[3] Zaeef was born in 1967 to a poor family in the small village of Zangiabad, between the Arghandab and Dori rivers, in the Panjwayi District of Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan.
He then was taken to live with a maternal uncle and studied at a madrassa at Sangisar,[4] receiving a basic religious education in the years before the Soviet invasion.
Zaeef's group continued to operate from Nelgham, sometimes travelling by foot as far as Helmand or Uruzgan provinces to fight, and undertaking religious study at the same time.
After nearly a year with the taliban, he was ordered to take a badly wounded comrade to Pakistan for treatment, and there he reunited with his relatives, who had settled in Quetta.
He fought for weeks in the Battle of Arghandab in 1987, including at Sangisar, when Mullah Mohammed Omar was one of the commanders and was wounded, losing an eye.
In 1994 he started to meet with other veterans of the war with the Soviets who wanted to take action against lawlessness and rogue mujahideen commanders who were controlling roads and cities.
When rogue mujahideen on the highway through Maywand and Panjwayi districts refused to stop extorting and harassing road users, they attacked them.
He did not wish to return to work in the government, but the Taliban leaders appointed him deputy minister of Mines and Industry, a post he held for 18 months.
Zaeef claims he was chained in illegal "stress positions" and subjected to sleep deprivation and extremes of temperature while held in the USA's Bagram Theater Detention Facility.
"An article in Der Spiegel on 12 April 2007 reported that Zaeef had moved into a "...handsome guest house, located in the dusty modern neighborhood Khoshal Khan.
"[11] The article in Der Spiegel stated that the new home Karzai's government has provided Zaeef is around the corner from one occupied by former Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil.
"On 15 June 2008, the McClatchy News Service published articles based on interviews with 66 former Guantanamo captives, including Abdul Salam Zaeef.
[14][15] The McClatchy reports state that guards told him he was the "King of the prison", and that he took a lead role in the Guantanamo hunger strikes.
According to The Age, other figures who attended the meeting included former Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil and former Supreme Court Chief Justice Fazel Hadi Shinwari.
[19][20] Quoting Al Jazeera's Waheed Muzhda:[19] "Zaeef feared for his life in the wake of the attempted raids on his home.
"In 2013, Mullah Zaeef met with Robert Grenier at a conference in which they discussed the invasion and the general positions of the Taliban government and the United States.