Former Afghan leader Buhanuddin Rabbani has been selected to head a peace council tasked with helping negotiations with the Taliban, President Hamid Karzai's office announced Saturday.
Rabbani is the leader of the Jamiat-e Islami party -- one of the Mujahideen factions in Afghanistan that fought Soviets in the 1980s. He became the country's president in 1992, after the collapse of Afghanistan's communist government.
For the next four years, rival Mujahideen militias fought for control of Kabul, and eventually destroyed much of the Afghan capital before being ousted by the Taliban in 1996.