Around 11 a.m. this morning, Kandahar time, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the controversial half brother of President Hamid Karzai and the most powerful man in southern Afghanistan, was shot dead in his home by Sardar Mohammed, who was in turn killed by Ahmad Wali's bodyguards.
In the confusion of breaking news reports following the shooting, I asked someone close to Ahmed Wali who this "Sardar Mohammed" was, and he gasped at the name. Mohammed, who commanded a force of men who ran checkpoints close to Ahmed Wali's hometown of Karz, had worked for the Karzai family for years and was from the same Popalzai tribe and district. The fact that he was allowed to bring his weapon into Ahmed Wali's presence shows just how trusted he was, and it seems likely that there was a personal motivation behind the attack. There have been a number of killings related to disputes within the Karzai family in Kandahar, most recently a misdirected NATO airstrike in March that killed a relative of the president.
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