Profile: This page describes Mohammad Yonus Qanooni as of September 2010. It is kept as part of the Khaama Press archive.
Mohammad Yonus Qanooni (also spelled Qanuni), born in 1957, is an ethnic Tajik politician from the Panjshir Valley who in 2010 led the Afghanistan-e-Naween (New Afghanistan) party and served as speaker of the Wolesi Jirga, the lower house of parliament.
After the Soviet intervention in 1979, Qanooni joined the mujahideen forces of Ahmad Shah Massoud in Panjshir. A close aide of Massoud, he helped create the Northern Alliance and served as interior minister in Burhanuddin Rabbani’s government. After Massoud’s assassination in 2001, Qanooni, defence minister Mohammad Fahim and foreign minister Dr. Abdullah Abdullah led the alliance.
Qanooni headed the Northern Alliance delegation at the 2001 Bonn conference. He then served as interior minister in the interim administration, as education minister in the transitional administration and as a security adviser to Hamid Karzai. He ran against Karzai in the October 2004 presidential election and finished second.
Later developments
Qanooni served briefly as Afghanistan’s first vice-president in 2014, after the death of Mohammad Fahim.
Archive note: First published on September 24, 2010, using text reproduced from Wikipedia. Rewritten in October 2026 as an original profile; unverified allegations in the earlier version were removed.
