Mullah Yaqoob
Minister of Defense of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan
Muhammad Yaqoob Mujahid Tumzi (born 1990), commonly known as Mullah Yaqoob, is an Afghan military leader and cleric who is serving as the second deputy leader of Afghanistan and the defense minister since 2021. He has been a deputy leader of the Taliban since 2016, and was additionally appointed to his ministerial role after the Taliban's victory over Western-backed forces in the 2001–2021 war. He has been the Taliban's military chief since 2020.
Biography
Mullah Yaqoob is an ethnic Pashtun of the Tumzi clan of the Hotak tribe, which is part of the larger Ghilji branch. He is the eldest son of the late Taliban founder Mullah Omar. He received his religious education in various seminaries in Karachi, Pakistan.
When his father died in April 2013 and rumors escalated that he had been assassinated by rival Akhtar Mansour, Yaqoob denied the rumor, insisting that his father had died of natural causes.
Leadership positions
In 2016, Yaqoob was assigned by the Taliban to be in charge of the military commission in 15 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces. The military commission, then headed by Ibrahim Sadr, is responsible for overseeing all military affairs of the Taliban. In addition, Yaqoob was included in the Taliban's top decision-making council, the Rehbari Shura.
“Mullah Yaqoob” enters the record as minister of Defense of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Mullah, Yaqoob and Minister can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q24572400. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1990, 2021, 2016 and 2001.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mullah Yaqoob” 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.