Afghan government formally confirms death of Mullah Omar

Afghanistan’s main intelligence agency said Wednesday that the reclusive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar has been dead for more than two years.

The mystery surrounding Mullah Omar, the Afghan Taliban leader remains as elusive as the himself with a splinter group claiming the senior leader was killed two years ago.

Haseeb Sediqi, the spokesman for Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security, told AFP that Omar died in a Karachi hospital “under mysterious circumstances”.

The intelligence official described Mullah Omar as having happened 28 months ago in a hospital in Karachi, Pakistan.

News of Mullah Omar’s death comes at a hard time for the Taliban, which is deeply divided over whether to engage in peace negotiations with the Afghan government with the goal of ending the 14-year Afghanistan war.

Omar, the reclusive militant leader who lost the use of his right eye due to a shrapnel wound, has not led the Taliban’s day-to-day operations for years but retained a powerful spiritual hold over its senior-most commanders based in the Pakistani city of Quetta.

White House spokesman Eric Schulz said U.S. officials found the report credible, but he stopped short of confirming it.

And earlier this month in a message released in Omar’s name, the leader was quoted as hailing the peace talks as “legitimate”. These reports started making headlines when debates about Omar’s successor started circulating in the Pakistani media, said Tolo.

It was unclear why news of his death was just now emerging, although there have been other reports of his death since 2001.

In the last few years, even some high-ranking Taliban have started asking questions about their leader’s health, life and ability to run the insurgency. Omar died two years ago in Pakistan, the presidential palace said.

The Taliban has denied previous reports of his death but have not yet issued a statement.

His death would mark, at the minimum, a serious setback for the Taliban as it is entering peace talks with the Afghan government and confronted by a rising threat from the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

Mullah Omar hasn’t been seen in public since the fall of the Taliban regime following the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, after the September 11 terror attacks.

The expert added that if Mullah Omer is confirmed dead most probably his son will take over.

The above is, of course, the conventional wisdom and how most observers in the west continue to regard the internal operations of the Taliban.

A source with links to the Taliban leader, however, told CBS News last week that he died in 2012 of natural causes in a remote part of Afghanistan’s southern Helmand province. However, it was only published as text on the Taliban’s website, which further fuelled speculations of Omar being dead or incapacitated.