U.S. ally turned foe said to have died in Afghanistan
KABUL, Afghanistan — A top leader of an insurgent group affiliated with the Taliban, who was once an ally of the United States and later became one of its fiercest opponents in Afghanistan, has died, the Taliban announced Tuesday.
The radical Islamist group said in a statement that Jalaluddin Haqqani, leader of one of the most effective militant networks in Afghanistan, “passed away after a long battle with illness.” It did not specify a time, place or cause of death. He reportedly had Parkinson’s disease and had been paralyzed for a decade.
Haqqani “was ill and bedridden for the past several years,” the statement said. He was believed to be in his late 70s. His sons long ago took over the day-today running of the group known as the Haqqani network, and at a time of increased Taliban attacks on the government, his death is expected to have little impact.
A Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, told the Associated Press that Haqqani died Monday inside Afghanistan. There was no independent confirmation of that. The Haqqani network is believed to be based primarily in Pakistan’s tribal Waziristan region, and the Taliban have been known to delay announcements of leaders’ deaths, sometimes by years. There were unconfirmed reports of Haqqani’s death in 2015.
Haqqani was among the main recipients of U.S. covert military and financial aid during the occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet army in the 1980s, and he was once hailed as a freedom fighter by President Ronald Reagan. He joined the Taliban movement after it took over the country in 1996, serving as a Cabinet minister and provincial governor.
As an Arabic speaker, Haqqani attracted Arab fighters who joined the battle against the Soviets and, later, the Taliban’s campaign against Afghan resistance forces. He notably befriended Osama bin Laden and protected the al-Qaida leader in camps he controlled.
When Afghan forces backed by U.S. airstrikes toppled the Taliban in 2001, Haqqani put his considerable military experience to work in fighting the Americans. His network introduced suicide bombing to Afghanistan, experts said. The United States formally declared the Haqqani network a terrorist organization in 2012.
Hailing from a powerful Pashtun tribe in eastern Afghanistan, Haqqani had historical ties to some of the rich Arab nations and Pakistan, including the Pakistani intelligence service. He set up his own front in the border region with Pakistan and called it the Haqqani network, while still considering himself a member of the Taliban.
The network launched several high-profile attacks against U.S. and Afghan troops. Now run by one of his sons, Sirajuddin Haqqani, it also has been behind a number of abductions of foreign nationals in Afghanistan.
Haqqani lost a wife, four of his sons and several other family members in various U.S. airstrikes and attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan over the years.
One of his sons has been languishing for the past several years in an Afghan prison under a death sentence. The government, however, has reportedly hesitated to execute him because the network since 2016 has held captive two instructors who taught at American University in Kabul; one of them is an American citizen.
Haqqani was variously reported to have at least seven sons, and possibly as many as 12.
Observers, lawmakers and officials think his demise will have no major impact on the Taliban’s expanding advances on the battlefield or on efforts to revive stalled peace talks with the group.
Among those who see Haqqani’s death as unlikely to affect the current political or military situation in the country is Michael Kugelman, an expert on Afghanistan at the Washington-based Wilson Center.
“Given how long he had been ill, his death won’t have a big impact on the war. But still a major loss for the (Haqqani network),” he said in a tweet.
Born in eastern Afghanistan in 1939, according to an interview he gave to an Arabic jihadi magazine in the 1980s, Haqqani studied at a conservative madrassa, or Islamic religious school, in northwestern Pakistan. He opposed Afghanistan’s monarchy and took up arms against the country’s leftist governments after the king was overthrown in 1973.