December 5, 2001
Following is the brief introduction of Hamid Karzai, who will lead Afghanistan interim set up for six months: Hamid Karzai, 46, first came to prominence in Afghanistan in the fight against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. He is the middle son of seven brothers and one sister and is married with no children. He is an ethnic Pashtun and the head of the influential Popalzoi clan, a position he inherited in 1999, after his father was shot dead in Quetta while returning home from a mosque.
He is a powerful tribal leader from the Taliban's political stronghold of Kandahar and a member of the same clan as the former Afghan king, Zahir Shah.
His father also fought the Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan. When his father -- a former parliamentary deputy -- was assassinated two years ago, the murder was widely attributed to the Taliban. His grandfather was Abdul Ahad Karzai, a former president of the national council under King Zahir before the monarch was deposed in 1973.
Abdul Ahad retired and the family moved to Quetta in 1983. He is well educated and Westernized. He speaks English fluently and served as a deputy foreign minister in Afghanistan's first Mujaheddeen government in 1992 of Burhanuddin Rabbani, which came to power after the Soviet withdrawal in 1987.
Karzai represented his tribe in the government until the Taliban seized power in 1996.
The Taliban are reported to have cultivated him before they took power and offered him the post of ambassador to the United Nations. He was originally sympathetic towards the regime, but changed his position in 1994.
Nearly every king of Afghanistan since 1747 has been drawn from the Popalzoi, who number around 500,000, and belong to a tribal grouping called the Durrani, one of two major groupings among Pashtuns.
The Durrani is the second-largest Pashtun clan. It was founded by Ahmed Shah Durrani, a Persian soldier who conquered Kandahar in 1747 and became the first king of Afghanistan. The Ghilzai is the largest Pashtun clan.
It forms the backbone of the Taliban and is naturally opposed to any effort to reinstate the King.
Karzai has also retained his links with Zahir Shah. He has long supported the former king's plans to build a broad-based government in Afghanistan through the convening of a grand tribal assembly known as a Loya Jirga.
In the wake of the September 11 suicide attacks in New York and Washington he was said to have received a stream of disgruntled Afghan commanders and tribal leaders at his home in the Pakistani city of Quetta.
In October, Karzai slipped across the border into Afghanistan to gather support for a Loya Jirga. He survived a Taliban attempt to capture him. More recently, his forces have been engaging the Taliban near their last remaining stronghold, the southern city of Kandahar.
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