Colonel Sultan Amir Tarar (died January 2011), best known as Colonel Imam, was a Pakistan Army officer and special warfare operation specialist. He was a member of the Special Service Group (SSG) of the army, an intelligence officer of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and served as Pakistani Consul General at Herat, Afghanistan. A veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, he is widely believed to have played a key role in the formation of the Taliban, after having helped train the Afghan Mujahidin on behalf of the United States in the 1980s.
Colonel Imam, who was a commando-guerrilla warfare specialist, had trained Mullah Omar and other Taliban factions. Colonel Imam remained active in Afghanistan's civil war until the 2001 United States led War on Terrorism, and supported the Taliban publicly through media.
He was kidnapped along with fellow ISI officer Khalid Khawaja, British journalist Asad Qureshi and Qureshi's driver Rustam Khan on March 26, 2010. Khawaja was killed a month later. Qureshi and Khan were released in September 2010. Imam was killed in January 2011.
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Famous quotes containing the word colonel:
“I am asked if I would not be gratified if my friends would procure me promotion to a brigadier-generalship. My feeling is that I would rather be one of the good colonels than one of the poor generals. The colonel of a regiment has one of the most agreeable positions in the service, and one of the most useful. “A good colonel makes a good regiment,” is an axiom.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)