Overview
The Mullah Dadullah Front was an extreme insurgent faction of the Taliban in Afghanistan, named after a notoriously violent Taliban commander, who was killed in 2007. The Mullah Dadullah Front split from the Taliban by 2013, and under a commander called Najibullah the Feda’i Mahaz, they actively sought publicity through the method of high-profile killings. By 2014, their spokesperson was claiming that the group opposed the Taliban’s stance on peace talks. The Mullah Dadullah Front was part of a wider context of fragmentation within the Taliban in the early 2010s, which culminated in 2015 with a larger-scale fragmentation, though this was ultimately later recovered and reunified from. The namesake of the Front, Mullah Dadullah, was killed in a raid by NATO forces; he was known for having controversially introduced the use of suicide bombings to the conflict in Aghanistan during the 2000s, and for engaging directly with the Western press, which was extremely rare at the time. The death of Dadullah had a lasting effect on the Taliban commander class: after his loss, it was several years before any of them would come into the public eye for disagreeing with their leadership. (1) The Mullah Dadullah Front were most well known for the killing of Arsala Rahmani, a senior member of the Afghan High Peace Council, who had also served as a Deputy Education Minister during the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan. Rahmani was assassinated in a shooting carried out in Kabul, which the Front later claimed responsibility for. (2) The assassination demonstrated the Mullah Dadullah Front’s ability at the time to dominate the news cycle around the negotiations between the Afghan government and the wider international community; it showed that there were many factions of the Taliban in the 2010s that went against the leadership’s propagated narrative of reconciliation, and instead were determined to exert control by other means. (3)
History & Origins
The origins of the Mullah Dadullah Front are inextricably tied to the ongoing factionalism and fragmentation of the Taliban in Afghanistan, throughout the conflict of the 2010s. While the word ‘fragmented’ is often used broadly to describe the Taliban’s loosely connected proliferation of groups and branches, it should also be understood as a more specific expression of division and factionalism within the organization. Practically, this means the splitting of the group into different splinter entities, which have their own politically distinct boundaries, and which join other existing groups, operate totally separately, or side with the state. Therefore, the fragmentation of decision making throughout the Taliban at this time stemmed from their being various ideological and pragmatic factions within the wider umbrella of the group; the Mullah Dadullah Front was part of this landscape. As early as 2007, there were signs of internal fragmentation within the Taliban; while there was no outright rejection of the authority of the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, various figures and factions began to emerge from this time that gradually became defined and politically distinct from the leadership. Prior to the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan by the US, the Taliban had actually developed a defined hierarchical structure that was not common among other mujahideen armed groups during this time, and their survival after the American invasion is thought by many to be due to the persistence but also, the looseness, of this hierarchy, which in large part consisted of personal, networked relationships and organization between top leaders and commanders. It was common for more local commanders to implicitly be left to pursue their own interests, as long as they broadly adhered to Taliban ideology. (1)
Then, in 2007, the Taliban’s senior commander and the Mullah Dadullah Front’s namesake, Mullah Dadullah, was killed by NATO special forces, and rumors of betrayal surrounded his death, which contributed to a general feeling of apathy among the wider command. There followed the death or arrest of three other senior Taliban figures, and Mullah Omar’s other deputies began implementing a wave of reforms in an attempt to further solidify and institutionalize the Taliban with the aim of keeping the movement coherent, and managed under the central leadership. However, by early in 2012, there were signs that more factionalism was causing further fragmentation, and the Mullah Dadullah Front emerged explicitly as a separate splinter group, lead by Dadullah’s younger brother, Mansour Dadullah, who had adopted his name, and who was demoted and published by the Taliban for disobedience. After this, the group conducted high-profile attacks, and maintained an opposition to the reconciliationary thinking propagated by the Taliban’s leadership during negotiations at the time.
Ideology & Goals
The ideology of the Mullah Dadullah Front is largely consistent with that of the wider Taliban movement: this is described by the United States Institute for Peace as ‘armed mullahs – fighting priests’; ‘as an organization of clerics, it claims a certain morality that lay people do not have; it also has a sense of exclusivity, restricted to a priestly order.’ The Taliban have, in their years of fighting in Afghanistan, sought to differentiate the violence that they enact from the violence of other groups, by giving it the legitimacy of a quasi-state power – now a state power, after their takeover following the US and UK withdrawal from the country in 2021. The Taliban emerged in 1994 and has been engaged in violent conflict since its founding; it has propagated and legitimized armed struggle as a core part of its ideology. Since their founding, the movement has fought the Islamic State of Afghanistan, and individual mujahideen commanders, before establishing themselves gradually as the de facto Islamic administration throughout Afghanistan. They argued for the establishment of the authority of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (IEA), an Islamic state in Afghanistan. With their founder, Mullah Omar as their amir, or leader, the Taliban demanded that all other forces in the country submit to their authority, arguing that to disrupt this was to defy Islam itself. The ultimate goal, then, was to establish the rule of an Islamic state system in Afghanistan, if necessary through the use of violence. The Taliban also established themselves as the only true protectors of Afghan sovereignty, against the intervention of Western forces, often referring to themselves as continuing the long tradition of Afghanistan withholding invasion and conquest from opposing nations and insisting that those who participate in Western-style systems have shed their Afghan identity.
The Taliban utilizes the Koran and the traditions of the Prophet to guide the leadership and ideology of the movement, however, it is worth noting that the organization’s hierarchy has, at plenty of points in its history, been more decentralized and looser than one might expect given its current iteration as the de facto government of Afghanistan. This more decentralized nature is crucial when considering the development of individual factions and branches within the Taliban; many of these factions did not evolve out of large ideological disagreements, but instead from pragmatic disagreements about how to achieve the ultimate Taliban goals, and dissatisfaction with the immediate resourcing of their segments of the organization. As the Taliban experienced growing pains during its expansion across the country, some branches became more focused on their own missions, such as the Mullah Dadullah Front and their high-profile killings, which they saw as the most effective way forward. It is also worth noting that there were various viewpoints within the Taliban about the relationship they should have to the US-supported Afghan government, as well as the wider international community, and the Mullah Dadullah Front differed with the centralized Taliban leadership on this, believing that reconciliation and negotiation was not a productive path, instead favoring violence. (4)
Approach to Resistance
The key methods of resistance for the Mullah Dadullah Front, were high-profile assassinations and suicide bombings. The namesake of the group, Dadullah, is responsible for introducing suicide tactics into the Afghan conflict, and this tactic persisted among the group. The group sent text messages and made phone calls to various members of the Afghan parliament in 2012, threatening suicide attacks if they voted to ratify the strategic partnership agreement between Afghanistan and the US. For the same objective, they also conducted their most famous killing, that of Rahmani. Rahmani was the second Peace minister to be killed within the year: before him, Burhanuddin Rabbani was also assassinated, a killing that was again claimed by the Mullah Dadullah Front. This approach was used by the Mullah Dadullah Front to disrupt the ratification of the strategic partnership, and curtail any new efforts to restart the much-disrupted peace process in Afghanistan. While the Taliban insisted at the time that the Front had no connection with them, and were instead a construction of the Afghanistan intelligence forces, the Front were widely known to be a branch of the Taliban and were successful at delaying the peace process by not only the threats of violence, but also by their ability to demonstrate that the wider Taliban movement was not united in its resolutions of openness to negotiation. Prior to the moves towards (and disruption of) ratification, the strategic partnership was signed by President Barack Obama and the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, during Obama’s visit to Kabul on 1 May 2012. Despite the intimidation by the Mullah Dadullah Front, the partnership was indeed ratified, agreeing that the US would be allowed to maintain a reduced number of troops in Afghanistan and continue training Afghan forces, as well as conducting targeted operations in the country against Al Qaeda.
Relations & Alliances
The Mullah Dadullah Front is largely thought to have remained affiliated with the Taliban, though Taliban spokespeople denied any relationship with the Front, claiming that the group was instead a creation of the Afghan government intelligence service. In August 2015, there was an announcement that Akhtar Mansour had succeeded the deceased Mullah Omar as the overall leader of the Taliban. Mansoor Dadullah refused to support the new leader, and this lead to several months of clashes between the Mullah Dadullah Front and the Taliban in Zabul Province, ultimately culminating in the killing of Mansoor Dadullah and many of his fighters in November 2015. In August 2016, the Mullah Dadullah Front then announced Dadullah’s nephew Mullah Emdadullah Mansoor as its new leader, threatening to take revenge on the Taliban. The Mullah Dadullah Front is also linked to a group known as the “Sacrifice Front” or Fidai Mahaz; this group was another splinter faction from the Taliban, and led by Mullah Najibullah, who was another former Taliban commander. This group was formed by many people who were ex-Taliban fighters and former members of the Mullah Dadullah Front, all of whom had become disillusioned with the Taliban itself. Overall, the Mullah Dadullah Front were part of a wider context of developing factionalism within the Taliban, and were vying for power and political purity alongside the backdrop of the Taliban’s participation with the current peace process in Afghanistan.
Works Cited
Watkins, Andrew. ‘Taliban Fragmentation: Fact, Fiction, and Future’. United States Institute of Peace. March 2020. Accessed 21 July 2024. https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/2020-03/pw_160-taliban_fragmentation_fact_fiction_and_future-pw.pdf
Roggio, Bill. ‘Mullah Dadullah Front Claims Assassination of Afghan High Peace Council Member’. Foundation for Defense of Democracies. FDD Long War Journal. 14 May 2012. Accessed 21 July 2024. https://www.fdd.org/analysis/op-eds/2012/05/14/mullah-dadullah-front-claims-assassination-of-afghan-high-peace-council-member
‘The Dadullah Front and the Assassination of Arsala Rahmani’. Institute for the Study of War. 14 May 2012. Accessed 21 July 2024. https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/dadullah-front-and-assassination-arsala-rahmani
Semple, Michael. ‘Rhetoric, Ideology, and Organizational Structure of the Taliban Movement’. United States Institute for Peace. December 2014. Accessed 21 July 2024. https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/PW102-Rhetoric-Ideology-and-Organizational-Structure-of-the-Taliban-Movement.pdf
Simpson, Connor. ‘Meet the New “More Radical” Insurgent Group in Afghanistan”. The Atlantic, 19 May 2012. Accessed 22 July 2024. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/05/meet-new-more-radical-insurgent-group-afghanistan/327901/
Special Operations Interrogator's Report, “State of the Taliban Archived 16 November 2021 at the Wayback Machine,”. The New York Times, 6 January 2012. Accessed 22 July 2024. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/296489-taliban-report.html#document/p1
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