Carlotta Gall
July 30, 2015
Mullah Muhammad Omar, Storied and Elusive Afghan Taliban Leader, Is Dead
Mullah Muhammad Omar, the leader of the fundamentalist Afghan Taliban movement, proved to be as enigmatic in death as he had been in life. When the Afghan government announced on Wednesday that he had died more than two years ago in a Pakistani hospital, he had not been seen in public since 2001, not long after the attacks of Sept. 11, carried out by a terrorist group to which he had given safe harbor.
A recluse whose lack of education led many to underestimate him, Mullah Omar cultivated the aura of a mystic and religious leader. He solidified his leadership of the Taliban in an elaborate ceremony at Kandahar’s holiest shrine in 1996. In full view of his supporters, he donned a venerated relic, the cloak of the Prophet Muhammad, as they proclaimed him Amir ul-Momineen, Leader of the Faithful, one of the highest religious titles in Islam.
There was nothing elusive about his command of the movement’s thousands of followers and fractious commanders. Through five turbulent years of Taliban rulein Afghanistan and more than a decade of guerrilla insurgency against NATO-led forces, Mullah Omar maintained his grip by means of cunning ruthlessness and the single-mindedness of a man who saw himself on a God-sent mission.
As the supreme religious figure in Afghanistan, he commanded allegiance from all Taliban and foreign fighters, including Osama bin Laden, the founder of Al Qaeda, who came back to live in eastern Afghanistan in 1996 shortly before the Taliban seized power in Kabul, the capital. Mullah Omar granted sanctuary to him and his followers as they plotted attacks against United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, against the American destroyer Cole and, most dramatically, against the United States mainland, in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
After the attacks he refused to hand over Bin Laden and led his country into war against the United States. Soon, he was forced to flee, overwhelmed by American bombing campaigns. He never appeared in public again, although there were reported sightings over the years: A family greeted him for prayers during Ramadan; a bodyguard attended a commanders’ meeting near the Pakistani town Quetta; his father-in-law met with his close aides.
Mullah Omar was widely reported to be living in or near Quetta, near the border with southern Afghanistan, and communicated with his followers through audio messages that were passed around. In later years, he moved to the teeming port city of Karachi.
Pakistani officials always denied that he was in Pakistan, but many admitted privately that he was probably under the protection of its intelligence service. For the last few years, those close to the Taliban and even foreign fighters allied to the movement began suggesting that he was dead, given the lack of any direct communication from him.
He was in his early 50s at his death. Born in southern Afghanistan, Mullah Omar was the son of a poor village cleric who died when he was small. He was raised by his uncle, also a mullah, and was educated at his mosque in Deh Wanarwarkh in Uruzgan Province and later at a religious seminary in the city of Kandahar, though he did not complete his studies.
Still a teenager when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, he joined the mujahedeen and fought in the resistance, gaining a reputation for bullheaded bravery. When injured in one eye by shrapnel, he famously tore out the eye and continued fighting. He was among those religious students, or “Taliban,” known for their strict observance of Shariah law and fearless fanaticism.
After the Russian withdrawal in 1989, and the fall of the Communist government in 1992, Afghanistan was sliding into civil war as armed factions fought for power. Mullah Omar was working as a laborer and continuing his studies with a local mullah in 1994 when he was selected to assist the feared judge, Maulavi Pasanai, who ran a Shariah court in Zangabad, outside Kandahar, in his campaign against militias that were plaguing the countryside.
Within weeks, Mullah Omar swept away the gangs preying on traffic on the main highways and seized power in Kandahar. He and his men went on to overpower other militias, killing some of their members – hanging one commander from the barrel of a tank — and disarming the rest. Soon there were popular tales of the valiant religious students mercilessly crushing warlords and criminal gangs. Many Afghans, weary of years of bloodshed and instability, welcomed the Taliban’s strong arm.
Then, in an extraordinary military feat, the Taliban swept north, seizing Kabul in 1996 and much of northern Afghanistan in the years that followed.
Aided by Pakistan, which provided the Taliban with substantial political and military assistance, the Taliban also welcomed thousands of Pakistani fighters and other foreigners, including members of Al Qaeda, who joined in the fight to establish the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, a fundamentalist, Islamic caliphate that harked back to the times of the Prophet Muhammad and the glory days of Islam.
Supporters described Afghanistan under the Taliban as a “pure Islamic state,” ruled by Shariah law, where clerics and military commanders enforced religious observance and draconian punishments — a forerunner of the now-rising Islamic State, formed much later in Syria and Iraq. To many Afghans, the Taliban had turned their country into a backward police state. While it brought security and ended corruption in some areas, for many the Taliban government represented the “security of the grave.”
The Taliban’s harsh treatment of women, who were banned from all public life, and the harsh suppression of minorities deprived the Taliban government of any formal international support. Only three countries – Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — recognized it.
By 2001 the Taliban were poised to conquer the last northern provinces of Afghanistan when, on Sept. 9, the group’s strongest opponent and leader of the resistance, Ahmed Shah Massoud, was killed by two Qaeda suicide bombers posing as journalists.
But the attacks of Sept. 11 two days later gave Mullah Omar little chance to carry out those plans, and when he refused to hand over Bin Laden, he took Afghanistan to war. His forces crumbled in just over two months of American bombing, and he fled to Pakistan, avoiding detection as he escaped on the back of a motorbike, never to surface publicly again.
Mullah Omar was married at least four times. He is survived by an unknown number of children, including a son, Mullah Muhammad Yaqoub, who recently graduated from a religious seminary in Karachi.
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