[8][9] In the meantime, as part of the peace and power-sharing efforts led by Ahmad Shah Massoud, Hekmatyar became Prime Minister of Afghanistan from 1993 to 1994 and again briefly in 1996, before the Taliban takeover of Kabul forced him to flee to Iran's capital Tehran.
[10] Sometime after the Taliban's fall in 2001 he went to Pakistan, leading his paramilitary forces into an unsuccessful armed campaign against Hamid Karzai's government and the international coalition in Afghanistan.
[16] Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was born in 1949 in Imam Saheb, Kunduz province, in the north of what was then the Kingdom of Afghanistan, a member of the Kharoti tribe of Ghilji Pashtuns.
[18] Afghan businessman and Kharoti tribal leader Gholam Serwar Nasher deemed Hekmatyar to be a bright young man and sent him to the Mahtab Qala military academy in 1968, but he was expelled due to his political views two years later.
During his first year at the university he wrote a 149-page book entitled The Priority of Sense Over Matter, where he refutes communists denying the existence of God by quoting European philosophers and scientists like Hegel or Francesco Redi.
[26] Hekmatyar's radicalism put him in confrontation with elements in the Muslim Youth surrounding Ahmad Shah Massoud, also an engineering student at Kabul University.
[28] The arrival of Afghan opposition militants in Peshawar coincided with a period of diplomatic tension between Pakistan and Afghanistan, due to Daoud's revival of the Pashtunistan issue.
[citation needed] Under the patronage of Pakistani General Naseerullah Babar, then governor of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and with the blessing of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, camps were set up to train Hekmatyar and other anti-Daoud Islamists.
[31] The other movement, called Hezb-i Islami ("Islamic Party"), was led by Hekmatyar, who favored a radical approach in the form of violent armed conflict.
[32] Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami was formed as an elitist avant-garde based on a strictly disciplined Islamist ideology within a homogeneous organization that Olivier Roy described as "Leninist", and employed the rhetoric of the Iranian Revolution.
In these camps, Hezb-i Islami formed a social and political network and operated everything from schools to prisons, with the support of the Pakistani government and their Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
[39] According to the ISI, their decision to allocate the highest percentage of covert aid to Hekmatyar was based on his record as an effective anti-Soviet military commander in Afghanistan.
[40] Others describe his position as the result of having "almost no grassroots support and no military base inside Afghanistan", and thus being the much more "dependent on Pakistani President Zia-ul-Haq's protection and financial largesse" than other mujahideen factions.
[43] As the Soviet-Afghan War was coming to its end, Hekmatyar used the funds and weapons provided to him by the CIA and ISI to establish his organization as one of the leading heroin producers in the Middle East.
[55] Hekmatyar's faction also attacked non-combatants such as British cameraman Andy Skrzypkowiak, who was killed in 1987 while carrying footage of Massoud's successes to the West.
French relief officials also asserted that Thierry Niquet, an aid coordinator bringing cash to Afghan villagers, was killed by one of Hekmatyar's commanders in 1986.
[57] Hekmatyar made an unlikely alliance with hardline communist and Minister of Defence Shahnawaz Tanai who launched a failed coup attempt in March 1990 against President Najibullah.
Many senior members of his party resigned in protest of the coalition, and other Mujahideen groups ridiculed Hekmatyar for uniting with Khalqists to oust the Parcham government.
[64] In April 1992, as the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan began to collapse, government officials joined the mujahideen, choosing different parties according to their ethnic and political affinities.
[66] The new leader of the "Islamic Interim Government of Afghanistan", Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, appointed Ahmad Shah Massoud as defense minister, and urged him to take action.
Hekmatyar took office on 26 June, and immediately started issuing severe decrees on women's dress that struck a sharp contrast with the relatively liberal policy that Massoud had followed until then.
After the U.S. entry into the anti-Taliban alliance and the fall of the Taliban, Hekmatyar rejected the U.N.-brokered accord of 5 December 2001 negotiated in Germany as a post-Taliban interim government for Afghanistan.
[89] In an audiotape released the same month, he called for revolt against U.S. forces and Karzai's "puppet government", and directly threatened to kill Lt. General Karl Eikenberry.
In January 2007 CNN reported that Hekmatyar claimed "that his fighters helped Osama bin Laden escape from the mountains of Tora Bora five years ago."
BBC news reported a quote from a December 2006 interview broadcast on GEO TV, "We helped them [bin Laden and Zawahiri] get out of the caves and led them to a safe place.
"[4] HIG claimed responsibility for and is thought to have at least assisted in a 27 April 2008 attempt on the life of President Karzai in Kabul that killed three Afghan citizens, including a member of parliament.
This contrasted with the views of Taliban leader Mullah Omar and allied insurgent chief Sirajuddin Haqqani, who refused any talks with Kabul as long as foreign troops remained in the country, Hekmatyar appeared less reluctant.
[95] On 10 February 2014, Hekmatyar's HIG group executed an attack which killed two US civilians, Paul Goins and Michael Hughes, and wounded two other Americans and seven Afghan nationals.
HIG was also responsible for a 16 May 2013 suicide VBIED attack in Kabul, which destroyed a US armored SUV and killed two US soldiers, four US civilian contractors, eight Afghans—including two children—and wounded at least 37 others.
Hekmatyar has been described as a "prolific writer" who, "despite rarely ceasing to fight, has authored more than 60 (reportedly 79) books on linguistics, Pashto grammar, comparative religion and political analysis.