Ahmad Masood Latifrai, a non-Taliban appointee, has served as the Deputy Minister at the Taliban's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology since the fall of 2021. Drawing from his experience while serving in the same capacity within the previous Afghan government since June 2020, he has actively contributed to advancing the Taliban government's initiatives in the development and management of communications and information technology across the country. Born in 1986, he attended the Oxford School of Indus College in Peshawar, Pakistan, and completed high school at Peshawar College in Pakistan in 2005. He then pursued a bachelor's degree in information technology at the University of Peshawar in 2006. In 2011, he taught computer science at Kabul Polytechnic University and served as the dean of the Department of Computer Science at Salam University in Kabul from 2010 to 2012. Between 2012 and 2014, he worked at the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund (ARTF), a joint project of the World Bank Project and Afghanistan's Ministry of Finance. Later, in 2016, he obtained his master's degree from the Technical University of Berlin, Germany. Upon his return to Kabul, he held various roles, including serving as the head of the information technology department for the Afghanistan Payment System (APS) at Afghanistan's Central Bank. In June 2020, he was appointed as deputy minister of telecommunication by former president Ashraf Ghani, a role he has continued since.
