Taliban Deputy Chief holds Pakistani Passport and National Identity Card

Abdul Ghani Baradar, one of Taliban’s cofounders and the Deputy Political Chief of Taliban holds a Pakistani passport and National Identity Card, sources have revealed.

A former official of the National Directorate of Security (NDS) has said that three reliable intelligence sources have confirmed that Mullah Baradar holds Pakistani passport and National Identity Card.

The official further added that Pakistan has issued the documents to Mullah Baradar under the fake name of Muhammad Arif Agha.

Pakistan has adopted a policy to issue passports and National Identity Cards to Taliban under fake identities in a bid to pave the way for them to travel abroad, the official added.

The documents were reportedly issued to Mullah Baradar in Karachi city of Pakistan on July 7, 2014.

However, the Taliban group has rejected that Baradar holds Pakistani passport and National Identity Card, claiming that the pictures of documents circulating on social media are fake.

This comes as the former Taliban supreme leader Mullah Akhtar Mansoor was also holding a Pakistani passport which was recovered following a drone strike which killed him in 2016.

Known primarily as a military man and an astute commander, Baradar is one of the founding members of the Taliban movement. He was present in its first meeting headed by Taliban chief Mullah Omar in the autumn of 1994, in a village in Maiwand district of Kandahar province.

He served in several key positions when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.

He fled to Pakistan after the US invasion in 2001 and was arrested in 2010 in an operation then considered to have dealt a fatal blow to the movement.

Baradar was released from a prison in Pakistan in October 2018 after the first meeting in Doha between the Taliban and Khalilzad. He later joined his family in Afghanistan.