Worldandnation: Who's who in Afghanistan's interim government

Afghanistan's interim administration will rule for six months to establish a traditional grand council, which will select a larger broad-based regime to govern for two years while an election process is developed. Its key leaders:

Karzai

HAMID KARZAI: The prime minister, 43, is a Pashtun leader whose Popolzai tribe is one of the largest in southern Kandahar. Married to a doctor, he became tribal leader after his father's assassination in Pakistan nearly two years ago. Fluent in English, his native Pashtu and Afghanistan's other major language, Dari, he is as comfortable sitting cross-legged on a carpet sipping tea with fellow tribesmen as negotiating treaties with international leaders.

MOHAMMED FAHIM: The defense minister, 44, is an ethnic Tajik from the northern Panjshir Valley and a member of the Northern Alliance that swept into Kabul on Nov. 13 after the Taliban fled. He was appointed alliance defense minister after a suicide bomber killed the alliance's charismatic military chief, Ahmed Shah Massood, in September. During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Fahim was a member of the secret police, then joined the Islamic uprising against the communists in the late 1980s.

YOUNUS QANOONI: The interior minister is an intellectual in his early 40s from the Panjshir Valley's town of Rokha. During the 1992-96 government of President Burhanuddin Rabbani, Qanooni was deputy defense minister, then interior minister. He survived an attempt on his life that was blamed on a renegade guerrilla leader and prime minister at the time, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. As a result, he walks with a cane.

DR. ABDULLAH: The foreign minister is a medical doctor in his early 40s. Raised in the capital, Kabul, he was the leading spokesman for Massood. During Rabbani's administration, Abdullah was the foreign minister, a role he assumed again after Nov. 13, when the alliance took power from the Taliban.

SUHAILA SIDDIQI: The 60-year-old surgeon is health minister. An ethnic Pashtun related to Afghanistan's royal family, she was given the rank of general during the communist rule of Najibullah. When the Taliban took power in September 1996, she was the chief of surgery at the capital's Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital. Within a week, the Taliban sent her home. The Taliban later relaxed their ban on women working because they needed Siddiqi to treat wounded Taliban soldiers.

SIMA SAMAR: The 44-year-old ethnic Hazara and the other woman in the Cabinet is one of four deputy prime ministers. She belonged to the feminist Revolutionary Afghan Women's Association, which sharply criticized the Taliban and the previous mujahedeen government of Burhanuddin Rabbani. Many of the same men are in the new government. Samar fled her homeland after the 1979 Soviet invasion, in which her first husband was killed. She worked as a doctor in a refugee camp in Pakistan and opened a hospital there in 1987. She also ran schools in rural Afghanistan and a school for refugee girls in Quetta, Pakistan.

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