By IANS,
New Delhi: An ethnic Tajik, Bruhanuddin Rabbani, who was assassinated Tuesday, was a former Mujahideen leader and played a key role to end the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Born in 1940 in northern Afghanistan, Rabbani was president of Afghanistan from 1992 to 1996, when the Taliban ousted him.
He then became the nominal head of the Northern Alliance, comprising mostly the minority Tajiks and Uzbeks who took power after the Taliban’s ouster by the US in 2001.
All through its existence, the Northern Alliance’s three main backers were Russia, Iran and India.
The head of the Jamiat-e Islami Afghanistan party, Rabbani was lately the leader of the largest political opposition to President Hamid Karzai’s government.
He was also chairman of Afghan High Peace Council set up by the government to broker peace with the Taliban.
Rabbani graduated in Islamic Law and Theology from Kabul University, where he was hired as a professor in 1963. He did his Masters in Islamic Philosophy from Egypt.