PESHAWAR, Oct 22: A leading member of Hekmatyar’s ousted government on Sunday said that the days of bloody power struggles that allowed Afghanistan’s Taliban to sweep into Kabul five years ago as bringers of peace were a thing of the past.

Qazi Amin Wiqad, Pakistan representative of the radical Hezb-i-Islami party that destroyed large swathes of Kabul in the 1990s, assured Afghan tribal leaders on Sunday that the interests of their nation exceeded those of political parties.

“We will not kill our brothers anymore,” Wiqad declared in a veiled reference to the brutal internecine battles for Kabul that followed the fall of the Soviet-installed government in 1992.

The party’s leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, now living in Iran, bombarded Kabul with hundreds of rockets from his base on the outskirts for a year in 1992 and 1993, destroying large parts of the city and killing thousands before he became prime minister in the government of President Barhanuddin Rabbani.

He later resumed devastating rockets attacks on the capital which only ended when the Taliban, a fundamentalist movement that arose in reaction to the chaos caused by the civil war among the Mujahideen, seized his rocket bases south of Kabul in February 1995.

The brutal fighting between Hekmatyar and the late Ahmad Shah Masood, the legendary commander who founded the Northern Alliance now fighting the Taliban in northern Afghanistan, discredited the Mujahideen parties and soured public opinion against the men whose valiant war of resistance drove out the Soviet army.

Wiqad said Hezb-i-Islami fighters in Afghanistan were now scattered, some siding with the ruling Taliban, some supporting the opposition now trying to unseat the fundamentalists and some not active at all.

DEEP SPLIT: Waqid even praised the Northern Alliance for agreeing with supporters of ex-King Zahir Shah to work together to convene a Loya Jirga and choose a broad-based government to replace the Taliban.