Usama bin Ladin’s “Father Sheikh”:

Hizb‐e Islami. 143 Apparently, the creation of this party was not the result of Khalis’s
own political maneuvering, nor was it the direct descendant of an older formal
organization like the Muslim Youth or one of the other Kabul Islamist groups.
According to the biographical sources, Hizb‐e Islami (Khalis) came about because a
small group of leaders in adjacent provinces wanted to band together to fight. Khalis
was far older and better known than the other men, and he may have become their
leader simply by default. 144 The ethnic divisions that took place in the mujahidin
movement relatively early in the 1970s were largely entrenched by the time that Khalis
had risen to a position of prominence, and his party was almost entirely made up of
eastern Pashtuns.
The effect of reading Din Muhammad’s version in tandem with Ahmadzai’s account of
the same events is to underscore how dangerous and tentative Khalis’s initial days in
Afghanistan actually were. Insofar as there is a mythic component to these accounts, it
is located in the authors’ depiction of the precarious early state of the jihad. According
to Ahmadzai, when Khalis went into Nangarhar Province in 1979, he brought only
seventy men, twenty weapons, and twenty‐seven blankets. 145 This was scarcely enough
equipment to defend them from government attacks and to keep away frostbite, much
less for conducting offensive operations. When Khalis’s group moved into the Luy Wali
Valley after running out of ammunition, food had become so scarce that “a boiled egg
the war zone distinguished him from the other Peshawar party leaders. Gailani, Rabbani, Nabi, and
Mojaddedi rarely entered Afghanistan. Sayyaf’s and Hekmatyar’s trips into Afghanistan were brief,
heavily guarded, well photographed, and usually just over the border to ISI‐supplied base camps. Khalis
was different. He buckled on his pistol and joined operations against the enemy in the Tora Bora area of
southern Nangarhar, sleeping under the stars and firing at regime outposts.” See Tomsen, 306.
143 Muhammad (2008), 45. It is worth noting that there is exceedingly little good information about Jamil
al‐Rahman in the available literature. Although Din Muhammad claims that Jamil al‐Rahman was one of
the original commanders involved in the creation of Hizb‐e Islami (Khalis), in a recent interview Habib
al‐Rahman vigorously denied this. Habib al‐Rahman is a former mujahidin commander from Kunar who
joined Jamil al‐Rahman’s Jama’at al‐Da’wa political party after the end of the Soviet Afghan War. See al‐
Rahman (2013). Clearly, much more research is needed before we can say anything conclusive about
Jamil al‐Rahman’s politics in the early 1980s.
144 With this said, Khalis also had a longstanding connection to the aristocratic Arsala family of
Nangarhar and the three Arsala brothers were some of his most important supporters (‘Abd al‐Haq, ‘Abd
al‐Qadir and Haji Din Muhammad). In addition, Jalaluddin Haqqani was an alumnus of the Dar al‐‘Ulum
Haqqaniyya, and it is probable that this shared connection to Mawlana ‘Abd al‐Haq Haqqani factored
into the connection between the two men.
145 Ahmadzai, 33.
28