Mohammad Qasim Fahim

"Mohammad Qasim Fahim was Afghanistan's first vice-president, a polarising leader whose political and military career spanned the Soviet War and the American invasion. His death leaves Afghanistan without one of its most controversial figures, who was expected to play an influential role in the country's security establishment and its complicated ethnic politics after the forthcoming US military withdrawal.



Born in 1957, an ethnic Tajik, Fahim gained notoriety as a young commander during the Soviet occupation of the 1980s and then as an anti-Taliban leader in the 1990s, a legacy he would parlay into a formal position of power under President Hamid Karzai. He is thought to have fled to Peshawar after the Communist coup of 1978, returning a year later to become right-hand man to Ahmad Shah Massoud, the charismatic Northern Alliance commander who was killed in an al-Qaida suicide bombing two days before 9/11.
When the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul collapsed in 1992, Fahim was appointed head of the KHAD, Afghanistan's intelligence service, under the interim president Sibghatullah Mojaddedi. He continued to serve under president Burhanuddin Rabbani."
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/mohammad-qasim-fahim-the-first-vicepresident-of-afghanistan-whose-career-was-dogged-by-allegations-of-atrocities-and-corruption-9182663.html