Did a US 'hit' create an Afghan hero?

SIYAWOOSHAN VILLAGE, Afghanistan — Thousands wept as Ghulam Yahya Akbari, rebel commander extraordinaire, was laid to rest beside the mosque that he had built in Paichenar, near his native village of Siyawooshan, in Herat Province. Women wailed from the rooftops, as a long procession of over 5,000 accompanied his body to the grave site.

Yahya was killed in a raid by U.S. and Afghan forces on Oct. 8. For the past year he had been the target of numerous American efforts to neutralize him and his fighters, who, by most accounts, never numbered more than 200.

But until he found himself firmly in U.S. sights, Yahya was just one of many rebel commanders in western Afghanistan, little known outside his native Gozara district. Repeated U.S. assassination attempts conferred upon him a certain notoriety.

He did not belong to the Pashtun majority, and was dubbed “the Tajik Taliban” by the media. But Yahya was not a Taliban commander; still less was he a global jihadist. He was a disgruntled former civil servant who decided to rebel against his former employer — the government. He supported himself by kidnapping businessmen for ransom, and occasionally fired rockets at the airport or the nearby U.N. base.

He did share characteristics of the Taliban — a strict interpretation of Islam and an aversion to foreign forces on Afghan soil. Perhaps because of this, he has been linked to every insurgent group from Hezb-e-Islami to Al Qaeda, although he always insisted he was acting on his own.

“We call Ghulam Yahya Akbari an insurgent leader as he seemed to temporarily affiliate himself with other organizations,” said Capt. Elizabeth Mathias, media spokesperson for the U.S. Forces Afghanistan. “Yahya was a significant destabilizing force in western Afghanistan, attacking ISAF and Afghan security forces and Afghan civilians almost equally.”

But for his many supporters, Yahya was not a rebel, he was a crusader.

“Ghulam Yahya was against the murdering foreigners who have occupied our country,” said Amrullah, a young resident of Siyawooshan, while tears streamed down his face. “They promised prosperity, but all they did was set Afghans fighting each other.”

Yahya was no Mullah Omar; he had little military influence outside his home district of Gozara. Indeed, he was afforded respect in many circles: Even Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai’s main rival for president, called Yahya “an honest mujahed” during a campaign stop in Herat in July.

A relative newcomer to the insurgency, Yahya was a government employee up until three years ago.

He had been a mujaheddin fighter during the war against the Soviets, forging a close bond with powerful commander Ismail Khan. When Khan took over as governor of Herat in the early 1990s, he made Yahya mayor of the city. The Taliban victory in 1995 put a sudden end to that job, and Yahya fled to Iran. A few years later he was back, fighting the Taliban.

After the U.S.-led invasion routed the fundamentalists, Ismail Khan resumed his status as “Emir of the West,” and installed his comrade-in-arms as head of the Department of Public Works in Herat. This came at a time when the wily Khan was pulling in close to $1 million per week collecting customs duties from trucks entering Afghanistan through Iran and Turkmenistan. Most of that money stayed in the province, and Herat, under Khan and Yahya, became one the most highly developed cities in the country. Heratis enjoyed 24-hour electricity when most Kabul dwellers were in the dark six nights out of seven.

But Ismail Khan was called to the capital in 2004, and made Minister of Energy. Yahya did not get along with Khan's replacement as governor, Sayed Hussain Anwari, so in 2006 Yahya was fired as mayor.

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