The Dirty Dozen

A guide to twelve of AfPak’s most wanted insurgents

A suspected insurgent is detained in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. (Photo credit: Teru Kuwayama / Basetrack.org via Newsweek / The Daily Beast)

April 10, 2011

As a new fighting season heats up in Afghanistan, here’s a quick guide to 12 of the most-hunted insurgent commanders on the front lines.

Excerpt

[The Taliban’s] senior leadership seems to be largely intact and determined to make the coming spring and summer as painful as possible for the coalition’s troops. The overall strategy for doing that is in the hands of a few top insurgent commanders, such as Abdul Qayyum Zakir, the former Guantánamo inmate who directs the Taliban’s combat operations; Sirajuddin Haqqani, who pledges loyalty to the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, but runs his own fierce militia of in eastern Afghanistan and Kabul; and the notorious mujahedin warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who commands a third guerrilla force, smaller than the others but better organized, from his mountain redoubt along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Still, they don’t risk their lives by conducting the actual war on the ground. That’s left to a group of lesser-known lieutenants who include some of the insurgency’s most important and aggressive operatives. A brief who’s who:

Maulvi Hassan Rahmani

Maulvi Abdul Rauf Khadim

Maulvi Abdul Kabir

Mullah Abdul Razaq Akhund

Qari Baryal

Maulvi Ishmael

Maulvi Gul Mohammad

Sheik Dost Mohammad

Amir Khan Muttaqi

Hakimullah Mehsud

Mullah Noor (Toofan) Jamal

Hafiz Gul Bahadur

Click for thumbnail sketches of individual commanders

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