Abdul Salam Zaeef

Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef (born 1967) is an Afghan diplomat who was the Afghan ambassador to Pakistan before the US invasion of Afghanistan.

Zaeef was born in 1967 to a poor family in the small village of Zangiabad, between the Arghandab and Dori rivers, in the Panjwayi District of Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan.

His family had moved there a few years earlier, because of fighting over land in their home village of Jaldak in Zabul Province.

His uncle, Mullah Nezam, was accused of killing 16 people in the fighting and was later killed by government forces.

Zaeef's mother died when he was one or two years old.

The family moved to Mushan, another village nearby, and then to Rangrezan in Maywand District.

His father died in 1975.

Zaeef was taken to live with an aunt and cousins at Charshakha, then in Panjwayi District and now in Zhari District, for a year and a half.

He then was taken to live with a maternal uncle and studied at a madrassa at Sangisar, receiving a basic religious education in the years before the Soviet invasion.

In 1978 he attended primary school in Kandahar city for a year.

That year the Communists took power in Afghanistan and fighting broke out between mujahideen and the government.

He fled with his relatives and many others to Pakistan in January 1979, when he was 10 years old, ending up in a refugee camp in Nushki, Balochistan.

He returned to Afghanistan to fight with the mujahideen in 1983, when he was 15, without telling his relatives.

After two months with a mujahideen group at Pashmol (now in Zhari District), he joined a group of fighting taliban (Islamic students and scholars) at Nelgham, not far from some of his childhood villages.

A few days later, they were attacked by Afghan army and Soviet forces for ten days, before the taliban fled to Zangiabad.

There the mujahideen were attacked for another ten days, with hundreds of mujahideen and civilians killed.

Then the fighting moved to Pashmol for two weeks, until the mujahideen were driven out.

Zaeef's group continued to operate from Nelgham, sometimes travelling by foot as far as Helmand or Uruzgan provinces to fight, and undertaking religious study at the same time.

After nearly a year with the taliban, he was ordered to take a badly wounded comrade to Pakistan for treatment, and there he reunited with his relatives, who had settled in Quetta.

There he resumed school and religious studies for nine months.

Then he received training from Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence in rocket systems, before re-entering Afghanistan in 1985.

While on the way to Kandahar, his group was ambushed, one of nine times he was ambushed during the war, and Zaeef was shot in the waist, after which he was taken back to Pakistan.

He fought in Kandahar Province for the next few years.

He fought for weeks in the Battle of Arghandab in 1987, including at Sangisar, when Mullah Mohammed Omar was one of the commanders and was wounded, losing an eye.

It was the last big battle in southern Kandahar.

By 1988 Zaeef was a junior commander.

In an attack on Kandahar Airport that year, he commanded 58 men and the fighting was so intense that 50 of them were killed.

After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, he worked as a laborer and as a mullah in a village.

Troubled by lawlessness that developed in Kandahar, in 1991 he took his wife and children and moved to Pakistan.

In 1992 he returned and became the imam of a mosque in a small village near Kandahar.

In 1994 he started to meet with other veterans of the war with the Soviets who wanted to take action against lawlessness and rogue mujahideen commanders who were controlling roads and cities.

In the autumn of that year they approached various people to be their operational leader, including Mohammed Omar, who was living at Sangisar, who agreed.

Forty to fifty people attended the founding meeting of what became known as the Taliban at the White Mosque at Sangisar.

They started to apply sharia in the local area and set up a checkpoint on Highway 1 nearby.

They gained support quickly and soon had 400 members.

When rogue mujahideen on the highway through Maywand and Panjwayi districts refused to stop extorting and harassing road users, they attacked them.

From there they then cleared the roads in Kandahar city and up to the border with Pakistan.

Once they had control of Kandahar, Zaeef was appointed to assist a sharia judge.

He was detained in Pakistan in the fall of 2001 and held until 2005 in the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp.

The United Nations removed Zaeef from its list of terrorists in July 2010.