KABUL (Reuters/AFP) --
Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers announced several senior appointments on Tuesday, naming two veteran battlefield commanders from the movement’s southern heartlands as deputies in important ministries.
Main Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said Mullah Abdul Qayyum Zakir will be deputy defense minister, while Sadr Ibrahim was named deputy minister for the interior. Both men had been expected to take major positions in the new government but neither was named in the main list of ministers announced this month.
The two were identified in UN reports as being among battlefield commanders loyal to the former Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour who were pressing the leadership to step up the war against the Western-backed government.
The appointments add to the roster of hardliners in the main group of ministers, which included figures like Sirajuddin Haqqani, head of the militant Haqqani network, blamed for a string of attacks on civilian targets.
But the appointments also appear to reflect concern within the Taliban to secure unity by balancing the regional and personal differences that have surfaced as the movement transitions from a wartime guerrilla force to a peacetime administration.
According to a UN Security Council report from June, both Zakir and Sadr commanded significant forces of their own, called mahaz, that traditionally operated across several provinces.
They were considered so powerful and independent that there were concerns within the leadership that this could stoke tension over the loyalties of certain groups, particularly in the south and southwest of the country.
Zakir, a former detainee in the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, was a close associate of late Taliban founder Mullah Omar. He was captured when U.S.-led forces swept through in Afghanistan in 2001 and was

incarcerated in Guantanamo until 2007, according to media reports.
He was released and handed over to the Afghan government and was widely tipped to become defense minister in the new government before Mullah Omar’s son, Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob, was appointed to the post.
Sadr, a former head of the Taliban military commission from the southern province of Helmand, will be deputy to Sirajuddin Haqqani, whose family comes from the eastern borderlands with Pakistan.
Girls to Return to School
Meanwhile, the Taliban said Afghan girls will be allowed to return to school “as soon as possible”, after their movement faced shock and fury over their effective exclusion of women and girls from public life.
The Taliban were notorious for their brutal, oppressive rule from 1996 to 2001, when women were largely barred from work and school, including being banned from leaving their homes unless accompanied by a male relative.
One month after seizing power and pledging a softer version of their previous regime, the militants have incrementally stripped away at Afghans’ freedoms.
During the weekend, the education ministry issued a diktat ordering male teachers and students back to secondary school -- but made no mention of the country’s women educators and girl pupils.
At a press conference in Kabul, Mujahid said of the return of girls to school: “We are finalizing things... it will happen as soon as possible.”
He added that “a safe learning environment” needed to be established beforehand.
The Taliban announced their new leadership earlier in September, drawn up exclusively from loyalist ranks.
The Taliban now face the colossal task of ruling Afghanistan, an aid-dependent country whose economic troubles have only deepened since the militants seized power and outside funding was frozen.
Many government employees have not been paid for months, with food prices soaring. “We have the funds but need time to get the process working,” Mujahid said.
The Taliban have also slashed women’s access to work, with officials previously telling them to stay at home for their own security until segregation can be implemented.
While the country’s new rulers have not issued a formal policy outright banning women from working, directives by individual officials have amounted to their exclusion from the workplace.
The acting mayor of the capital Kabul has said any municipal jobs currently held by women would be filled by men.