It has now been almost two years since President Trump bestowed the Medal of Honor on Staff Sgt. Ronald Shurer II. Shurer was a true hero. As Trump’s recount of his actions show, he scaled a cliff to reach his comrades, who were under attack by “roughly 200 well-trained and well-armed terrorists.” He was shot in the head but still managed to rescue most of his team and many of their Afghan partners. He subsequently joined the Secret Service. That this spring, the 41-year-old lost his life to cancer is a tragedy not only for his family but also for our nation.
The terrorists to which Trump referred, however, were not mere Taliban. Rather, they were members of Hizb-e Islami under the command of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
Who was Hekmatyar? During the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, Hekmatyar grew to become one of the most prominent Mujahedin commanders, famous not for his prowess on the battlefield — unlike many of his peers, he never actually scored a victory against the Red Army — but rather for his duplicity. He repeatedly back-stabbed other Afghan commanders in a mad scramble to the top. Afghans who knew him as an opponent or even as a friend described him as a sociopath.
Ordinary Afghan citizens knew him as the “Butcher of Kabul” for shelling the city repeatedly for no other reason than to ensure promotion to make the murder stop. He ultimately did become prime minister in 1993 and again in 1996, but he had destroyed what was left of the country in order to achieve that position. He was also a man for hire. His instability and unreliability led the United States to cut him off, but Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence embraced him fully. Prior to the rise of the Taliban, Hekmatyar was the Inter-Services Intelligence’s chief proxy; they only shifted resources to the Taliban because the upstart group was not impeded initially by the human rights baggage that came with Hekmatyar.
Hekmatyar has repeatedly targeted Americans. His relationship with al Qaeda and its founder, Osama bin Laden, led the State Department to designate Hekmatyar a terrorist. After U.S.-led forces entered Afghanistan to help Afghanistan get back on its feet after decades of civil war, Hekmatyar repeatedly targeted Americans. His fighters, for example, ambushed a U.S. convoy in August 2005. In 2012, his group claimed responsibility for an attack targeting flight attendants for a charter company used by the U.S. Embassy. The terrorists Shurer faced down? Hekmatyar’s group. While the Afghan government subsequently agreed to a peace deal with Hekmatyar, Afghans victimized by Hekmatyar’s terrorism still seek justice.
Pakistan continues latent support for Hizb-e Islami to have a Plan B to the Taliban to pursue efforts to hobble Afghanistan’s recovery. Hekmatyar is Machiavellian and has also sought an insurance policy lest he become too reliant on Islamabad. That insurance policy has been Turkey.
This is why, less than a year before Trump bestowed the Medal of Honor on Shurer, Hekmatyar flew to Turkey on a Turkish air ambulance to seek treatment for an undisclosed illness in an Istanbul hospital. He was welcomed there by none other than Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who promised that he would himself travel to Kabul to celebrate Hekmatyar’s triumphant return. It was not their first meeting: Photos published in the Turkish press and a video that subsequently surfaced showed the two met at the height of Hekmatyar’s Mujahedin-era reign of terror in Afghanistan.
While mayor of Istanbul, Erdogan referred to himself as “the Imam of Istanbul” and a “servant of Sharia.” While Western diplomats insisted Erdogan had evolved away from the radicalism of his youth and early career, when Turkish forces invaded northern Syria, they did so under fatwa, declaring their reason to be “jihad for the sake of Allah.” More recently, during a May 4 briefing on COVID-19, Erdogan dismissed the “leftovers of the sword,” a derogatory phrase that referred to the survivors of massacres perpetrated by the Ottomans and Turkey against Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian Christian communities. Erdogan also seeks to utilize his partnership with Hekmatyar to help shape Afghanistan’s post-war political order.
The U.S. should not let them. The persistence of Erdogan’s relationship with Hekmatyar illustrates that it was wishful thinking to believe that Erdogan was ever anything more than a jihadi in a business suit, no matter how many diplomats projected their hopes of change on him. To trust Erdogan’s word now — in Afghanistan, in Syria, in Libya, in Somalia, or anywhere else — is to betray the memory and heroism of Shurer.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
