By Fidel Rahmati

The deafening roar of rocket launchers and mortar explosions shattered the tranquillity of Kurram, a Pakistani district of majestic peaks, ancient maple forests and fertile fields bordering Afghanistan. People huddled in makeshift bunkers, exchanging desperate volleys as their villages became battlegrounds.

For months, Sunni and Shiite Muslims in the area have been fighting intermittently over land disputes, the latest flare-up in a conflict that has simmered for decades, paralleling two wars in Afghanistan and the rise of terrorist groups in the region.

At least 16 people were killed in clashes on Oct. 12, including an ambush on a convoy that was under paramilitary protection. Since then, warring tribes have blocked roads, causing shortages of food and medicine, residents said. In September, fighting between members of the two communities left 46 people dead; a weeklong battle in July claimed nearly 50 lives.

“It is like a war between two countries, not a dispute between tribes,” said Hussain Ali, 26, a university student from Parachinar, Kurram’s main city. “Innocent people are suffering, and the government doesn’t care.”

Pakistan is mostly Sunni, but Shiites make up about 45 percent of Kurram’s 800,000 people, and they dominate Parachinar.

Mr. Ali, the university student, is from the Turi, the only tribe among the Pashtun, Pakistan’s second-largest ethnic group, that is wholly Shiite. The overwhelming majority of Pashtuns in Pakistan and Afghanistan are Sunni.

Shiites and Sunnis have often clashed over the use of agricultural land and forests in Kurram. Much of the land in some bordering districts is communally owned, with no formal records in existence. But ownership of the land in Kurram was partially documented during the British colonial era, and the inconclusive nature of those records has helped to fuel the long-running conflict, according to local elders.

Last year, at least 25 people were killed in a clash over land in Kurram. In a gruesome separate incident, seven Shiite teachers were murdered in a school.

“The administration’s failure to prevent a simple land dispute from escalating into sectarian violence is disgraceful,” said Hameed Hussain, a member of Parliament from Kurram who organized a peace protest in Parachinar.

“When disputes arise, troublemakers spread propaganda through mosque announcements to incite violence along sectarian lines,” he said.

The threat of violence is so ingrained that self-defense has become a way of life. Many people in Kurram learn to use heavy weapons from a young age.

Kurram, sometimes called the Parrot’s Beak because of how it extends into Afghanistan, borders the Afghan provinces of Khost, Paktika and Nangarhar. Parachinar is just 62 miles from Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital.

Shiites and Sunnis in Kurram lived largely in harmony for centuries, despite occasional violence. But the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Iran’s Shiite revolution in 1979 dramatically altered the landscape.

“These events eroded traditional cultural values, fractured once-unified tribes along sectarian and socioeconomic lines, and heightened tensions in Kurram,” said Noreen Naseer, a political science professor at the University of Peshawar.

Kurram’s demographic and sectarian balance changed significantly in the 1980s with an influx of Sunni Afghan refugees and the establishment of mujahedeen groups, backed by Pakistan and the United States to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.

“It was a time when Afghan mujahedeen introduced a militant brand of Sunni Islam, while the Shiite population was also being radicalized by the Iranian revolution,” said Dr. Noreen, who is from Kurram.

This led to escalating tensions, resulting in two major episodes of violence in the 1980s that left dozens of people, mostly Shiites, dead. Shiites were forced to flee from the Sunni-dominated town of Sadda to Parachinar.

As the Taliban rose in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, they provided arms and manpower to their fellow Sunnis in Kurram, fueling more clashes that left hundreds dead.

The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 introduced a new dynamic. Pakistani Sunnis in areas near Kurram harbored fleeing Taliban and Qaeda militants, but the Shiites of Kurram did not, which earned them the enmity of those groups.

In 2005, Pakistan expelled Afghan refugees from Kurram, generating fears among Sunnis of a restored Shiite dominance. That sparked bloody clashes beginning in April 2007 that led to the expulsion of Sunnis from Parachinar.

In early 2008, the arrival of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or T.T.P., a militant umbrella group formed in nearby tribal districts, further deepened the sectarian violence. A 45-day gun battle devastated Kurram. Hundreds of Shiites and Sunnis, along with Pakistani Taliban militants, were killed, and several villages were burned.

Shiite leaders claimed that the T.T.P. wanted to take control of Parachinar because the Shiites would not let them use their land to attack American troops in Afghanistan. “In fact, T.T.P.’s brutalities united the Shiite tribesmen, enabling them to mount organized resistance,” said Niyaz Muhammad Karbalai, a community elder in Parachinar.

A peace agreement in 2011 finally ended nearly four years of incessant warfare, after almost 2,000 deaths. But sporadic violence persisted.

The conflict in Kurram intensified further with the return of young Shiite residents who had fought in Syria’s civil war to support Bashar al-Assad’s government and protect Shiite shrines from Islamic State bombings.

Since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 2021, tribes in Kurram have obtained advanced American weapons left behind by Afghan troops, which has contributed to the violence.

The decades of strife are deeply etched into the collective memory of Kurram’s people.

“The violence, particularly the wave that began in 2007, has transformed local land disputes into full-scale sectarian clashes, widening the gap between Shiites and Sunnis,” said Mr. Chamkani, the farmer. “I am skeptical that people from the two sects in Kurram will be able to coexist peacefully anytime soon.”

For most of the three years since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, their erasure of women’s rights appeared to be setting them on course for near-total isolation in the world.

Western and Islamic countries alike condemned the group’s most extreme strictures, particularly on girls’ education. Messages by Taliban officials that their government was eager to engage with the world were ignored. To this day, no country officially recognizes the Taliban as the lawful authorities in Afghanistan.

But in recent months, the political winds have begun to shift in the Taliban’s favor.

Dozens of countries have welcomed Taliban diplomats. Some have sent high-ranking officials to Kabul to build diplomatic ties and secure trade and investment deals. Taliban officials have won temporary reprieves from travel bans. There has even been talk of removing the group from international terrorist lists.

The diplomatic activity reflects a subtle but significant shift toward normalizing the Taliban as political leaders and away from treating them as insurgents. It also reflects a growing consensus among world leaders that the Taliban government is here to stay.

In January, China became the first country to formally welcome a Taliban diplomat as Afghanistan’s ambassador — a title typically reserved for envoys whose countries are formally recognized on the world stage. The United Arab Emirates followed suit in August.

Many experts saw the moves as paving the way for the Taliban’s government to earn formal recognition eventually from the two countries.

Also in August, Uzbekistan sent its prime minister to Kabul, the highest-level foreign visit to Afghanistan since the Taliban seized power. The Russian Foreign Ministry announced this spring that the Kremlin was considering removing the Taliban from its list of designated terrorist organizations, which would make it the first country to do so.

Taliban officials have scored victories in another contested political battleground too: Afghanistan’s diplomatic missions around the globe. After the U.S.-backed Afghan government collapsed in 2021, its diplomats still ran the country’s embassies and consulates — and often lobbied their host countries for policies opposed by the Taliban.

But last month, the Taliban’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that about 40 Afghan embassies and consulates now answered to its government. Control over those diplomatic missions signals the Taliban government’s authority in Afghanistan and gives the group a voice in countries where many top Taliban leaders cannot visit because of international travel bans.

What about the West?

Western countries have led the charge in denouncing the Taliban’s treatment of women, hoping to pressure the group into reversing some of its most contentious policies.

American officials have stuck to their hard and fast red lines on women’s rights, emphasizing that the United States will not lift sanctions or remove Taliban officials from its blacklists until the restrictions are eased.

But the United States has become an outlier. As Taliban officials have made clear that they will not bow to outside pressure, more European leaders and international organizations have appeared to accept the limits of their influence and engage on issues where they can find common ground.

In recent months, Afghan embassies and consulates across Europe have faced increased pressure from their host countries to answer to the Taliban government, according to three officials with knowledge of the deliberations.

The Afghan Embassies in Britain and Norway opted to close last month. The ambassador to Britain, who had been appointed by the old U.S.-backed Afghan government, said in a statement that the embassy was shutting down “at the official request of the host country.”

Leaders of European countries are motivated to engage with the Taliban by two fears: that waves of Afghan migrants will enter Europe if there is turmoil in Afghanistan, and that terrorism could emanate from Afghanistan and reach Europe.

What does this mean for Afghanistan?

The growing diplomatic acceptance has created trade and investment opportunities — injections of cash that have been badly needed since the U.S.-backed government collapsed.

Over the past year, the Taliban have issued dozens of contracts to tap into the country’s mineral wealth. Private companies from the region have also scored deals to build infrastructure across Afghanistan — a link between Central and South Asian trade routes — that could help revive its economy and score points for the Taliban among the public.

The new diplomatic embrace has also eased the pressure to roll back the restrictions on women — a victory for the Taliban, but a major blow for many Afghan women.

Najim Rahim contributed reporting.

For the better part of two decades, one name above all others inspired fear among ordinary Afghans: Sirajuddin Haqqani.

To many, Mr. Haqqani was a boogeyman, an angel of death with the power to determine who would live and who would die during the U.S.-led war. He deployed his ranks of Taliban suicide bombers, who rained carnage on American troops and Afghan civilians alike. A ghostlike kingpin of global jihad, with deep ties to Al Qaeda and other terrorist networks, he topped the United States’ most-wanted list in Afghanistan, with a $10 million bounty on his head.

But since the Americans’ frantic withdrawal in 2021 and the Taliban’s return to power, Mr. Haqqani has portrayed himself as something else altogether: A pragmatic statesman. A reliable diplomat. And a voice of relative moderation in a government steeped in religious extremism.

Mr. Haqqani’s makeover is part of a larger conflict that has roiled the Taliban over the past three years, even as the group works to present a united front. At the center is the Taliban’s emir and head of state, Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada, a hard-line cleric whose evisceration of women’s rights has isolated Afghanistan on the global stage.

As Sheikh Haibatullah has seized near total control over major policy, Mr. Haqqani has emerged as his most persistent challenger. Mr. Haqqani has privately lobbied for girls to be allowed to return to school beyond the sixth grade and for women to resume work in government offices, according to several Taliban and foreign officials. And as Sheikh Haibatullah has denounced Western ideals and dismissed Western demands, Mr. Haqqani has offered himself as a bridge.

He has gone on diplomatic tours and conducted back-channel conversations to espouse his more palatable vision and promote shared interests, like keeping terrorist groups on Afghan soil at bay. He has built relationships with some former enemies in Europe, as well as with Islamic countries, Russia and China, foreign officials said.

“Twenty years of fighting jihad led us to victory,” Mr. Haqqani told me earlier this year in an interview in Kabul, his second ever with a Western journalist. “Now we have opened a new chapter of positive engagement with the world, and we have closed the chapter of violence and war.”

Mr. Haqqani and his family have a long — and once secret — history of just that kind of outreach: At several points during the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, the Haqqanis sought rapprochement with the United States, a New York Times investigation revealed. But American officials mostly rebuffed the Haqqanis, viewing them as irredeemable and untrustworthy in light of the mass death they had wrought during the war.

Some diplomats now say that the Haqqanis’ bids for dialogue were missed opportunities, ones that illuminate how the American war on terrorism created the very enemies it sought to destroy — and help explain why the United States’ war in Afghanistan carried on for 20 years.

To continue to reject engagement with Mr. Haqqani may be to replay those missteps, some American officials and experts say. Faced with few alternatives, some see Mr. Haqqani as a potential force for change that could one day redefine life under Taliban rule and the country’s relations with the world.

The Insurgent

Around 10 one night earlier this year, I sat down with Mr. Haqqani in a two-story mansion just outside Kabul’s old fortified Green Zone. A stout man in his 40s with a coarse black beard, he has the grizzled look of an insurgent-turned-statesman.

It’s a tantalizing — if hard to imagine — vision for a country that has been plagued by nearly half a dozen coups, a civil war and invasions by two superpowers within the past century.

It also came from a surprising messenger: a man responsible for hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths during the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.

Born around the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Mr. Haqqani grew up in Miran Shah, a beige-earth, mud-brick enclave of Afghan refugees just over the border in Pakistan. His father, Jalaluddin Haqqani, was a prominent commander of the mujahedeen — the Afghan insurgents fighting a holy war against Soviet forces — who forged relationships with powerful sponsors across South Asia and the Persian Gulf.

All the while, Mr. Haqqani was grooming his son Sirajuddin to take over the sprawling jihadi network he was creating, sustained by a hugely lucrative criminal empire of drugs, kidnapping and extortion that spanned the Arab world. Even when Sirajuddin was a child, neighbors and relatives called him “khalifa,” a title in Islam that refers to a successor or leader.

The younger Mr. Haqqani said his earliest memories were of traveling to mujahedeen training camps in eastern Afghanistan to visit his father. The camps buzzed with the whistle of mortars from nearby fighting and stank of the sweat from mujahedeen fighters coming off the battlefield, Mr. Haqqani recalled.

When his father could not leave the battlefield, he and his brothers climbed atop nearby mountains and watched the fighting. “We said to ourselves that our father and uncles are down there, busy in the battle,” he recalled.

Mr. Haqqani and his brothers spent the rest of their childhood studying in a local madrasa, then with private tutors their father hired to teach them about global politics as well as religious texts. That gave Mr. Haqqani exposure to the outside world that was rare for a future Taliban leader.

When the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001, Mr. Haqqani, then in his early 20s, was sitting in the madrasa his family ran in Khost Province, in the southeast. The news arrived through crackling static over an old mujahedeen radio: American missiles were raining down across Kabul.

A jolt of adrenaline shot through the room. “We were young and full of energy. We were physically and mentally prepared” to fight, he recalled.

While the Taliban regime fell quickly, by the summer of 2006 the movement had regrouped and roared back as an insurgency. By then, Mr. Haqqani was leading guerrilla operations in the east, before eventually being charged with overseeing Taliban military strategy nationwide as a deputy to the emir.

The fighters under his direct command grew into one of the most resilient and capable arms of the Taliban insurgency. Mr. Haqqani embraced suicide attacks in a way that few had before him, creating a high-ranking battalion that prospective bombers flocked to join, former militants told me.

The headline-grabbing attacks prompted the United States to designate the Haqqani network a foreign terrorist organization in 2012 — the only arm of the Taliban to be classified that way.

American forces hunted Mr. Haqqani, to no avail — a point in which he takes great pride. He told of changing locations sometimes 10 times a night and never using the same cars or bodyguards twice to outsmart American forces.

“I ask you to ask our enemies how they could not kill me or arrest me with all the equipment they had,” he said, sitting in a beige leather armchair under fluorescent lights.

The Politician

When speaking about the war, Mr. Haqqani appeared at ease, a glint of nostalgia in his eyes. But when the interview turned to the Taliban’s internal politics and foreign policy, he was more calculated — after each question, he would pause, flip through a stack of talking points and then respond.

That caution betrays the Taliban’s delicate power dynamics and Mr. Haqqani’s uneasy place within them. While the movement has prioritized unity out of fear that any splintering could send the country back into war, a struggle has unfolded out of public view, pitting more pragmatic figures like Mr. Haqqani against the ultraconservative emir, Sheikh Haibatullah.

Within months of the Taliban’s takeover three years ago, Sheikh Haibatullah laid down an iron fist, establishing himself as the lone decision maker on all significant policies and government appointments.

Mr. Haqqani and other pragmatists made personal appeals to the emir to ease the most restrictive policies. Then, to signal their protest, he and some of his allies refused to attend meetings in Kandahar, Sheikh Haibatullah’s conservative southern stronghold, according to experts and foreign officials with knowledge of the efforts.

In a speech last year, Mr. Haqqani said the Taliban’s leadership was “monopolizing power” and “hurting the reputation” of the government — comments that many observers viewed as veiled criticism of the emir. Mr. Haqqani’s aides denied that characterization, saying that he was expressing a general desire for his government to establish a good relationship with its citizens.

The public objections seemed to violate the Taliban’s central code: total loyalty to the supreme leader.

And Sheikh Haibatullah responded with the full weight of his authority.

He reassigned the battalions of fighters loyal to the dissenting Taliban officials to his base in Kandahar and established his own private protection force. He replaced pragmatists in key government positions with his allies. He also, some analysts say, deliberately tried to undercut Mr. Haqqani’s overtures to the West by further restricting women’s rights.

The clampdown largely worked. “Many of those who tried to resist the emir now seem to be thinking that it’s not doable,” said Antonio Giustozzi, a leading scholar of the Taliban.

In the interview, Mr. Haqqani denied any rift in the government, saying the Taliban leadership had secured a major achievement by creating an “independent government with a single law and a single leader.”

But diplomats and analysts say he remains among the few still challenging the dominance of Sheikh Haibatullah, who less than a decade ago came to public prominence as a deputy, along with Mr. Haqqani, to the movement’s emir at the time.

Now, with most of his allies inside the Taliban cowed into silence, Mr. Haqqani has increasingly turned outside the country to help tip the power contest in his favor.

Mr. Haqqani has sold his efforts to establish ties with other countries — currently, no other nation officially recognizes the Taliban government — as part of his vision for its leaders to be players on the international stage.

He has built strong working relationships with United Nations officials and European countries, foreign officials told me. He has signaled a green light for Chinese investment and developed close ties to Russia.

In pitching himself as a reliable, practical partner, he has tried to shake the almost mythological lore around him as a terrorist mastermind and sworn enemy of the United States — a reputation forged over 20 years of war.

But he is walking a fine line, trying to cultivate ties with the world — including the West — while not offering fodder to conservative Taliban clerics who view relationships with Western countries as a betrayal of Islamic values and, potentially, Afghan sovereignty.

So far, the United States has largely rebuffed efforts by Taliban officials to establish any formal ties with their administration, drawing a red line over women’s rights. But the United States still holds enormous sway. It is the largest donor of foreign aid to the country, its sanctions help dictate the flow of badly needed cash and humanitarian assistance, and it effectively controls billions in frozen assets belonging to Afghanistan’s central bank.

While his influence over restrictions on women is limited, Mr. Haqqani has tried in back-channel conversations with Western diplomats to leverage an issue where he does have influence: global terrorism.

The Haqqanis have pledged to contain the threat not just from the Islamic State, which has been carrying out attacks across Afghanistan, but also from Al Qaeda, with which the Haqqani network still maintains close ties, officials with knowledge of the discussions told me.

Some Western diplomats have questioned whether terrorism emanating from Afghanistan is truly a global threat, potentially reducing the incentive to deal with Mr. Haqqani.

For others, distrust still hangs in the air, especially after the Haqqanis were found to be sheltering the head of Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahri, in a Kabul safe house when he was killed in a U.S. airstrike in 2022. Pakistani officials have also accused the Haqqanis of providing safe haven to the Pakistani Taliban, a militant group and ideological ally of the Afghan Taliban that has roared back in Pakistan since the Afghan Taliban regained power.

“They are tactically very astute,” the Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations, Munir Akram, told me, referring to the Taliban in Afghanistan. Their relationship with militants is both about ideology and a strategy to “secure greater leverage over neighboring countries.”

In my conversation with Mr. Haqqani, he insisted that no terrorist groups were present in Afghanistan, saying that “the Islamic Emirate controls every corner of the country.” A more nuanced reading of the security environment under the Taliban might be that, while terrorist groups have a presence in Afghanistan, the fact that they have not attacked targets in the West over the past three years is a sign of Mr. Haqqani’s intent to engage internationally.

The question is what he might get in return.

“It’s a dangerous idea, working with the Haqqanis,” said Hans-Jakob Schindler, a former coordinator of the United Nations’ monitoring group on the Islamic State, Al Qaeda and the Taliban. “You don’t know what side the Haqqanis will be standing on on the day you deal with them — your side or their own or the side of international terrorists.”

The Negotiator

For the United States, the distrust of Mr. Haqqani is etched in blood. But the Haqqanis’ reputation among American officials as radical ideologues and avowed enemies may be one of the many misconceptions that helped keep the United States in Afghanistan for two decades.

Even during the war, the Haqqanis showed an openness to engagement with the United States that was broader than previously publicly known. For years, the family was involved in secret discussions with American officials seeking a détente, according to former officials and others with knowledge of the interactions.

Those efforts began in the early days of the American invasion. Rattled by the American bombing campaign, the elder Mr. Haqqani dispatched a convoy of dozens of relatives and allies to Kabul to show support for the U.S.-backed Hamid Karzai as president at his inauguration, according to former American and Afghan officials. An American airstrike hit the vehicles before they could reach the city, according to former Western officials.

Soon after, Mr. Haqqani’s father sent his brother Ibrahim Omari to Kabul in another attempt to engage with the Americans. U.S. forces arrested him, according to Taliban and former Western officials.

In 2004, the Haqqanis approached Mr. Karzai again in an attempt to reconcile, only to have the request effectively ignored. “There was a chance to stop the Haqqanis from becoming terrorists, but that’s when we ignored them,” said Umer Daudzai, who served as Mr. Karzai’s chief of staff at the time.

At the height of the war in 2010, the Haqqanis were still secretly seeking rapprochement. They exchanged letters unofficially with American officials proposing ways of easing hostilities and asked through other back channels to meet with the Americans, according to two people with knowledge of the interactions.

A year later, Mr. Haqqani’s uncle, Mr. Omari, met with American officials at a Raffles hotel in Dubai, accompanied by the head of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, a patron of the Haqqanis that had helped broker the discussions, those people said.

Then, around 2015, the Haqqanis sat down with American officials alone for the first time in decades and discussed finding a path to ending the war, according to three people with knowledge of the encounter.

In response, Laurel Miller, the State Department’s acting special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, admitted that as conflicts drag on, their original rationale often becomes lost and they become self-perpetuating.

“The United States has lost the ability to answer the question for itself,” Ms. Miller recalled telling Mr. Omari about why the United States remained at war. “Right now, we are in the middle of a process to try and figure it out.”

Looking back now, some former officials told me that the United States, thirsty for revenge after the deadliest attack ever on American soil, seemed to create the very enemies it sought to destroy.

In our conversation, Mr. Haqqani was coy about his family’s previous engagement with the West, a history that could complicate his relationship with other groups within the Taliban.

But even if it is the card he is most reluctant to advertise publicly, it may be the best one he has to play with foreign governments skeptical of his outreach now. That once-secret history lends a measure of credence to Mr. Haqqani’s recent overtures, some former officials say. Instead of a shocking transformation by Mr. Haqqani, his outreach, they suggest, may be a continuation of what his family has long sought: strategic partnership.

The Future

Earlier this summer, a photograph of Mr. Haqqani was splashed across social media: He was standing outside the Qasr Al Shati palace in Abu Dhabi, a slight smile on his face and his hand grasping that of the United Arab Emirates’ ruler, Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

The encounter was Mr. Haqqani’s first official meeting with a head of state — and seen by some as a signal that his lonely campaign to build an independent support base was alive and well.

While not as outspoken as he once was, Mr. Haqqani appears to be “trying to build a political coalition for the long term,” Mr. Rubin, the former diplomat, said.

Even sitting down for an interview struck me as part of that political effort. In our conversation, he made his first public statement on women’s education in over a year, saying that the current situation “does not mean that girls are forever denied from going to schools and receiving an education.”

Such statements seem to reflect his belief that even an authoritarian government needs public support to last. “Unity is important for Afghanistan currently,” Mr. Haqqani told me, “so we can have a peaceful country.”

His efforts have begun to pay off. In June, the United Nations temporarily removed Mr. Haqqani from its travel blacklist. In addition to going to Abu Dhabi, he traveled to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, to perform the hajj pilgrimage.

Safiullah Padshah, Yaqoob Akbary, Fahim Abed, Najim Rahim, Zia ur-Rehman and Azam Ahmed contributed reporting.