Cover Story 
 

Cover Story

Elusive Hibatullah Akhundzada

September 2021

Hibatullah Akhundzada is the third Supreme Leader of the Taliban and the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. A political and religious figure, he was born in 1961 in the Panjwayi district of Kandahar Province in Afghanistan. In May 2016, he was elected as the leader of the Taliban, following the killing of the previous leader, Akhtar Mansour, in a U.S. drone strike. Similar to his two predecessors, Hibatullah Akhundzada is also given the title of Amir al-Momineen (Commander of the Faithful) by the Taliban.

Akhundzada has served as the head of the Sharia courts and unlike many Taliban leaders, he is more of a religious leader than a military commander, reportedly running a chain of madrassas in Balochistan. He is ethnically a Pashtun, the group that makes up the majority of the Afghani population. His first name, Hibatullah is an Arabic word which means “the Gift of God”.

In the 1980s, Akhundzada was involved in the resistance against the Soviets. In the middle of the 1990s, he became one of the early members of the Taliban. After Farah Province was captured by the Taliban, Akhundzada was put in charge of fighting crime in the area. Later, he was appointed as the head of the Taliban’s military court in eastern Nangarhar. He also served as the deputy head of the Supreme Court during the Taliban’s previous rule of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. When they captured Kabul in 1996, Akhundzada was made a member of the Department of the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. He later moved to Kandahar and was put in charge of the training of some 100,000 students at Jihadi Madrasa.

After the US-led invasion in 2001, Akhundzada became the head of the group’s Council of Religious Scholars and later served as the Chief Justice of the Sharia Courts of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. He also became the advisor of Mullah Omar, who founded the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in 1996. Both Mullah Omar and Mullah Mansour consulted Akhundzada on various matters.


Reportedly, Akhundzada lived in Afghanistan the 2001–2016 period with no travel record, though he had close ties with the Quetta Shura, comprising veterans of the Taliban regime that ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s.

Hibatullah Akhundzada was appointed the Taliban supreme commander on May 25, 2016 as a replacement for Mullah Akhtar Mansour. He was previously a deputy of Mansour. Mohammad Yaqoob, the eldest son of Mullah Omar, and Sirajuddin Haqqani, the leader of the Taliban’s Haqqani network, have worked as Akhundzada’s deputies.

In May 2021, Akhundzada asked the Afghan people to get the U.S. forces to withdraw from Afghanistan and setting up of an Islamic Emirate. In August 2021, forces under Akhundzada’s nominal command began a general offensive seeking to achieve a final victory in the war against the U.S.-led allied forces. Under the leadership of Akhundzada, the United States troops withdrew, and the Taliban gained control of Kabul. On August 18, 2021, it was announced that, based on the general amnesty issued by Akhundzada, “it was decided to release political detainees from all prisons of Afghanistan”. By the time, the Taliban had already taken control of key prisons across the country and freed thousands of inmates, including ISIL fighters, al-Qaeda members and senior Taliban figures.

Akhundzada has been the subject of assassination two times. In 2012, an attempt was made to assassinate him in Quetta. According to Mullah Ibrahim, during one of Akhundzada’s lectures in Quetta, a man stood up among the students and pointed a pistol at Akhundzada from a close range, but the pistol stuck. Mullah Ibrahim recalled, the man was trying to shoot him, but he failed, and the Taliban rushed to tackle the man. The Taliban accused the National Directorate of Security, the Afghan intelligence agency, for the assassination attempt.

During Friday prayers on 16 August 2019, a powerful blast tore through a grand mosque in Balochistan. The attack killed Akhundzada’s brother Hafiz Ahmadullah and their father. Ahmadullah had succeeded Akhundzada as leader of the Khair-ul-Madarais Mosque, which had served as the main meeting place of the Quetta Shura, after Akhundzada was appointed as the Taliban emir. More of Akhundzada’s relatives were later confirmed to have died in the blast. The High Council of Afghanistan Islamic Emirate claimed responsibility for the attack, adding that the prime target was Akhundzada.

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