Gul Agha Sherzai
politician
Gul Agha Sherzai (Pashto: ګل آغا شيرزی; born 1954), also known as Mohammad Shafiq, is a politician and former warlord in Afghanistan. He is a former governor of Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan. He previously served as Governor of Kandahar province, in the early 1990s and from 2001 until 2003. In October 2013, Sherzai resigned from his post as governor and formally announced himself as a candidate for Afghanistan's 2014 Presidential Election, and served as the minister of border and tribal affairs until the Taliban captured Afghanistan again in 2021.
Early years
Sherzai was born in 1954 in Kandahar province His father Haji Abdul Latif, proprietor of a small tea shop in Kandahar, rose to become a famous Mujahideen commander. Sherzai took the name Gul Agha when he joined his father in the Mujahideen, who were fighting in the southern Afghanistan area against the Soviet and Afghan government forces.
His father was later murdered and he added Sherzai (Pashto for "son of lion") as his last name. He is an ethnic Pashtun from the Barakzai tribe. His father was locally known as Haji Latif Sagwan, ("Sagwan" is a term used for a "dog fighter") which is a derogatory term used for gamblers, who was a well-known dog fighter in southern Afghanistan. Sherzai would later collaborate with then-Governor of Kandahar, General Nur ul-Haq Ulumi, to stage fake attacks on the Afghan military, resulting in the ISI increasing supplies sent to Sherzai, who would sell them in Kandahar with the blessings of the PDPA government.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as politician. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q903527. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1954, 2001, 2003 and 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gul Agha Sherzai” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.