Fahim stepped into the international limelight after the assassination of his legendary former boss Ahmad Shah Masood on September 9, 2001, to take up the mantle as military commander of the Northern Alliance.

The alliance was a group of northern Afghan commanders who joined US-led troops to oust the militant Islamist Taliban regime after the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.

A former intelligence officer for the Northern Alliance, Fahim has emerged in recent years as an able administrator and is seen by many as the most effective man in charge of the Afghan military.

However, his grip over the defence ministry has stalled Afghanistan's vital disarmament process.

"Many regional commanders are unwilling to surrender their forces to someone they consider a factional commander," writes the Crosslines Guide to Afghanistan, a field guide for aid workers.

President Hamid Karzai faced international pressure to drop the warlord Fahim as running mate from his ticket for the October 9 presidential elections in order to speed up disarmament, diplomats and analysts said.

So far, 11,770 troops out of an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 private militiamen have laid down their guns, although the aim is to disarm 60 percent of them before parliamentary elections in April 2005.

An ethnic Tajik from the Panjshir valley, Fahim is seen as having strong ethnic loyalties to fellow Panjshiris, including Karzai's former education minister Yunus Qanooni, who has just stepped down in order to challenge Karzai for the presidency.

Karzai's foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah is part of the same Tajik clique and is also thought to be backing Qanooni's presidential bid.

Born in a small village in the Panjshir Valley to a Muslim cleric, Fahim went on to study Islamic law in Kabul. Towards the end of the 1970s he joined the anti-Soviet resistance.

Under Masood's command, Fahim gained a reputation as a sturdy and reliable leader of men -- a rare phenomenon in a war of turncoats.

Fighting the Red Army across northeastern Afghanistan, he was quickly promoted to head intelligence operations, after Masood's forces entered Kabul in 1992.

Fahim was given charge of the defence of Kabul's southern frontlines, under almost daily rocket and mortar barrages, first from rival Pashtun warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and then by the Pashtun Taliban movement.

The general played a central role in the September 1996 strategic withdrawal from Kabul, returning to the Tajik heartland of the Panjshir to continue battling the Taliban, both in the valley and in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, where bloody fighting erupted in 1997.

WAR.WIRE