fathers.
The Americans came through the valley about 20 times, he said. "Often they would come close to me, and I would watch them from the mountaintop with binoculars. They would camp out in my house."
When the Karzai government announced an amnesty early last month, he was one of the first to come in, going to Kabul to meet with Karzai. Last month he registered as a candidate for the parliamentary elections in September in Helmand Province. He said he wanted the U.S.-led forces to stay until Afghanistan could defend itself and maintain internal peace, but he demanded that they cease unilateral actions and stop raiding people's houses without being accompanied by Afghan troops. |
In a fresh bout of violence in Afghanistan, insurgents shot dead two more pro-government clerics in the troubled southern and eastern parts of the country. Maulvi Mohammad Gul, member of the Ulema Council in Afghanistan's Helmand province, and Maulvi Noor Ahmad, member of the Kunar Ulema Council, were killed in overnight attacks by armed men believed to be activists of the ousted Taliban movement. Earlier, a pro-government scholar Maulvi Mohammad Khan was killed in an explosion in the southwestern Khost province.
Suspected Taleban militants have shot dead a pro-government cleric in southern Afghanistan, the fourth such killing in the past two months. 
Afghan authorities have captured a 
A crowd of 600 Afghan clerics gathered in front of an historic mosque yesterday to strip the fugitive