As US Lifts Bounties On Key Taliban Leaders, A Glance At Haqqani Network & Its Violent Past | Explained

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Shilpy Bisht

Last Updated:March 25, 2025, 11:20 IST

The Haqqani Network was created in 1980 as an anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. After the death of its founder Jalaluddin, one of his sons, Sirajuddin Haqqani, took over the network, establishing stronger relations with Pakistani intelligence

Over the past three years, Sirajuddin Haqqani has sought to remake his image and engage with the West through back channels. (Photo: News18 Hindi)

The United States government has lifted multi-million-dollar bounties on three senior Afghan officials, including the interior minister, Sirajuddin Haqqani, who heads a powerful network known for carrying out attacks on prominent targets in Afghanistan.

Haqqani, who acknowledged planning a January 2008 attack on the Serena Hotel in Kabul, which killed six people, no longer appears on the State Department’s Rewards for Justice website. The FBI website still featured a wanted poster for him on Sunday.

How The Haqqani Network Was Created

The origins of the Haqqani Network date back to a 1973 coup in Afghanistan that brought to power Prime Minister Daoud Khan. When Khan offered “shelter, training, and weapons to Baloch insurgents and Pakistani Pashtun nationalists alike," Pakistani intelligence began mobilizing exiled Afghan dissidents like Jalaluddin Haqqani for “anti-regime operations." From their base in Pakistan’s tribal areas, in 1975, Haqqani’s fighters launched their first attack in Afghanistan, killing 12.

After the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistani intelligence re-activated Afghan mujahideen proxies, with Haqqani and his allies receiving an “extraordinary share" of the arms and financial assistance. Pakistan accepted arms and aid from the US and Saudi Arabia for the anti-Soviet jihad, even as Pakistani intelligence “controlled their distribution and their transport to the war zone," while limiting contact between the CIA and the mujahideen.

Jalaluddin’s tribal connections, fundraising skills, and fluency in Arabic were his key assets behind his ascension. Haqqani’s Zadran tribe straddles the Afghan-Pakistani border where Loya Paktia meets Waziristan. The border crossings under its control provided the network leverage over the flow of drugs, trade, and fighters coming across the porous border, with additional revenue earned from smuggling, kidnapping, and extortion.

Jalaluddin had distinguished himself by drawing Gulf money and Arab fighters to the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad, even taking an Arab wife from the UAE with which he had a son, Sirajuddin.

After the Soviet withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, there was a civil war. Ultra-conservative Pashtun religious students (Talibs) came out of nowhere, vowing to end warlordism and implement strict Islamic law in the country.

In late 1994, Pakistan threw support behind emerging Taliban movement led by Mullah Omar. Initially opposed to the group, Jalaluddin “defected" to the Taliban in 1995 while maintaining his own power base in Loya Paktia. The following year, the Taliban seized control of Kabul and effectively ended the Afghan civil war.

Jalaluddin was appointed Minister of Borders and Tribal Affairs in the Taliban government from 1996 to 2001.

After 9/11, US-allied forces began cornering Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders, as well as Pakistani army officers and intelligence advisers along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

The Rise Of Sirajuddin Haqqani

Jalaluddin began remobilizing his front in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and by late 2002, Haqqani fighting groups were operating in Paktia and Khost in eastern Afghanistan.

In 2003, the Taliban formed new regional leadership councils or “shuras." The quasi-autonomous “Miram Shah shura," headquartered in North Waziristan, was “composed exclusively of the Haqqani Network."

Meanwhile, Sirajuddin began taking control of the network from his aging father. By 2005, he was spearheading the insurgency in Loya Paktia, overseeing an expansion of the network’s operations and stretching campaign of terror to Kabul.

Sirajuddin was making the Haqqani Network increasingly indispensable to Pakistan intelligence. In 2000s, the militants in the network in the stronghold of Waziristan began targeting the Pakistani state and civilians, coming together under the banner of a new Pakistani Taliban in 2007.

In 2007, the Haqqani Network was officially affiliated with the Taliban. Sirajuddin was granted membership to the Taliban Leadership Council and was later appointed head of the Miram Shah Shura.

Haqqani Network’s Violent Attacks

The US military officials warned that the Haqqani Network was becoming “more violent and self-serving" under their leader Sirajuddin, who recruited younger and more aggressive militants against the traditional Zadran tribal leaders.

Among all the Taliban factions, the Haqqani Network was the first to adopt suicide bombing technique and is believed to have played a major role in the July 2008 attack at the Indian Embassy in Kabul that killed over 50 people.

In December 2009, the network carried out a suicide bombing at a CIA outpost in Khost.

In 2011, the Haqqani Network orchestrated a suicide bombing at the Inter-Continental Hotel in Kabul, injuring 77 US soldiers in an attack on a US military base, and targeted the US embassy in Kabul.

That same year, Sirajuddin published a manifesto advocating for global jihad outside Afghanistan’s borders – a departure from his father more traditional focus on eastern Afghanistan.

In 2011, the US became frustrated and asked Pakistan to cut ties with Haqqani. Then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen described the network as a “veritable arm" of Pakistani intelligence. In 2012, Siraj officially assumed control of the network from Jalaluddin, and the US State Department designated the group a terrorist organisation.

Haqqani And Al Qaeda

Jalaluddin was considered close to al Qaeda and its founder Osama Bin Laden. According to a 2021 UN report, the Haqqani Network “remains a hub for outreach and cooperation with regional foreign terrorist groups and is the primary liaison between the Taliban and Al-Qaida."

Khalil Haqqani is “known to American intelligence as the Taliban emissary to Al Qaeda." Stanford’s “Mapping Militant Organizations" explains that Khalil “has acted on behalf of Al Qaeda and facilitated its terrorist operations" and “organized the detention of enemy prisoners captured by [the Haqqani Network] and Al Qaeda."

Experts believe al-Qaeda and the Haqqani Network are today “intertwined, and it is highly unlikely they will cut ties."

Afghanistan expert Melissa Skorka, quoted by Foreign Policy, notes that even in 2021, “Mr. Haqqani marches in lockstep with his al Qaeda base."

The network is believed to be even more anti-US than other parts of the Taliban. Don Rassler and Vahid Brown, co-authors of one of the most deeply researched books on the Haqqani network, believe the Haqqanis influenced al Qaeda to view the US as the primary target of global jihad.

Haqqani And The Taliban

After the fall of Kabul in August 2021 and the US troops’ retreat, the Taliban and the Haqqani Network became indistinguishable. But within days of forming the government, both the factions were reportedly involved in a power-sharing tussle, sending a key Taliban leader fleeing Kabul.

Although the Haqqani Network has been termed as an “autonomous and integral" part of the Taliban, but it has maintained separate command and control and lines of operations.

In terms of differences between the Taliban and the Haqqani Network, the former roughly aligns Pashtun tribes of which the Haqqani Network is a part. The traditional Taliban leaders such as late Mullah Omar, his son Mullah Yaqoob and current deputy prime minister Mullah Baradar hail from greater Kandahar region in southern Afghanistan. While the Haqqani tribe lies in the more mountainous northeast.

In 2015, the death of Mullah Omar, which propelled Sirajuddin’s rise, created fissures between the Taliban’s Kandahari leaders and the Haqqani Network. Sirajuddin was named deputy emir of the Taliban under Omar’s immediate successor, Mullah Mansour.

After Omar’s immediate successor was killed in a drone strike by the US in 2016, a religious scholar, Haibatullah Akhundzada, was named the Taliban’s new emir.

Siraj reportedly enjoyed final authority over the appointment of Taliban shadow governors while “Akhundzada’s relative lack of battlefield experience meant Sirajuddin had almost total autonomy over military strategy and operations", according to ‘War on the Rocks’ — a platform for analysis and debate on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs.

In August 2021, after the US military’s withdrawal from Kabul, Haqqani leaders and Taliban Deputy Prime Minister Mullah Baradar sparred over the allocation of ministerial posts. The dispute was so serious that the Pakistani intelligence chief had to fly to Kabul to oversee negotiations.

Ultimately, two Haqqani leaders were given ministerial positions in the new Taliban government: Khalil (refugees minister) and Sirajuddin (interior minister).

But within days of forming the new government, the Haqqani leaders and Baradar were reportedly engaged in a fistfight, which sent Baradar and Mullah Yaqoob fleeing to Kandahar. Reports said Baradar released a “hostage" video claiming that the two sides had settled their differences. By October, he had returned to Kabul, apparently refusing a security detail from the Haqqani-led interior ministry.

Pakistan’s Relationship With Haqqani

As per reports, Pakistani intelligence has predictably backed the Haqqanis over Baradar. The relationship between the Haqqani leaders and Pakistani state is older and stronger.

Sirajuddin’s uncle, Khalil Haqqani, reportedly meets Pakistani army chief frequently and was a regular visitor to Pakistan’s headquarters in Rawalpindi.

This seems obvious as Pakistan got Baradar arrested in 2010 after he tried to negotiate peace talks with the US “without us", a Pakistani official had told The New York Times.

The Taliban’s relationship with Pakistani intelligence can be characterized by tactical cooperation and mutual dependency but also substantial mistrust. Therefore, the Pakistani intelligence has sought to make itself indispensable to the group by populating it with more loyal Haqqani militants.

In the late 1990s, when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, they categorically refused to recognise the Durand Line, the de facto Afghan-Pakistani border created by the British in 1893 that divides the nearly 60 million Pashtuns in both countries.