Jalaluddin Haqqani

Jalaluddin Haqqani appears in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s account at two sharply different moments: as the commander of a unit fighting in Afghanistan, and later as a figure whose whereabouts interrogators demanded to know. The book establishes Haqqani’s wartime role but gives little biographical detail; his significance here lies in that contrast, and in the gulf between the events interrogators asked about and what Slahi could know.

Command in Afghanistan

In early 1992, as Afghanistan’s communist government was nearing collapse, Slahi returned to the country and joined a unit commanded by Haqqani. The unit was laying siege to Gardez, which fell with little resistance three weeks after Slahi arrived. Haqqani is thus identified through a specific military command: he led the force in which Slahi served during the brief campaign for the city.

The campaign belonged to a conflict whose purpose soon changed for Slahi. After the communist government fell, rival factions began fighting one another. Slahi later said that he left because he did not want to fight other Muslims; the account identifies this decision as the end of his commitment to al-Qaeda. Haqqani’s command marks Slahi’s participation in the siege, but the narrative does not say whether their association continued after it.

A name in the interrogation room

Years later, while Slahi was imprisoned in Jordan and isolated from the outside world, interrogators asked him, “Where is Jalaluddin Haqqani?” The question placed Haqqani among figures the interrogators wanted located after the war in Afghanistan, but it did not establish that Slahi knew his whereabouts or had recent contact with him.

Slahi’s account emphasizes the mismatch: the interrogators had just briefed him that Afghanistan had been taken over and its senior figures had not been captured, while he had been cut off from the world since turning himself in. He answered, “I don’t know!” Haqqani’s brief reappearance therefore carries no new revelation about his movements; instead, it shows how a former battlefield commander’s name had become part of an interrogation about fugitives, while Slahi lacked the information the question presumed he might possess.