Mullah Omar

Mullah Omar was the founder and leader of the Taliban from 1994 until he died in 2013, the head of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan from September 1996 to December 2001, the one-eyed village mullah from the Kandahar countryside whom perhaps a dozen photographs show, who received Osama bin Laden as a guest and lost the country rather than hand him over, and whose death was kept secret by his own movement for two years. He was a Hotak Ghilzai Pashtun who had fought the Soviets as a junior commander with one of the Peshawar parties and lost his right eye to shrapnel. The movement began, by its own account, in the summer of 1994 with thirty students of a madrasa near Kandahar whom he led against a checkpoint commander who had raped two girls, and hanged him from a tank barrel. By November 1994 they had Kandahar, by September 1995 Herat, by September 1996 Kabul, where they hanged Najibullah from a traffic post. By 1998 they had the north, where they massacred the Hazara of Mazar-i-Sharif. He took the title commander of the faithful in April 1996 by wrapping himself before a gathering of mullahs in Kandahar in the cloak of the Prophet from the city's shrine. The emirate he ran from Kandahar, never visiting Kabul, was the sharia as the village understood it. The women were out of the schools, the offices and the streets, the beards measured, the music, kites and pictures banned, the executions in the football stadium. There were the Buddhas of Bamiyan blown up in March 2001, and the Arabs of al-Qaeda under his protection. The Saudis and the Americans asked him to give up after the embassy bombings of 1998 and again after 11 September. He would not, on the grounds of Pashtun hospitality and of a dream he had had. He left Kandahar on a motorcycle in December 2001 as the Americans and Karzai's men closed in. He ran the insurgency from Pakistan, or lent it his name. He died of tuberculosis in a Karachi hospital in April 2013. The movement announced it in July 2015 after two years of statements in his name. The successor Mansour was killed by an American drone ten months later. He was born near Kandahar, in Nodeh or in Chah-i-Himmat, the sources disagree. The emirate his successors restored in 2021 governs by the rules he made and puts his name on the buildings.

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