The prolonged absence of key figures in the Taliban regime — acting Interior Minister Sirajuddin Haqqani, acting Deputy Prime Minister Abdul Ghani Baradar and acting Deputy Foreign Minister Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai — from Afghanistan underscores that the rift between the Taliban’s Kandahari and Haqqani factions has assumed serious proportions.
It has been over six weeks since the three senior Taliban ministers left Afghanistan separately amid escalating tensions with Taliban Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada. While Baradar has returned, Stanikzai and Sirajuddin — the latter’s U.N.-approved travel ban exemption expired on February 3 — remain in the UAE.
Led by Akhundzada, the Kandahari faction comprises hardline and doctrinaire clerics, while the Haqqani group, which includes Sirajuddin, Baradar, Stanikzai, and acting Defense Minister Mohammad Yakoob among others, is viewed as the more moderate or rather pragmatic faction.
Since the Taliban captured power in August 2021, Akhundzada has issued dozens of edicts curbing women and girls’ access to education, workplaces, and public life and spaces at large, which the Haqqani group has opposed as it has stood in the way of the Taliban regime gaining diplomatic recognition.
Reports of the rift between the Kandahari and Haqqani factions are not new. However, the rift appears to be particularly serious at this point.
Underscoring its severity, Shuja Jamal, a senior Afghan civil servant in the Office of the National Security Council of Afghanistan’s previous government and co-author of “The Decline and Fall of Republican Afghanistan” told The Diplomat that the rift is “serious enough to have become uncontainably public for the notoriously secretive Taliban.”
According to an Afghan journalist in Kabul, the exit of the senior ministers from the country suggests that they “seriously fear for their lives, and see little use in remaining in Kabul at this time.”
Stanikzai was the first of the three ministers to flee Afghanistan. In a speech at a religious seminary in Khost on January 18, Stanikzai slammed Akhundzada’s decisions restricting women as unjust and un-Islamic. “The path we are currently following is guided by [the] personal choice [of Akhundzada], not Sharia,” Stanikzai said.
While he has publicly criticized the denial of education to Afghan girls several times in the past, what he said on January 18 was unprecedented. Without naming Akhundzada, he urged Afghans not to follow him blindly. “Follow him [Akhundzada], but not to the extent that, God forbid, you grant him the rank of prophethood or divinity. If you [Akhundzada] deviate even a step from God’s path, then you are no longer my leader, I do not recognize you,” he said.
Not only did Stanikzai challenge Akhundzada’s authority but also, he stripped him of religious legitimacy. He blamed Akhundzada’s suppression of women for the international community not recognizing the Taliban regime.
Akhundzada’s response was swift. He ordered Stanikzai’s arrest and imposed a travel ban on him.
However, “with Defense Minister Yakoob’s help, Stanikzai managed to escape from Afghanistan,” an Indian government official, who did not want to be named, said.
Around the same time, Sirajuddin left Afghanistan for Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Like Stanikzai, he has opposed Akhundzada’s diktats.
But more importantly, Sirajuddin and Akhundzada have been locked in a power struggle. In addition to concentrating all power in his hands and appointing loyalists to key posts across the country, Akhundzada has systematically whittled down Sirajuddin’s powers, the Indian official said.
According to Jamal, “In the last two years, it was clear that although he is at the helm of the Interior Ministry — a key security institution with a massive personnel base — Sirajuddin was not really in charge of internal security.” It is the General Directorate of Intelligence, the regime’s intelligence agency, headed by “Kandahar faction honcho Abdul Haq Wasiq that has been in charge of internal security, including the job of suppressing the opposition,” he said.
In November last year, Akhundzada issued a decree stripping the ministries of interior, defense and the GDI of the authority to distribute weapons, ammunition and military equipment. Only the Taliban chief was authorized to do so.
Soon after, in a speech at a madrasa graduation ceremony near Kabul, Sirajuddin spoke about public disillusionment with religious figures, in a veiled reference to Akhundzada. Three days later, on December 11, Sirajuddin’s uncle, Khalil Ur-Rahman Haqqani, the minister of refugees and repatriation in the Taliban regime, was assassinated. Although the Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) claimed responsibility for the killing, “the word on the street was that the Kandaharis had ordered it,” the journalist said.
It was a “factional hit job,” Jamal claimed, pointing out that the GDI is “in charge of Directorate 10, which has responsibility to protect key leaders.”
Khalil’s killing, according to the Indian official, was “a warning from Akhundzada to Sirajuddin that dissent would be punished.”
With real power concentrated in Kandahar, “there was not much use in Sirajuddin remaining in Kabul,” Jamal said. Needing to “shore up his foreign support,” he headed to the UAE.
Little is known about the meetings between Sirajuddin and the Emiratis, with whom the Haqqanis have long had strong ties. What unfolds in the coming months will depend “to a certain degree on the kind of support Sirajuddin is able to muster in the UAE,” Jamal said.
Meanwhile, back home in Afghanistan, Sirajuddin has lost even more ground to the Kandaharis. Akhundzada has deployed his fighters at key strategic locations in Kabul, including Bala Hissar Fort and Kabul International Airport. Until recently, Haqqani Network fighters guarded these locations.
However, Sirajuddin is an expert military strategist and has survived rivalries and internecine bloodletting for many years. He has also had close ties with Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. While Akhundzada lacks Sirajuddin’s military expertise, he enjoys the unquestioning loyalty of his fighters, who believe that obeying him is a religious obligation.
At this point, it appears that it is “Advantage Akhundzada” in the ongoing battle between the Kandahari and Haqqani factions. But Sirajuddin is no pushover.