Taliban head dead 2 years, afghans say

• Mullah Mohammad Omar, the secretive head of the Taliban and an al-Qaida ally who led a bloody insurgency against U.S.-led forces, eluded capture for more than a decade in spite of being one of the most-hunted fugitives on earth.

On Wednesday, he was reported to have died two years ago in a Pakistani hospital, according to the Afghan intelligence agency. In Washington, the U.S. government said they considered the report credible, though it was not confirmed by the Taliban or Pakistan.

Even in possible death, the one-eyed cleric-warrior was shrouded in mystery.

He led a movement that swept over most of Afghanistan in the 1990s and became notorious for imposing what was perhaps the strictest regime of Islamic law in the world at the time. For his Afghan followers and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida militants, Mullah Omar held the supreme status of Commander of the Faithful. And yet only one known photograph of him exists.

Abdul Hassib Sediqi, the spokesman for Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security, said Mullah Omar died in a hospital in the Pakistani city of Karachi in April 2013. The Taliban leader’s exact date of birth is unknown, but he is believed to have been in his 50s.

“We confirm officially that he is dead,” Sediqi told The Associated Press. “He was very sick in a Karachi hospital and died suspiciously there.”

Sediqi did not elaborate, and it was not immediately clear why news of the death had been delayed until now. But the announcement came just two days before a key second round of peace talks were to be held between the Taliban and the Afghan government in Pakistan.

Mullah Omar’s sheltering of bin Laden and al-Qaida, in an alliance forged in the 1990s, brought the wrath of the U.S. after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Less than three months later, Kandahar, the southern city that served as Taliban headquarters, fell. Mullah Omar escaped on a motorcycle.

With a US$10-million bounty on his head, Mullah Omar is believed to have spent most of his time in hiding in Pakistan — nominally a U.S. ally, but also a longtime backer of the Taliban — or in the Pashtun heartland of southern Afghanistan.

The alliance between the Omar and bin Laden, killed in a May 2011 raid by U.S. special forces, was unusual. Bin Laden was a cosmopolitan Saudi with visions of global jihad, while Mullah Omar was a village cleric who rarely strayed from Kandahar. He is said to have seldom met a non-Afghan or a non-Muslim and was deeply rooted in the traditional, insular tribal world of Afghanistan’s Pashtun majority.

Both men fought against the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but they did not meet until the Taliban had seized control of most of Afghanistan in September 1996.

Mullah Omar spent much of his life in the village of Singhesar in Kandahar province. In 1979, when the former Soviet Union sent in troops to support a leftist government, Mullah Omar took up arms.

Soviet troops were dispatched to Kandahar to try to subdue the fierce Pashtun tribes there. Omar fought with one of six mujahedeen groups that were heavily financed by the U.S. and other western countries.