Following the Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan’s capital city of Kabul, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar is expected to be named the country’s next president.
Baradar, a close ally of Mullah Umar and one of the Taliban’s co-founders, currently heads the Taliban’s political office and is also a member of the group’s Doha negotiating team.
Baradar, a trusted Taliban commander, was apprehended by forces in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi in 2010 and released in 2018.
Baradar was detained until 2018, when he was transferred to Qatar.
He was appointed chief of the Taliban’s political office here, where he oversaw the signing of the US pull-out deal.
According to reports, the Taliban leader was born in Afghanistan’s Oruzgan Province in 1968. He belongs to the Popalzai tribe of Pashtuns.
\Mullah Abdul Ghani served in the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet-backed Afghan government during the Soviet-Afghan War in Kandahar in the 1980s.
Later, Baradar and his previous commander, Mohammad Omar, ran a madrassa in Maiwand, Kandahar Province.
He assisted Omar in the formation of the Taliban in southern Afghanistan in 1994.
In the early 1990s, amid the turmoil and corruption of the civil war that ensued after the Soviet withdrawal, the two would create the Taliban movement.
\Following the Taliban’s defeat in 2001, Baradar is said to have been one of a small group of insurgents who approached interim Afghan President Hamid Karzai with a letter proposing a possible arrangement in which the militants would recognise the new government.