Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost

Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost (Urdu: عبد الرحیم مسلم دوست; born 1960) is an Afghan Salafi jihadist militant who served primarily with the Taliban, and later, as a founding member of ISIS–K. Dost's militancy began by age 19, when he left Afghanistan to join the Ikhwan, carrying out the Grand Mosque seizure in Mecca, Saudi Arabia before most of the group were captured and executed, though he escaped to Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. By 1986, he had returned to Afghanistan to fight in the Soviet–Afghan War as a member of Jamaat al-Dawah ila al-Quran wal-Sunnah, a Salafist forerunner to the Taliban. Following the Soviet withdrawal, he joined the Taliban as they ascended to power in the 1990s. During the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Dost was arrested and held in the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he was noted for his poetic writings. In April 2005, he was released following a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, and returned to Peshawar, but was quickly recaptured by the Pakistani ISI, before ultimately being released in a prisoner exchange between Pakistani government and the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) in 2008. From his release from Pakistani custody through 2014, he was active with the Taliban in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, until swearing allegiance to the Islamic State's Khorasan Province in 2014. In late 2015 he purportedly left ISIS–K and the life of militancy, publicly condemning the group's emir, Hafiz Saeed Khan, as "illiterate" for approving attacks on civilians, however he reportedly maintains his allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and the broader Islamic State.