Hanif Baktash

Mohamad Hanif Baktash, an ethnic Pashtun of the Amarkhel tribe, was born on 9 May 1961, in Maidan Shar, Afghanistan. He started his studies in Mazar-i-Sharif and continued in Maidan Shar, Kandahar, Helmand and finished Habibia High School, Kabul in 1978. He earned a graduate degree in social science from the Kabul Institute of Pedagogy. He received a Ph.D. diploma in History from the Supreme Attestation Commission of the USSR in 1993 for his thesis "War in Afghanistan: Social – Political Reasons and Consequences". Career In the summer of 1993 he moved to London and became a British citizen in 2002. He worked as a journalist with the BBC in 1998 and 1999. In 2009 he began working as a consultant for Afghanistan at a consultancy in Hamburg, Germany. Baktash was fluent in Pashto, Dari, English, and Russian.

He married Meena Baktash. Together, they had two sons. Hanif Baktash died in 2012.

In 1976 Baktash won a Pashto poetry prize in Afghanistan that opened his way into Afghan media. His main books include: • یادداشت هاونوشته ها (1984), analytical research in Dari • دځنګله سترګوکې (1987) • کله چې لمردخدای ایتونه لولي (2009) • شعرې که خنجر است (1983) • صدا (1984)