http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/30/taliban-officially-announces-death-of-mullah-omar
The Taliban has conceded Mullah Mohammad Omar, the one-eyed Afghan cleric who transformed a mob of 50 madrasa students into a national insurgency, is dead amid reports it has appointed a supporter of peace talks as his successor.
The statement, which followed denials of Omar’s death and recent statements in his name, said he had died “some time ago”, without specifying when. The Afghan government believes he died in a hospital in Karachi, Pakistan in April 2013.
Anonymous Afghan Taliban commanders, speaking to the Reuters news agency, said a leadership council in Pakistan had appointed Omar’s deputy, Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, to head the movement. Mansoor has been a proponent of the recent, embryonic peace talks and is seen as a pragmatist.
Some mosque-goers said the government had deliberately withheld information about Omar’s death for years. Indeed, Hasib Sadiqi, a spokesman for the national spy agency told the Guardian that the agency had told lawmakers for 18 months that Omar had died. Yet, in July, the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, welcomed a message, purportedly from Mullah Omar, endorsing peace talks.
Others suggested that the Afghan government simply didn’t know about Omar’s death, and that the poor quality of Afghan intelligence was even worse than wilful deception.
“Two years. For two years this big criminal was dead, and the government didn’t know about it,” said Wahid Rahmani, 25. “What kind of government is this? Screw this government.”
Omar’s designated replacement, Mansour, served as aviation minister in the Taliban government that was in power from 1996 to 2001 and fought alongside Omar against the Soviet invasion in the 1980s. “He is from the core group that was there from the beginning,” said author Anand Gopal who has chronicled the war and the Taliban.
With a record of favouring reconciliation, Mansour tried to retire from the insurgency early in the war and offered to support the new government under Hamid Karzai. But after he was rebuked, and learned that he was in fact on the US hit list, he fled the country, according to Gopal. He later rose to the top of the ranks in the Taliban.
Mansour, however, does not command the same reverence as Omar, whom tens of thousands saw as Commander of the Faithful, after he donned a cloak in 1996 that had belonged to the Prophet Muhammad.
Some fear the announcement of Omar’s death may disrupt talks between the insurgents and the government. With various factions disagreeing over whether to push for political inclusion through negotiations, or to use the current momentum to attempt all-out military victory, Omar served as a unifying figure.
His death could be detrimental to peace talks, Gopal said, “because Mullah Omar’s imprimatur was important in getting people to the table.”
He added: “This could actually hasten the fragmentation of the Taliban, though it’s too early to say.”
The announcement also comes at a time when Pakistan has put rare pressure on the Taliban to accept Ghani’s offer to restart peace talks.