It was formed to bring together nine separate and mostly inimical military and ideological groups into a single entity. During the period of the Afghan civil war in the early 1990s, it emerged as one of the major actors in Kabul and some other parts of the country. Political Islamism was the ideology of most of its key leaders but the party gradually tilted towards its Hazara ethnic support base and became the key vehicle of the community’s political demands and aspirations.