Leaving a power vacuum in southern Afghanistan, Ahmad Wali Karzai, a controversial half brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, was shot dead on Tuesday, July 12, probably by one of his inner circle, Reuters reported.
“My younger brother was martyred in his house today,” President Karzai said at the start of a news conference with his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy in Kabul.
“This is the life of all Afghan people, I hope these miseries which every Afghan family faces will one day end.”
The news was earlier confirmed by the Interior Ministry as well as Zalmay Ayoubi, spokesman for the governor of Kandahar province, where Ahmad Wali Karzai was head of the provincial council.
“I confirm that Ahmad Wali was killed inside his house,” Ayoubi said.
NBC News reported that the president’s brother had been shot with a AK-47 by “a good friend” at his home in Kandahar.
Abdul Ghafar Sayedzada, head of the ministry’s counter-terrorism department, said the killing was probably the work of someone from his inner circle.
“It appears Ahmad Wali Karzai has been killed by one of his bodyguards, and there was nobody from outside involved,” Sayedzada told Reuters.
Wali, the head of Kandahar’s provincial council, had survived two other assassination attempts in recent years.
He said in May 2009 that he had been ambushed on the road to Kabul by Taliban insurgents, who killed one of his bodyguards in an early morning attack.
In November 2008 he also escaped unscathed from an attack on government buildings in his home province which killed six.
The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, saying they had persuaded one of Karzai’s bodyguards to turn on him.
Yet, different news reports questioned such a declaration, saying that the group often exaggerates battlefield claims.
Powerful Man
A half brother of the president, Ahmad Wali was a critical power-broker who helped shore up Karzai’s influence in volatile southern Afghanistan.
Deemed the most powerful man in southern Afghanistan, NATO officials depended on him in the south of the country, according to NBC News’ Atia Abawi.
“He was the glue that kept Kandahar together,” she said.
He returned to Afghanistan after the ouster of the Taliban government in 2001, leaving behind a career as a restaurateur in Chicago to eventually become probably the most powerful man in Kandahar.
His power came not from his position as head of the provincial council, which normally carries limited influence, but from his tribal and family connections and the fortune he accumulated.
Wali is widely believed to have ties to the booming opium trade in war-torn Afghanistan.
Western officials also believe that he orchestrated the manufacture of hundreds of thousands of phony ballots for his brother during the fraudulent August 20 vote.
Depending on him in their war on Afghanistan, a 2009 report said that Karzai’s brother was on the CIA payroll for a variety of services to the US troops.
He was reportedly helping the CIA recruit Afghan mercenaries to launch raids against suspected Taliban in and around the southern city of Kandahar.
He was also paid for allowing CIA and US special forces to rend the former house of Taliban leader Mullah Omar.
Wali was also included in a 2010 report into Afghanistan corruption which included charts outlining the criminal syndicates in Afghanistan, known as the “Malign Actor Networks.”
Source: OnIslam & News Agencies
Comments