Mawlawi Habibullah Agha, a prominent cleric, assumed the position of the Taliban's Minister of Education on September 20, 2022. Before ascending to his current position, he served as the provincial head of the Taliban's clerical council in Kandahar province. Born in 1955, he received his formative education from his late father, Abdul Ghaffar Agha, in a local madrassa in his native village of Joi Lahore before enrolling at the Darul Uloom Haqqani madrassa in Pakistan. Upon graduation in 1980, he taught in local madrassas in Pakistan and joined the Taliban movement shortly after the group's emergence in 1994. During the first Taliban regime in the 1990s, he served as the head of the Punishment Diwan in the Primary Court in Kandahar province. After the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, he served as a legal adjudicator for four years in the Taliban's shadow Court of Arbitration in western Farah province. Subsequently, he assumed the role of deputy head of administration at the Central Dar-ul-Ifta, the main legal body overseeing religious rulings and fatwas. Presently, Habibullah Agha serves as a trusted confidante to the Taliban’s emir. His ascension to a crucial ministerial role serves as an affirmation of the emir's unyielding commitment to enforcing the group's radical agenda, placing Habibullah Agha as one of the emir's key enforcers within the corridors of the Taliban government.
