Word: hezb
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...past eight years, Afghan rebel leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar has been a phantom presence on the edges of the Afghan insurgency. His Hezb-i-Islami militia - said to number between 2,000 and 3,000 fighters, and which operates independently of the Taliban - has carried out scores of ambushes on coalition forces in the northeastern mountains of Afghanistan and has claimed credit for two attempts on the life of President Hamid Karzai...
...seems, the veteran warlord wants to come in from the cold - as a peace broker between Karzai and the Taliban. Hekmatyar last week dispatched a 10-man delegation to Kabul to name an offer: If NATO agreed to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan starting by this summer, Hezb-i-Islami would cease hostilities and urge the Taliban to do the same. The mid-2010 withdrawal demand is flexible, according to delegation spokesman Mohammad Daoud Abedi, who told journalists in Kabul that the deadline "is a start. This is not the word of the Koran that we cannot change...
...impetus for the new peace effort may have come earlier this month, when a group of 70 Hezb-i-Islami fighters in the northern province of Baghlan found themselves on the losing end of a gunfight with the Taliban. Besieged, Hekmatyar's men opted to surrender to nearby government troops as a way to save themselves. That incident, however, underscores how abysmal Hekmatyar's relations are with the Taliban and casts doubt over his ability to deliver Taliban leaders to the negotiating table. No sooner was the new peace plan announced in Kabul than did the Taliban vigorously reject...
...Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) ever since he was the main recipient of the CIA and Saudi aid that was channeled by the ISI to anti-Soviet Afghan rebels in the 1980s. And despite the fact that since 2002, the U.S. has considered Hekmatyar a terrorist, the Hezb-i-Islami chief operates more or less openly inside Pakistan. He maintains houses for his family in Peshawar and Islamabad, and recruits his fighters from Afghan refugee camps near Peshawar, all under the watchful eye of the ISI. (See TIME's video "Obama...