Faryadi Zardad

Faryadi Sarwar Zardad (also known as Zardad Khan and Commander Zardad) is a former Afghan warlord. In 2005 he was convicted in the United Kingdom where he was living, for conspiring to take hostages and conspiring to torture during the 1990s in Afghanistan.

Born circa 1963, Faryadi Sarwar Zardad is Pashtun and a former Mujahideen leader who fought during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He ran a Sarobi checkpoint, blocking the major route heading from Jalalabad into Kabul, that commonly robbed, abducted and killed travellers between 31 December 1991 to 30 September 1996.

A widely publicised allegation regarding Zardad was that one of his militiamen, Abdullah Shah, viciously bit prisoners and had even eaten at least one victim's testicles. Shah was described as a "human dog" and kept in a cave with a chain around his neck by Zardad, and brought out to intimidate captured travellers. Shah was reportedly executed by the Afghan government in 2002.

In 1998, Zardad fled to Britain using a false passport to avoid persecution under the ruling Taliban, and requested asylum. He was the subject of an exposé on a BBC television programme, Newsnight, first broadcast on 26 July 2000. Zardad's presence in London had been discussed with a BBC reporter, John Simpson, by the Taliban's Foreign Minister in Kabul, Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, during an interview in 1999.

The minister had retorted to a question that "Well, you British are sheltering the criminal Commander Zardad". The BBC eventually tracked Zardad down after nearly a year, and found him living in Mitcham, Surrey. He was interviewed by Simpson for the programme, in which Zardad claimed to have been based in Kabul and had only visited Sarobi as an adviser to the local commanders. After the BBC report, Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) launched an international campaign urging the British government to prosecute Zardad. They issued a statement in many languages and circulated it through the Internet.

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