Burhanuddin Rabbani
Burhanuddin Rabbani was president of Afghanistan from June 1992 to December 2001, the Tajik theologian who led the Jamiat-i-Islami party of the mujahideen, whose commander was Massoud. He held the presidency of a state that governed the northern half of Kabul and, after 1996, the Panjshir and the north-east, and was recognised at the United Nations throughout. The Taliban were recognised by three countries and he by the rest. He was a professor of Islamic law at Kabul university, trained at al-Azhar, who had founded the Islamist movement among the students in the 1960s against the communists. He fled to Pakistan in 1974 when Daoud arrested the Islamists. He ran his party from Peshawar through the Soviet war, the largest of the seven, with Massoud in the Panjshir and Ismail Khan in Herat as its commanders. The Peshawar accord of April 1992 that divided the state after Najibullah fell gave him the presidency for four months from June. He kept it for nine years. The four months became a two-year term by a council he chose. The war with Hekmatyar's Hezb-i-Islami, whose rockets fell on Kabul from the south from August 1992, killed fifty thousand of the city's people and destroyed the half of it that the Soviets had not. The Hazara quarter of Afshar was sacked by his own forces in February 1993. The Taliban, when they came north in 1995 and 1996, found a city that did not much mind who took it. He left Kabul with Massoud on 26 September 1996 for the Panjshir and Taloqan. He presided over the Northern Alliance from Faizabad. He was flown back into Kabul on 17 November 2001 after the Taliban left. He handed the presidency to Karzai at the Bonn agreement's instruction on 22 December. He did it with a bad grace, and did it. He was born in Faizabad, Badakhshan, and sat in the parliament of 2005 for the province. He was chairman of the High Peace Council that Karzai set up in 2010 to talk to the Taliban. In that capacity he received at his house in Kabul on 20 September 2011 a Taliban envoy with a bomb in his turban, who embraced him and killed him, on his seventy-first birthday. His son Salahuddin was foreign minister under Ghani. The party is the Tajik party still.
- Lived: 1940 CE – 2011 CE
- Nationality: Afghan
- Roles: president, theologian, politician
