Background of the "Northern Alliance"

People who had paid no attention to Afghanistan since General Boris Gromov walked across the "Friendship bridge" into the Soviet Union early in 1989 are suddenly paying close attention to the fighting forces of the so-called "Northern Alliance", and — despite continuing efforts to find ethnic Pashtun allies against the Taliban — the largely minority-dominated "Northern Alliance" has also, for all its faults, become the main fighting "force in being" on the ground for the US war against the Taliban and Usama bin Ladin's Al-Qa‘ida. Pakistan had warned that a Northern Alliance occupation of Kabul would be unacceptable and pointed to bloody ethnic fighting which took place there between 1992 and 1996, blaming the present leadership of the Alliance, but when Kabul fell, there was no one else available to provide security but the Northern Alliance, who quickly swept across half of Afghanistan. While Pakistan and others lament its successes, some question why the US did not push for an even earlier Alliance offensive.

Since so much of the commentary has been written by those who have only recently had to bring themselves up to speed on Afghanistan, it seemed appropriate for The Estimate — which ran its first Dossier on Afghanistan in its seventh issue over 12 years ago (July 7, 1989) and began covering the Taliban over a year before they took Kabul — to offer some historical context for the body of fighters now being called the Northern Alliance.

"Northern Alliance" appeared in quotes in the first paragraph because that is not what it calls itself: it is officially the United Front, and it claims to represent the Islamic State of Afghanistan, which holds that country's United Nations seat. (The Taliban government calls itself the Islamic Amirate of Afghanistan.) It is, essentially, a rump of the coalition government which governed (or at least ruled) in Kabul from 1992 to 1996, but without most of its Pashtun elements. Several of its key commanders are old rivals of each other and are really ethnic warlords, so it is more of an alliance than a United Front, and northern to the near exclusion of the Pashtun-dominated south of the country. So "Northern Alliance" is a more accurate description of its present makeup than its official name.

Because it is a loose alignment of fighting forces that never really successfully governed as a united coalition, and for much of the 1992-96 period its President and Prime Minister were fighting each other. The US and other outside powers face some problems in trying to put together a coalition government for post-Taliban Afghanistan. Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was President of the coalition government of 1992-96, claims to still be the President of Afghanistan and does not seem much interested in broader coalitions, but other elements in the Alliance have agreed to try to find a modus vivendi with the former King, Mohammad Zahir Shah (Profile in The Estimate of October 5, 2001), who is Pashtun and who, many hope, might head a national unity government (perhaps in a non-Royal role). Many Northern Alliance figures have already been profiled in recent issues; others are described in this one.

The fall of Mazar-i-Sharif and the rapid advances which followed it (See Pages One and Four) have suddenly made the Northern Alliance seem considerably less ineffectual than many had begun to suspect it to be; at presstime it apparently controlled all the major cities except Kandahar. But what is being seen as good news by the planners of the US military campaign is also awakening alarm among others who remember the quarreling and bloodletting which followed the 1992 capture of Kabul by the mujahedin warlords, a bloodletting which helped prompt the rise and spread of the Taliban. Precisely because it is not itself unified, the so-called Northern Alliance is hard to characterize fairly; its military commanders range from longtime radical Islamists, to heroic fighters against the Soviets, to men who were convinced Communists until almost the last gasp of the Najibullah regime in 1992, and these varying leaders' visions for a future Afghanistan are probably that diverse as well. They are ethnically just as diverse as ideologically: the fighting forces are mostly ethnic Tajik, Uzbek, or Hazara, but the commanders still include a few Pashtuns; Herati Persians and some Turkmen and other minorities are also represented. Until the United States suddenly discovered their utility, they had also depended on quite diverse foreign patrons: the Uzbeks on Russia and Uzbekistan, the Tajiks on Russia and Tajikistan, and the Hazaras, who are Shi‘ite, on Iran.

Many of the leaders are old rivals, some of them old enemies; what they have had in common since 1996 is that they hate the Taliban at least slightly more than they hate each other. Similarly, between 1979 and 1989, those who were fighting against the Soviets (one main current leader, ‘Abdul Rashid Dostum, was fighting for the Soviets) also shared mainly in the fact that they hated the Soviets slightly more than they hated each other. What worries some is what happened in 1992 when the Soviet regime of Najibullah collapsed and Kabul fell to the mujahedin.

To be fair, however, one of the key figures in that bloodbath — Pashtun Hizb-e Islami leader Gulbuddin Hikmatyar — is not a member of the Northern Alliance and in fact is today openly supporting the Taliban from his Iranian exile. Nor was the bloodshed in Kabul in 1992 unique; fighting over the spoils is an old tradition. It was, however, very bloody, and the fact that it essentially went on for years helped rally support for the Taliban when they appeared.

Afghanistan has a bloody history. One reason the former King is enjoying a burst of popularity is that his regime, however weak and ineffectual, was not only the last but one of the few moments in Afghan history where something like peace and national unity could be experienced. Few outside the royal family and the old aristocracy would claim that it was a golden age — the country was underdeveloped, weak, some would say corrupt — but it was less dismal than everything which has followed.

As noted in the introduction, "Northern Alliance" is a better term than the official "National Front" because the Alliance really is little more than a group of allied fighting forces bound together less by a common ideology than by a common enmity toward the Taliban. Essentially, it is the rump or remnant of the coalition government which was formed in 1992, though that coalition was rent by internal fighting from the beginning.

The Alliance is usually described as mostly Tajiks and Uzbeks, though this is an oversimplification. The most famous fighting force, that of the late Ahmad Shah Mas‘oud, is Tajik, while that of ‘Abdul Rashid Dostum is Uzbek. The Hazara ethnic group, who are of Mongol origin and are Shi‘ite in religion, are represented through the Iranian-backed Hizb-e Wahdat, and the Hazaras represent a larger proportion of Afghanistan's population than either the Tajiks or the Uzbeks. And the forces of Isma‘el Khan, operating around Herat, contain many Persian-speaking Heratis.

It is also not true that there are no Pashtuns in the so-called Northern Alliance, though few of their fighting forces are Pashtun. One of the senior leaders, however, ‘Abdur Rabb Rasul Sayyaf, is Pashtun, though he is not known to have many forces at the moment and has been rendered somewhat suspect by his alleged involvement in arranging the interview in which Mas‘oud was assassinated.

Essentially, then, the Alliance today consists of those parts of the 1992 coalition of mujahedin groups which managed to hold together after the civil war between most of them and Hikmatyar; but it was Hikmatyar and later the Taliban who commanded most of the Pashtun support. Pashtuns are about 40% of the Afghan population by most estimates. But they are also the traditional rulers of Afghanistan and unlikely to be comfortable with a largely non-Pashtun group.

The different ethnic militias within the Northern Alliance also evolved in somewhat different ways. The main military force, that which spent the last several years holding the Panjshir Valley front north of Kabul, is largely Tajik because it is the force associated with the late Ahmad Shah Mas‘oud, generally acknowledged to have been the best commander of the anti-Soviet mujahedin. He was a member of Burhanuddin Rabbani's Jami‘at-e Islami movement, and the military commander of the Alliance until his death on September 9 in an assassination widely believed to be linked to the September 11 attacks on the US.

Mas‘oud's military skills had much to do with Rabbani becoming the President of the overall coalition in 1992. The Prime Minister was Hikmatyar, but he fought against most of the other ethnic groups in the civil war which helped destroy Kabul. In the end he lost control of the Pashtun factions to the Taliban, and the Northern Alliance (not then so called) consisted of the rump of the coalition.

As for the Uzbeks, the main Uzbek militia was that of ‘Abdul Rashid Dostum (Profile in the issue of October 19), which had been a self-contained Uzbek militia under the Najibullah Communist regime. It was Dostum's turning of his coat which helped bring about the mujahedin capture of Kabul. A longtime Communist, self-proclaimed atheist and hard drinker, he has always seemed an odd fit with the various Islamist mujahedin groups.

The Hazaras are mostly represented in the Hizb-e Wahdat, or Party of Unity, a grouping of various Shi‘ite movements put together as a front under Iranian auspices to fight the Soviets. During the first fighting near Kabul in 1995, their leader, ‘Abdul ‘Ali Mazari, was killed after being captured by the Taliban; his successor, ‘Abdul Karim Khalili, heads the front today. Though part of the Alliance, the Hazaras have depended on Iranian support -while the Tajiks and Uzbeks have been receiving aid from Russia and from their ethnic brethren in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Their strength has been in Bamiyan and neighboring provinces, which were particularly persecuted after being captured by the Taliban in 1998; though the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan received more publicity, the Shi‘ites who live there today were equally despised by the Sunni Taliban.

In the West, Herat has once again come under the control of Isma‘el Khan, a former officer in the Army in monarchy days who became a popular governor after the fall of the Soviets and who is now again in charge (Profile in The Estimate for October 19, 2001).

It is, in short, a very mixed bag of people: radical Islamists, ex-Communists, ethnic nationalists, etc. But they are the force in being on the ground; the reality of Afghanistan today is that they have more influence than the ex-King who has spent nearly 30 years in Rome.

Concern about including more Pashtuns (figures like Sayyaf are not particularly good candidates) is legitimate, but it also needs to be remembered that the Hazaras have long been treated as virtual foreigners by many Sunni Pashtuns, the Tajiks and Uzbeks have long felt excluded from power, and the centuries of Pashtun dominance helped bring about some of the conflicts which have wracked Afghanistan. Clearly, the Northern Alliance will not be the only participants in a future Afghanistan: just as clearly, they are determined to make sure that they redress some of the balance in favor of the Pashtuns which they feel characterized Afghan governments in the past.A Brief Who's Who of the Northern Alliance

The "Northern Alliance" — officially, the National Front — remains the remnant of the 1992 coalition government formed by the victorious mujahedin in Afghanistan; as a result it still includes a number of figures who are not really active or who no longer have armed forces loyal to them. It also enjoys the United Nations seat of Afghanistan — as the Islamic State of Afghanstan — and therefore maintains embassies in many foreign countries (though not in the US, where a dispute over the Embassy led to an end to representation of either the Alliance or the Taliban). What follows is a far from comprehensive guide to some main players.

Burhanuddin Rabbani: Rabbani was President of the 1992 coalition and still claims to be President of Afghanistan; some in the West think this may pose a problem in getting the Northern Alliance to join a broader-based coalition. This week Rabbani said that the ex-King would be welcome back as an ordinary citizen, but was himself headed for Kabul to try to stake his claim as President. Rabbani, born in 1940, was trained in Islamic law in Cairo and taught in Kabul; he originally belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood, and his Jami‘at-e Islami (Islamic Society or Organization) Party was an early moderate Islamist movement against the Soviets. An ethnic Tajik, his fellow Tajik Ahmad Shah Mas‘oud's military genius had much to do with the emergence of Rabbani as the coalition's President. Rabbani is from Badakhshan in the far northeast of Afghanistan.

Mohammad Qasim Fahim: Successor of Ahmad Shah Mas‘oud as overall military commander of the Alliance and also as leader of the Tajik fighters from the Panjshir Valley area; he is the subject of the Profile on Page 10 of this issue. He has been asked by the three commanders who took Mazar-i-Sharif — one Uzbek, one Tajik, and one Hazara — to mediate if there is a dispute between them.

Isma‘el Khan: The former mujahedin Commander and later governor of Herat has once again reconquered his home in the western city near the Iranian border. Isma‘el Khan was subject of a Profile in The Estimate for October 19.

‘Abdul Rashid Dostum: The Uzbek warlord who led the attack on Mazar-i-Sharif, Dostum was also the subject of a Profile in the October 19 issue.

‘Abdul Karim Khalili: Head of the Hizb-e Wahdat, the Shi‘ite Hazara force, he was driven out of the Bamiyan area by the Taliban in 1998; in 1995 he succeeded ‘Abdul ‘Ali Mazari as the leader when the latter was killed by the Taliban after falling into their hands.

Hajj (Ayatollah) Mohammad Muhaqiq: The Hazara and Hizb-e Wahdat commander in the north; he was one of three commanders, along with Dostum and the Tajik Mohammad Ustad ‘Atta, who took Mazar-i-Sharif. He is also Chariman of the Wahdat's Politburo and is sometimes accorded the clerical title of Ayatollah.

‘Abdur Rabb Rasul Sayyaf: Sayyaf is one of the last major Pashtun figures still affiliated with the Northern Alliance. His Ittehad-e Islami B'ra'i Azadi-ye Afghanistan (Islamic Union for Free Afghanistan) was an Islamist, "Wahhabi" movement supported by Saudi Arabia. Sayyaf and his remaining forces were based at Gulbahar after the fall of Kabul (he is from Kabul Province originally). Sayyaf, despite some Saudi support and training in the Arab world, never commanded large forces; today he is one of the few commanders from a Pashtun background who remained in the Northern Alliance, and he has been somewhat tainted by his recommendation that the Arab "reporters" who carried out the suicide attack on Ahmad Shah Mas‘oud be granted access.

Yunis Khalis: Another Pashtun fighter from Nangarhar Province in anti-Soviet days, Yunis Khalis had lost influence, first to Gulbuddin Hikmatyar and then to the Taliban. In recent days he has reappeared as leader of one of the factions fighting in Jalalabad.

Dr. ‘Abdullah: Though sometimes referred to in the Western press as ‘Abdullah ‘Abdullah, the Foreign Minister of the Islamic State of Afghanistan uses only one name, Dr. ‘Abdullah. A longtime backer of Ahmad Shah Mas‘oud, ‘Abdullah served as spokesman for the Rabbani government, then as the Islamic State of Afghanistan's UN Ambassador, then Deputy Foreign Minister, and more recently as Foreign Minister; he has become a familiar face on Western televisions in recent weeks.

A. G. Ravan Farhadi: The Islamic State of Afghanistan's (that is, the Northern Alliance's) Ambassador to the UN. The old government never lost its United Nations seat.

There are others as well, and some defecting Taliban commanders and Pashtun tribal leaders may make common cause with the alliance as events evolve.

Home

Current Issue

About Us

Back Issues

Resources

Subscribe