However, Mullah Omar has not been seen in public since then.
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Mullah Omar’s death has been floating amid peace talks between Taliban representatives and the Afghanistan government.
For years, the U.S. State Department had kept a $10 million bounty on his head.
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.
His death would leave the Taliban without a leader ahead of vital peace talks with the government.
The Taliban are planning to formally announce the death of Omar and declare his son Mohammad Yaqub as his successor and the organization’s leader, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad, a Taliban commander in the nation’s southern Helmand province, said by satellite phone Wednesday.
Afghan Taliban refuted the BBC claim of Mullah Umar’s Death on Wednesday.
“He was very sick in a Karachi hospital and died suspiciously there”, he said.
Sayed Zafar Hashemi, a spokesman for Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, said on Wednesday that authorities were trying to verify the claim that Mullah Omar is dead, BBC reports.
It is widely believed that the Taliban has split between supporters and detractors of the peace talks as their war on the Afghan government has intensified in recent months.
The senior official told Anadolu Agency, on condition of anonymity, that Pakistan had informed the Afghan government about the death. Ending Afghanistan’s war with the Taliban has been a main priority for Ghani since he took office past year.
The meeting to be held in the hill resort of Murree just outside Pakistan’s federal capital of Islamabad would be more substantive, raising hopes of a viable peace process to end the conflict in Afghanistan, the officials said. In an interview in the most recent edition of the ISIS English-language magazine Dabiq, a Muslim scholar said jihadists in Afghanistan and Pakistan should pledge to the self-declared “caliphate” of al-Baghdadi over the “regional” leader Omar. “If he is dead, it would be much more hard to get negotiations with the Taliban because there would be no collective figure to rally around and take collective responsibility for entering peace talks”.
Omar’s death has been rumored before but never confirmed.
Omar’s rise was born from frustration at abuses perpetrated by armed factions in the chaotic early 1990s, and he and his hardline Islamist Taliban movement seized power in 1996. Twice in 2011, the Taliban denied speculation that he had been killed.
Only two weeks ago, the Taliban released an Eid message attributed to Mullah Omar calling on Taliban fighters to back the peace talks.
The above is, of course, the conventional wisdom and how most observers in the west continue to regard the internal operations of the Taliban.
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The U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan ended last year, leaving the Afghan military to lead the fight against the Taliban.
