Hibatullah Akhundzada
Hibatullah Akhundzada has been the leader of the Taliban since May 2016 and the head of the restored Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan since August 2021, the cleric from Kandahar who has never appeared on camera, never left Kandahar, and never met a foreign government. He rules a country of forty million people by decrees read out by others. That is a stranger kind of government than the one Mullah Omar ran and the same. He was the movement's chief justice under Omar, the head of its sharia courts in the emirate of the 1990s and of its religious commission in the insurgency. He was the man who wrote the fatwas that licensed the suicide bombings and sent his own son as one in 2017. He was chosen in May 2016 in the day after Mansour was killed by an American drone as the compromise who was neither the Haqqanis nor Omar's son. He was a scholar rather than a fighter, with Sirajuddin Haqqani and Omar's son Yaqub as his deputies. That is still the structure. The Doha agreement of February 2020 was signed in his name and the return to Kabul of 15 August 2021 was made in it. The government since has been his against his own ministers'. The girls' secondary schools closed in March 2022 on the morning they were to open, by his order, against the cabinet's. The universities were closed to women in December 2022. The women were banned from working for the UN and the aid agencies, from the parks and from speaking in public. There were the vice and virtue law of August 2024, the floggings and the stonings resumed. The opium poppy was banned in April 2022 and, alone among his decrees, enforced. The crop fell by nineteen twentieths, which the farmers have not forgiven. The country's economy, which is aid, was cut off. The Haqqanis in Kabul, who want the schools open and the money in, have said so in public. He has moved the ministries' decisions to Kandahar one by one. That is where the power is and where the sole known photograph of him, a passport picture, was not taken. He was born in Panjwai, Kandahar, the son of a village imam. He taught in a madrasa in Quetta through the years of exile. No country recognises his government except Russia, since 2025, and the states that deal with it anyway. That is most of them.
- Lived: 1961 CE – ?
- Nationality: Afghan
- Roles: emir, cleric
