Gulbuddin Hekmatyar

Kabul, April 8: The US has held direct talks with one of Afghanistan’s biggest insurgent factions, according to the Afghan media.

A deputy to Richard Holbrooke, the new US envoy to the region, has met a deputy of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who leads the Hizb-i-Islami party, a key figure in the country’s Taliban-led insurgency.

In close alliance with the Taliban, his anti-government fighters are responsible for large numbers of attacks against Afghan and international forces mainly in the north east of the country.

Afghan media reported that Daud Abedi, his deputy, had met the US official to discuss what role Hizb-i-Islami could play in ending the Afghan conflict. US state department officials were not immediately available to confirm the reports.

Hizb-i-Islami, founded by Hekmatyar, was one of the main Mujahideen groups to fight the Soviet invasion during the 1980s. The party was a favourite of Pakistan’s intelligence agency and Hekmatyar’s men were renowned as some of the most effective anti-Soviet fighters, but also the most fundamentalist of all the Afghan resistance groups.

Hekmatyar received the largest share of the hundreds of millions of dollars of aid and arms supplied by the US and Saudi Arabia and funnelled through Pakistan.

Following the Soviet withdrawal, Hekmatyar’s men played a prominent role in the civil war which tore the country apart and left Kabul in ruins. His party was dropped by Pakistan in 1994 and he fled to Iran after losing to Mullah Omar’s Taliban forces in 1997.

However, after the US-led invasion, he returned to Afghanistan and forged an alliance with the Taliban.

Militant expansion

Scores of Pakistani Taliban militants have moved into Buner district of Pakistan, clashing with villagers and police in the Swat Valley about 100km from the capital, police and district officials said today. “About 20 vehicles carrying Taliban entered Buner on Monday and started moving around the bazaar and streets,” said senior police officer Israr Bacha.

Villagers formed a militia, known as a lashkar, to confront the Taliban and eight of the insurgents were killed in a clash yesterday, police said. Two villagers and three policemen were also killed. “People don’t like the Taliban,” Ghulam Mustafa, deputy chief of Buner, told Reuters by telephone.