Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi, quoted by Sky News, said that Mullah Omar was “still alive and leading the movement”.
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Mullah Omar, the supreme commander, emir, and spiritual leader of the Taliban, is dead-at least that’s what unverified reports out of Afghanistan are saying as of this morning.
Syed Zafar Hashemi, a deputy spokesman for Afghanistan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, said the government is investigating claims that Mullah Omar is dead during a news conference in Kabul, Afghanistan July 29, 2015.
In Pakistan, a Pakistani security official said the Omar officials were still considered “speculative”. The reports surfaced just days before the next scheduled session of peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government seeking to end 14 years of fighting.
He said one woman, Sediqa Balhki, would be included in the Afghan delegation.
Mullah Omar is believed to have fled over the border into Pakistan after the U.S.-led invasion.
By the end of the year the Taliban regime, too, lay in ruins following the onslaught by US-led and Northern Alliance forces after 9/11.
“Concurrently with armed jihad, political endeavors and peaceful pathways for achieving these sacred goals is a legitimate Islamic principle and an integral part of Prophetic politics”, he said in a statement earlier this month, according to CNN. Despite the careful negotiations, the Taliban continues to launch attacks against the government.
The official announcement comes after unnamed government and militant sources told media, including AFP.
Mullah Omar is a key figure in Afghan politics and the politics of terrorism. He spends much of his early life in the village of Singhesar in neighboring Kandahar province. “With Omar out of the equation, more are likely to join (ISIS)”.
A Pakistani security official, speaking anonymously because he is not authorised to brief journalists, called the reports of Omar’s death “speculation” designed to disrupt the talks.
After the Soviets pulled out in 1989, he returned to his native area as a prayer leader and teacher.
Omar’s Taliban ranks were largely filled by young men who grew up as refugees in Pakistan during the Soviet occupation and the following civil wars. Acording to Yossef Bodansky, author of a book on the Al-Qaeda founder, they cemented their ties in 1998 when Omar married bin Laden’s oldest daughter.
But the talks quickly collapsed after the Taliban raised its flag outside of a peace office in Qatar, angering then-Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
It was Omar’s backing for al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks that sparked the US-led campaign in Afghanistan. More than 3,000 people are killed in the largest terrorist act in U.S. history.
Rumors have swirled for years that the one-eyed leader of the militant group that ruled Afghanistan until being toppled by U.S.-backed forces 2001 had passed away.
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November. 13, 2001 – Taliban fighters abandon Kabul after weeks of air assaults.
