KABUL (Dispatches) – Afghan officials say the country’s president has issued pardons to 75 prisoners loyal to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord who signed a peace deal with the Kabul government in 2016.
The 75 pardoned convicts were released from the Pul-e-Charkhi prison east of Kabul, prison press officer Shah Mir Amirpoor said.
Under the 2016 agreement, President Ashraf Ghani agreed to release the followers of Hekmatyar in an effort to encourage insurgent groups to lay down their arms.
The release has been delayed for months. Human rights groups criticized Kabul for agreeing to the move that allowed prisoners suspected of being involved in attacks on civilians to go free.
An initial group of 55 prisoners were released in May 2017.
Hekmatyar, a former commander in the 1980s who waged a guerrilla war against the Soviet forces occupying Afghanistan, stands accused of leading the militancy that allegedly killed thousands of people, mostly civilians, in Kabul, during the 1992-1996 civil war.
In the wake of Taliban’s reign of terror in 2001, Hekmatyar was designated a "global terrorist” by the U.S. for his alleged links to the al-Qaeda and Taliban militant groups and was hence forced to go into hiding.
Back in February last year, upon Kabul's request, the United Nations Security Council lifted sanctions against Hekmatyar, saying "assets freeze, travel ban and arms embargo set out in … Resolution 2253 (2015)” no longer applied to him. It also removed his name from its Daesh-linked group list.
The peace deal with Hekmatyar’s outfit, the country’s second-biggest militant group after Taliban, is seen by some as a symbolic victory for Ghani, who seeks to revive peace negotiations with the much stronger Taliban, and who has so far failed to bring complete peace to the country despite election promises to that effect.
Afghanistan has been plagued by insecurity since the US and its allies invaded the country as part of Washington’s so-called war on terror in 2001. Many parts of the Asian state suffer from militancy despite the presence of foreign troops.
During the past 16 years, the Taliban militants have been conducting terrorist attacks across the country, killing and displacing civilians.