Faqir Mohammed

Maulvi Faqir Mohammed (Pashto/Urdu: فقیر محمد; c. 1970) is an Islamist militant and, until March 2012, a deputy leader of the Pakistani Taliban umbrella group Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. He was reported as killed on 5 March 2010 during a helicopter gunship attack on militants by the Pakistani military although he denied the reports as false. In July 2011, he resurfaced on the air broadcasting radio shows out of Afghanistan. He was captured in Afghanistan on 17 February 2013, and released by the Afghan Taliban in 2021.

Mohammed was born in 1970 in Sewai, a village in Bajaur District's Mamund Subdivision, into a Pashtun family of the Mamund clan. Belonging to a religious family, he studied in a local madrasa under Maulana Abdus Salam, a Deobandi cleric under whom he achieved the Dars-i Nizami graduation in the 1990s, then studied the Quran in the Darul-Uloom Panjpir in the Swabi District, known to promote a local form of Wahhabism. In terms of political activities he was initially a local leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami Pakistan before joining Sufi Muhammad's Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) in 1993 or 1994. While in Afghanistan he also fought the Soviets in the 1980s and for the Taliban in the 1990s.

He has one wife in a tribal society where polygamy is not uncommon.

Mohammed was a staunch activist of TNSM, to the extent that he has been considered Sufi Mohammad's confidant and right hand man. He and his two sons were captured in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, and were held in Dera Ismail Khan jail in southern Pakistan. However, he successfully fled back to Pakistan, where his knowledge of the territory has been useful to Al-Qaeda operatives.

He has been sanctioned as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist under the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List by the United States Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control; where he is listed as a member of the Haqqani network with a birth year of 1968, a place of birth in either North Waziristan Agency, Pakistan or Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Pakistan or Khowst Province, Afghanistan, and residential addresses in Bannu, Pakistan, or Lahore.

His house was raided by Pakistani security agencies hunting a "high-value" al-Qaeda target in 2005. Public sympathy raised him into a position of leadership in the Bajaur Agency. His house was raided again on 22 January 2006, and three of his relatives were arrested. He is a wanted man due to suspected contacts with Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants. Faqir has publicly stated that he has close ties to Ayman al-Zawahiri.

For his part, Faqir Mohammed strongly denies any presence of al-Qaeda or Taliban leadership in the area and says, "According to Pashtun tradition we will definitely exact revenge on America. Ayman al-Zawahiri never came here but if he wanted to come, we will welcome him, and it will be a great pleasure for us to be his host" (Daily Jang, 23 January 2006). President Pervez Musharraf, however, is insistent that "al-Qaeda fighters were probably killed in a suspected CIA air strike that killed 18 civilians in Bajaur Agency earlier this month...now that we have started investigating the reality on the ground, yes we have found that there are foreigners there, that is for sure." (The Nation, 25 January 2006).

He commented on the Chenagai airstrike which occurred in October 2006.^{[clarification needed]}