By Graeme Smith
The Globe and Mail
Neighbours woke to the sound of gunfire, then a car horn blaring continuously.
Habibullah Jan lay slumped against the steering wheel of his Toyota Corolla, bullet holes peppering the modern white sedan.
The killing of the 47-year-old parliamentarian on Friday night, July 4, has deepened the sense of alarm in Kandahar city, as the provincial capital lost another of its local protectors.
The chain-smoking tribal elder controlled the city's western suburb, Senjaray, with a private militia and a talent for deal-making.
Fighting wars almost constantly since he was a teenager, Mr. Jan had acquired so many enemies that nobody could say for certain whether the gunmen on motorbikes who ambushed him in the dirt laneway outside his home were sent by the Taliban, the government or any of his other antagonists.
But it's widely believed that his death will give fertile new ground to the insurgency.
“The area is full of Taliban now,” said Atta Ulla, the eldest of the parliamentarian's 14 sons, speaking by telephone from Senjaray. He apologized for the fact that it was too dangerous to invite a Western journalist to the condolence ceremony for his father, only five kilometres from the city limits. “There will be much fighting, I think,” he said.
Mr. Jan's is only the latest death among a fractious group of former anti-Soviet warriors who rose to prominence in the 1980s and suffered under the Taliban regime in the 1990s. Many of them returned to power after 2001, and largely served as bulwarks against the rising insurgency in recent years as they staked out territory.
They have been heavily targeted in the past nine months after the most prominent among them, Mullah Naqib of Arghandab district, died of a heart attack in October after a roadside bombing. His death was followed by a suicide bombing that killed one of his allies, Abdul Hakim Jan, along with perhaps 100 others in February. Another prominent former commander, Malim Akbar Khakrezwal, was gunned down in early June by attackers on motorbikes, a tactic frequently used by the Taliban.
The killing of Mr. Jan followed the same pattern. He was usually surrounded by three or four bodyguards but had dismissed them for the evening, as he was travelling only a few hundreds metres between his house and the high-walled mud compound on the north side of Highway 1 that served as his guesthouse and office.
The heavyset old warrior had married for the fourth time two years ago, his cousin Haji Amanullah said, and he was headed toward his new wife's sleeping quarters when his vehicle was struck by gunfire from three directions.
It was a violent end for a man whose life was steeped in warfare. Mr. Jan had quietly assisted Canadian and U.S. military officials with the planning of Operation Medusa in 2006, the largest offensive by Canadian troops in the war. He proudly kept certificates of appreciation he had received from the foreign military commanders.
“They needed some advice from me and I gave them good advice,” Mr. Jan said in an interview last year, fondly remembering his conversations with Canadian Brigadier-General David Fraser. “We know this area, these Taliban.”
As leaders of the Alizai tribe, his family had been influential in the farmland west of Kandahar city for generations. His father, Haji Mohammed Omarzai, was among thousands of prominent figures arrested by the Communist regime of Nur Mohammad Taraki in 1978.
Mr. Jan. joined the mujahedeen resistance at age 16 and eventually drew support from three of the Islamist parties supplying weapons for the anti-Soviet war. After the Russian withdrawal, he carved out a territory controlling the highway west of the city.
The Taliban chased the warlords out of Kandahar in 1994, forcing Mr. Jan to flee north and join forces with famed Tajik commander Ahmad Shah Massoud.
His experience fighting in northern Afghanistan led him to forge an alliance with a Tajik presidential candidate, Yunus Qanooni, and he was among the few prominent figures to openly campaign against Hamid Karzai in his home city of Kandahar during the 2004 presidential elections.
That opposition did not endear Mr. Jan to the Karzai family. He feuded with Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president's younger half-brother, until the two of them formally reconciled with a three-day ceremony of feasting last year. The detente didn't last, however, and in recent months he became the first politician in Kandahar to publicly accuse the younger Karzai brother of involvement of the opium trade. Ahmed Wali Karzai has denied the accusation.
A Taliban spokesman denied any role in Mr. Jan's death, and Taliban sources in the districts west of Kandahar said they weren't aware of any order to kill him.
One of Mr. Jan's relatives initially said he was skeptical it was an insurgent attack, because he understood that Mr. Jan's militia had an informal ceasefire agreement with the Taliban.
But the same relative corrected himself the next day, saying the family had recently obtained information that gave them certainty he was assassinated by insurgents.
“We know which Taliban killed him,” he said, without elaborating.
Niaz Mohammed Sarhadi, commissioner of Zhari district, said Mr. Jan had recently grown vocal about attacking the Taliban. A cluster of villages known as Ashokay, just west of Mr. Jan's territory in Senjaray, is a notorious hideout for the insurgents and Mr. Jan had recently made a proposal to help set up a 30-man outpost that would have disrupted insurgents in the area, Mr. Sarhadi said.
Still, the district commissioner said it's too early to say who killed him.
“He was a commander for many years,” Mr. Sarhadi said. “He had many enemies.
— July 7, 2008
______