Afghan Warlord Pledges to Back Bin Laden

An Afghan police officers poses for the camera as he guards the area of the destroyed former Russian Culture House in Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, May 1, 2006. The culture house was built during the Russian occupation in Afghanistan, then destroyed by different armed militias as being one of the front lines during the civil war, later occupied by hundreds of refugees that moved to Kabul after the end of the Taliban regime, and now it was pacifically evicted by the actual government. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd) (Rodrigo Abd - AP)

Hekmatyar, a Sunni Muslim and ethnic Pashtun leader of the militant Hezb-e-Islami group, speaks excellent English. He gained a reputation for extreme violence while leading militant attacks against the 1979-1989 Soviet occupation and repeatedly shifted his support during more than 20 years of conflict in Afghanistan.

Bin Laden and Hekmatyar forged their relationship during the mujahedeen campaign against the Soviets. The Afghan warlord built a powerful militant force through CIA support, funneled through Pakistan.

During the 1992-1996 civil war that ravaged Kabul after the Soviet pullout, killing 50,000 people, then-prime minister Hekmatyar turned his fighters against those of President Burhanuddin Rabbani, an ethnic Tajik. But the pair banded together in a failed attempt to stave off the emergence of the hard-line Taliban regime, which eventually drove Hekmatyar out of Kabul in 1996.

He went into exile in Iran, where he spent several years before returning after the U.S.-led coalition toppled the Taliban in late 2001 following the Sept. 11 attacks.

But his once close ties with Washington dissipated as American troops began hunting Islamic militants, particularly bin Laden and those allied with him. His fall from grace pushed him into a marriage of convenience with fellow militant outcasts, the Taliban.

In May 2002, his former CIA patrons reportedly ordered a Hellfire missile attack fired from an unmanned spy plane while he was in Afghanistan.

Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman Gen. Mohammed Zahir Azimi said Hekmatyar's fighters were becoming "increasingly isolated" and his tactics had changed from attacking soldiers to "targeting innocent people like teachers, shopkeepers and NGOs and putting bombs on the road."

Singapore-based militant expert Rohan Gunaratna said Hekmatyar was merging with al-Qaida and the Taliban in an attempt to inflame Afghanistan's insurgency and reinvigorate his ties with bin Laden.

"Traditionally Hekmatyar and bin Laden have been friends, so certainly this is a case of two old friends uniting forces," Gunaratna said.

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Associated Press writers Amir Shah in Kabul and Mariam Fam in Cairo, Egypt, contributed to this report.