White House says Mullah Omar death reports are credible

The U.S. State Department has had a million bounty on his whereabouts.

Bizarrely enough, media reports claim that the Taliban’s leadership council, the Quetta Shura, are “beginning” to have meetings on a successor, which seems belated if Omar has actually been dead for multiple years.

The spokesman for Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security, Abdul Hassib Sediqi, told EFE that the death of the insurgent leader occurred in a Karachi hospital.

Afghanistan’s president Ashraf Ghani’s office issued a press release that confirms earlier claims of BBC that Mullah Omar died two years ago in Pakistan.

The latest of these statements, from mid-July, expressed support for peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government.

The Taliban has released occasional messages said to come from Mullah Omar.

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

“Afghan government has received reports indicating Taliban leader Mullah Omar is dead, but is in the process of assessing the reports”.

Rumours of Omar’s ill-health and even death have regularly surfaced in the past.

Omar has not been seen since the collapse of his regime by the U.S.-led military invasion in 2001. When civil war erupted after the anti-Soviet war ended in 1989, Mullah Omar became leader of the Taliban movement that took power in 1996 and spread a severe interpretation of Islam across the country.

Omar Samad, senior adviser to Afghan Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, also told CNN, “All odds and indications point to the fact that he has been dead for at least two years”.

Meanwhile earlier today the Afghan government had said that it was investigating these reports of the Taliban leader’s death. In recent years, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan has struggled to maintain influence as terrorists linked to Islamic State gain prominence in the region. Local police and soldiers now take the brunt of their assaults as U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation forces ended their combat mission at the end of a year ago. Despite the careful negotiations, the Taliban continues to launch attacks against the government.