KABUL, Sept 20, (AFP): A Taleban suicide bomber with concealed explosives in a turban on Tuesday assassinated former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was leading government peace efforts, police said.
The bomber struck during a meeting at the Kabul home of Rabbani, who was last year appointed chief of the Afghan High Peace Council that President Hamid Karzai tasked with negotiating with the Taleban.
His death is the most high-profile political assassination since the 2001 US-led invasion ousted the Taleban from power and comes just two months after Karzai’s brother Ahmed Wali Karzai was also killed.
The attackers arrived at Rabbani’s house with Mohammad Massom Stanikzai, Rabbani’s deputy, for a meeting before the turban bomber detonated his explosives, according to one source amid conflicting reports of the incident.
A member of the High Peace Council, Fazel Karim Aymaq, said the men had come with “special messages” from the Taleban and were “very trusted.”
Kabul criminal investigations chief Mohammad Zaher said two men “negotiating with Rabbani on behalf of the Taleban” arrived at his house, one with explosives hidden in his turban.
“He approached Rabbani and detonated his explosives. Rabbani was martyred and four others including Massom Stanikzai (his deputy) were injured.”
The bomber struck close to the US embassy, making it the the second attack within a week in Kabul’s supposedly secure diplomatic zone.
The killing prompted Afghan President Hamid Karzai to cut short his visit to the United States, his spokesman said, adding he was still expected to meet US President Barack Obama as scheduled before leaving.
An AFP reporter saw an ambulance at the scene and said police had blocked off surrounding roads.
The reporter also heard guards at the house shouting for an ambulance for Rabbani’s deputy.
Two of the former president’s political allies, who did not want to be named and speaking before police confirmed Rabbani’s death, wept as they told AFP he had been killed.
“Yes, he is dead,” said one of the two sources by telephone.
The Taleban were not immediately reachable for comment, but the insurgency led by its militia has hit Kabul increasingly hard in recent months.
The Pakistani government swiftly condemned the assassination, describing Rabbani as a “friend” with whom Islamabad was working closely on peace efforts.
“The people of Pakistan stand by their Afghan brothers and sisters in this moment of grief,” a joint statement released by President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said, just days after the United States accused the Pakistani government of having ties to Taleban faction the Haqqani network.
Among the most high-profile attacks was last week’s 20-hour siege of the US embassy and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) headquarters which left 14 people dead.
Rabbani was president of Afghanistan from 1992 until the Taleban took power in 1996 and headed a country wracked by civil war.
Karzai’s brainchild, the High Peace Council was intended to open a dialogue with insurgents who have been trying to bring down his government since the US-led invasion overthrew their regime.
The 68-member council, hand-picked by the president, was inaugurated on Oct 7, 2010, amid mounting reports of secret peace talks with Taleban leaders and key insurgent groups.
Delivering his acceptance speech, Rabbani said he was “confident” that peace was possible, according to a statement from the palace.
“I hope we are able to take major steps in bringing peace and fulfil our duties with tireless effort and help from God,” he was quoted as saying.
According to Human Rights Watch, Rabbani is among prominent Afghans implicated in war crimes during the brutal fighting that killed or displaced hundreds of thousands of Afghans in the early 1990s.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the suicide attack that assassinated the scholar with a silver-white beard shortly before dusk at his well-guarded Kabul home in the shadow of the American embassy.
Yet suspicion quickly fell on the Taleban, driven by the motive of his near one-year tenure on the Council.
Rabbani was elected chairman of the peace council set up to broker an end to the war with the Taleban in October 2010, shortly after its inauguration.
The 68-member council was hand-picked by Karzai and inaugurated last October amid mounting reports of secret peace talks with Taleban leaders and key insurgent groups, which have since largely come to nothing.
But as president and as possible negotiator, Rabbani suffered from being an ethnic Tajik in a country dominated by the majority Pashtun ethnic group — one reason why his presidential rule was never recognised inside the country.
After the 2001 US-led invasion ousted the Taleban regime, he initially returned as president of the first UN-recognised “government”.
But he fast handed power to the Pashtun tribesman Karzai, taking something of a backseat — although he was elected an MP in the first-post Taleban parliament.
Born in 1940 in Faizabad in the northeastern province of Badakhshan, Rabbani left the shadows of the Hindu Kush mountains for an academic career.
He studied in Kabul and then in Cairo’s prestigious Al-Azhar university, and then took the helm of the moderate Islamist and anti-communist campus movement in the 1960’s and 1970’s.
In 1971 he took over the leadership of the Jamiat-i-Islami (Islamic Society) party, but the dominant communist groups of the day forced him into exile in Pakistan.
After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, his party played a central role in the jihad (holy war) against the Red Army, but Rabbani was overshadowed by Afghan-based Ahmad Shah Masood and Ismail Khan.
When the Soviet-installed regime collapsed in April 1992, Rabbani returned to Kabul and in June took over Afghanistan’s presidency.
But it was a tenure under siege: Kabul was rocketed by Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, in a siege that inflicted thousands of civilian casualties.
Rabbani was forced from power in 1996 by the Taleban movement of “Islamic Students”, who helped restore order after the years of fighting which had decimated the city.
But their strict interpretation of Islamic law — including the banning of women from work and education — meant Rabbani held onto his status as the UN-recognised leader of Afghanistan.