This undated image is one of few pictures purportedly showing Mullah Mohammad Omar. (Video frame grab)
Ever since the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, questions have swirled about the Afghan Taliban’s reclusive leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar.
Suppositions run the gamut. Some analysts say he is dead; others say he has retired from active command of militant groups; and still others say he is a figment of the imagination, a name rather than a real person.
“Since the fall of the Taliban’s rule in Kabul, no Taliban leader has claimed to have seen or met with Mullah Omar in the past 13 years,” Mubashir Bukhari, a Lahore-based analyst, said.
At the very least, he does not seem to be actively commanding the militants, Bukhari said.
“I believe the militia is running on ‘automatic’ mode … and its local commanders have gained more power and independence to pursue their ‘jihadist’ agenda,” Bukhari told Central Asia Online.
“If he is alive, he would have been spotted,” he said.
Existence difficult to prove
In late 2001, when international forces dislodged the puritanical regime in Kabul, Mullah Omar reportedly escaped capital on a two-wheeler. Since then, no credible reports of him being seen or heard have surfaced.
However, reports have circulated of him being killed in Pakistan on his way to North Waziristan – a Pakistani tribal agency that was headquarters to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Haqqani Network and a local chapter of al-Qaeda, until Pakistan security forces launched Operation Zarb-e-Azb in mid-June this year, destroying the militants’ networks. But those media reports were never confirmed.
Meanwhile, Mullah Omar remains a spectre.
Part of the mystery stems from the rarity of available photographs, even of those taken during the Taliban’s heyday. Supposedly the militants frowned on photos as a form of self-glorification.
In a 20-year-long journalistic career, Safdar Dawar, a former president of the Tribal Union of Journalists (an association of reporters from the Pakistani tribal area), has never met someone who claimed to have seen Mullah Omar.
“I’ve asked a number of Taliban commanders and al-Qaeda people in North Waziristan about the Taliban leader, but none said they had seen or heard [the actual voice] of Mullah Omar,” Dawar, a native of Mir Ali, North Waziristan, said.
If the secretive leader exists, he has gone into deep hiding, Murtaza Solangi, a senior journalist and former director general of Radio Pakistan, said.
If so, it seems likely he would be “somewhere in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border regions,” Solangi told Central Asia Online. “How active the militia leader is, though, is an enigma.”
If not Mullah Omar, who is at helm?
Regardless of whether Mullah Omar is alive, his lack of visibility raises the question of who really is pulling the Taliban’s strings.
“I think the Taliban are being led by the Haqqanis,” Aurangzeb Khan, a Peshawar-based analyst, said.
The Haqqani Network (HN) has become increasingly influential on both sides of the border – in Pakistan, securing supply lines to Afghanistan, and in Afghanistan, actively engaging in warfare.
“Omar has always been deeply secretive. He may be just a ‘front’ for his handlers,” Aurangzeb said. “On his own, he has never taken any initiative in the Afghan war post-2001 to address the fighters’ directly made statements.”
If Mullah Omar is alive, Aurangzeb suggested that his role would be more of an observer and an adviser.
“He would be too old to be fighting the war or leading the fighters in active ‘jihad,'” he said.
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