Mohammed Omar

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Mohammed Omar
Colorized photo thought to be of Mohammed Omar.
Commander of the Faithful
In office 1996 – 2001

Born	c.1959 Nodeh, near Kandahar, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan
Political party	Islamic Revolutionary Forces, later Taliban
Religion	Sunni Islam

Mullah Mohammed Omar (Pashto: ملا محمد عمر) (born c.1959, Nodeh, near Kandahar^[1]) or simply Mullah Omar, is the reclusive leader of the Taliban of Afghanistan and was Afghanistan's de facto head of state from 1996 to 2001. He is also known as Commander of the Faithful, as declared by his followers in 1994.

Since the 2001 war in Afghanistan began he has been in hiding and wanted by U.S. authorities for harboring Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization. He is believed to be hiding in Pakistan.

Despite his former political rank, and his current high status on terrorism wanted lists^[2], not much is publicly known about this man. Few photos of him exist. During his tenure as "emir" of Afghanistan, most of the contact between that country and the rest of the world was via his foreign minister Wakil Ahmad Mutawakkil.

1 Personal life
2 Soviet Invasion and radicalisation
3 Forming the Taliban
4 Leader of the Taliban
5 After 2001
6 See also
7 Further reading
8 References
9 External links

[edit] Personal life

Omar is an ethnic Pashtun, a member of the Hotak tribe, of the Ghilzai branch of the Pashtun^[1]He was born the son of a peasant farmer, and grew up in mud huts around the village of Singesar (or, by some reports, Nodeh), near Kandahar. His father died when Mohammed was still young and the responsibility of fending for his family fell to him. He is reported to be married to Osama bin Laden's daughter and have five children that are studying in the madrasah run by Omar.

[edit] Soviet Invasion and radicalisation

Omar was a guerilla warrior with the Harakat-i Inqilab-i Islami faction of the anti-Soviet Mujahideen. He was wounded four times and lost one eye in an explosion. Taliban lore has it that, upon being wounded by a piece of shrapnel, Omar removed his own eye and sewed the eyelid shut.^{[citation needed]} However, reports from a Red Cross facility near the Pakistan border indicate that Omar was treated there for the injury, where his eye was surgically removed.

After he was disabled, Omar may have studied and taught in a madrasah, or Islamic seminary, in the Pakistani border city of Quetta. He was reportedly a mullah at a village madrasah near the Afghan city of Kandahar.

[edit] Forming the Taliban

Following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 and the collapse of the Communist regime in Kabul in 1992, the country fell into chaos as various mujahideen factions fought for control. Omar came to head a group of warriors known as the Taliban, or Students. His recruits came from the Qur'anic schools within Afghanistan and in the Afghan refugee camps across the border in Pakistan. They fought against the rampant corruption that had emerged in the civil war period and were initially welcomed by Afghans weary of warlord rule.

Reportedly ^[3], in early 1994, Omar led 30 men armed with 16 rifles to free two girls who had been kidnapped and raped by local commanders. His movement gained momentum through the year, and he quickly gathered recruits from Islamic schools. By November 1994, Omar's movement managed to capture the province of Kandahar.

[edit] Leader of the Taliban

In April 1996, supporters of Mullah Omar bestowed on him the title Amir al-Mu'minin (أمير المؤمنين, "Commander of the Faithful"^[4]), after he supposedly took the cloak of the Prophet Muhammad out of a series of chests it was locked in, which were held in a shrine in Kandahar. Legend decreed that whoever could retrieve the cloak from the chests would be the great Leader of the Muslims, or "Amir al-Mu'minin"^[5]. Shortly afterwards, Kabul fell to Mullah Omar and his followers in 1996.

Mohammed Omar, holding the purported cloak of Muhammad (filmed by a hidden camera, 1996).

Mullah Omar renamed his subjected country the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in October 1997. However, he did not move to Kabul, which has been the capital of Afghanistan for several centuries. In fact, he only visited Kabul twice during the reign of the Taliban from 1996 to 2001. Instead, Omar preferred to rule from his base in Kandahar.

Under Mullah Omar, Taliban authorities enforced a particularly strict version of Islamic Law (the Sharia or Path). The only professions open to women were in the field of medicine, and the women working as doctors or nurses could only treat other women. Women were also not permitted to attend co-educational schools; in practice, this prevented the vast majority of young women and girls in Afghanistan from receiving even a primary education. A stringent interpretation of the Islamic dress code, specifically the Hijab or Veil, was enforced: women could not leave the house without a burqa. Men were forced to grow beards and avoid non-Islamic haircuts or dress. Cinemas were closed and music banned. Theft was punished by the amputation of a hand, rape and murder by public execution. Married adulterers were stoned to death. In Kabul, punishments were carried out in front of crowds in the city's former soccer stadium. Hundreds of cultural artifacts were also destroyed including major museum and countless private art collections. Mullah Mohammed Omar defended his order saying it was an honor for Islam, despite international outcries, particularly with regard to the destruction of the world's largest and amongst the oldest buddhist statues, at Bamyan.

On 15 November 2001, Mohammed Omar proclaimed,

“

All Taliban are moderate. There are two things: extremism ["ifraat", or doing something to excess] and conservatism ["tafreet", or doing something insufficiently]. So in that sense, we are all moderates - taking the middle path.^[6]

”

This photo was featured on Wanted posters issued by the coalition forces, but it has since been established that it did not represent Mohammed Omar.

[edit] After 2001

Since the international intervention Afghanistan began in 2001, Omar has been hiding in unknown location(s) in the Pashtun regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan and is still at large. The United States government is offering a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to his capture^[2].

In June 2006, a statement was released, supposedly from Mullah Omar, regarding the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq. The statement hailed al-Zarqawi as a martyr and claimed that the resistance movements in Afghanistan and Iraq "will not be weakened".^[7]

Omar is believed to have played a significant role in the ending of the Waziristan War between Waziri Pashtuns and the government of Pakistan in September, 2006. He continues to have the allegiance of prominent pro-Taliban military leaders in the region, including Mullah Dadullah and Jalaluddin Haqqani. Former foe Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's faction has also reportedly allied with Omar and the Taliban.

In December 2006 Omar issued a statement expressing confidence that foreign forces will be driven out of Afghanistan.^[8]

In January 2007 a captured Taliban spokesman, Muhammad Hanif, told Afghan authorities Omar is being protected by the ISI in Quetta, Pakistan. This matches an allegation made by the President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, in 2006, though it is denied by officials in Pakistan.

In Ayman al-Zawahiri's frequent appearances in as-Sahab videos, he continues to refer to Omar as "Commander of the Faithful".

[edit] See also

[edit] Further reading

Coll, Steve (2004). Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. Penguin Press. ISBN 1-594-20007-6.
Rashid, Ahmad (2001). Taliban: The Story of the Afghan Warlords. Pan Books. ISBN 0-330-49221-7.