Mazar-i-Sharif. After the fall of the Taliban, he joined interim president Hamid Karzai's administration as Deputy Defense Minister and later served as chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Afghan Army, a role often viewed as ceremonial. His militia feuded with forces loyal to general Atta Muhammad Nur. Dostum was a candidate in the 2004 elections, and was an ally of victorious Karzai in the 2009 elections. From 2011, he was part of the leadership council of the National Front of Afghanistan along with Ahmad Zia Massoud and Mohammad Mohaqiq. He served as Vice President of Afghanistan in Ashraf Ghani's administration from 2014 to 2020. In 2020 he promoted to marshal rank in after a political agreement between Ghani and former Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah. Dostum is a controversial figure in Afghanistan. He is seen as a capable and fierce military leader and remains wildly popular among the Uzbek community in the country; Many of his supporters call him "Pasha" (پاشا), an honorable Uzbek/Turkic term. However he has also been widely accused of committing atrocities and war crimes, most notoriously the suffocation of up to 1,000 Taliban fighters in the Dasht-i-Leili massacre and he was widely feared among the populace. In 2018, the International Criminal Court (ICC) was reported to be considering launching an inquiry into whether Dostum had engaged in war crimes in Afghanistan. Early life Dostum was born in 1954 in Khwaja Du Koh near Sheberghan in Jowzjan Province, Afghanistan. Coming from an impoverished Uzbek family, he received a very basic traditional education as he was forced to drop out of school at a young age. From there, he took up work in the village's major gas fields. Career Dostum began working in 1970 in a state-owned gas refinery in Sheberghan, participating in union politics, as the new government started to arm the staff of the workers in the oil and gas refineries. The reason for this was to create "groups for the defense of the revolution". Because of the new communist ideas entering Afghanistan in the 1970s, he enlisted in the Afghan National Army in 1978. Dostum received his basic military training in Jalalabad. His squadron was deployed in the rural areas around Sheberghan, under the auspices of the Ministry of National Security. As a Parcham member of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), he was exiled by the purge of the party's Khalqist leaders, living