Mullah Omar
Muhammad Umar Mujahid, commonly known as Mullah Omar or Muhammad Omar, was an Afghan militant and religious leader who served as the first supreme leader of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. He founded the Taliban in 1994 and served as its first supreme leader until his death in 2013. During the Third Afghan Civil War, the Taliban fought the Northern Alliance and took control of most of the country, establishing its First Islamic Emirate. Shortly after al-Qaeda carried out the September 11 attacks, the Taliban government was toppled by an American invasion of Afghanistan, prompting Omar to go into hiding. Evading capture by the American-led coalition, he died from tuberculosis in 2013.
Born into a religious family in Kandahar, Afghanistan, Omar was educated at local madrasas. After Afghanistan was invaded by the Soviet Union in 1979, he joined the mujahideen to fight in the Soviet–Afghan War and was trained by Amir Sultan Tarar. Omar served as an important rebel commander during several skirmishes, losing his right eye in an explosion. The Soviets eventually withdrew from the country in 1989 and Afghanistan's Soviet-backed Democratic Republic was toppled in 1992, triggering the Second Afghan Civil War. While initially remaining quiet and focused on continuing his studies, Omar became increasingly discontent with what he perceived as fasād in the country, ultimately prompting him to return to fighting in the Civil War.
In 1994, Omar, along with religious students in Kandahar, formed the Taliban, which emerged victorious against other Afghan factions by 1996. Omar led the Taliban to form a Sunni Islamic theocracy headed by the Supreme Council, known as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, which strictly enforced sharia. While ruling between 1996 and 2001, the Taliban were widely condemned for committing massacres against civilians, discriminating against religious and ethnic minorities, banning women from school and most employment, and destroying cultural monuments, including the Buddhas of Bamiyan, which Omar personally ordered.
After al-Qaeda, which had been given sanctuary in Afghanistan by the Taliban, carried out the September 11 attacks against the United States in 2001, American president George W. Bush demanded that the Taliban extradite al-Qaeda's leader Osama bin Laden to the United States. The Taliban, under the leadership of Mullah Omar, refused to extradite him to the U.S. without concrete evidence linking him to the attacks, and they requested proof of his involvement in 9/11. The United States, however, had enough proof of him being in Afghanistan and under the Taliban's protection, and subsequently began the Global War on Terrorism and led a multinational invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, greatly bolstered by the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. By December 2001, the Taliban government had been ousted by the American-led coalition; Omar fled Kandahar, went into hiding in Zabul Province, and delegated operational control of the Taliban to his deputies. Under his command, the Taliban launched an insurgency against the new Afghan government and the coalition. Although Omar was the subject of a decade-long international manhunt, he remained in hiding for the rest of his life. He died in 2013, reportedly due to tuberculosis, which was not revealed publicly until 2015. In 2021, the Taliban deposed the Afghan government and regained power following the fall of Kabul.
Omar remains a largely popular figure amongst the Taliban, who view him as a key freedom fighter who defended Afghanistan's Islamic principlesfirst against the Soviet empire and later against the Western world. Others have criticised him for his method of governance and his religious dogmatism.
Early life and education
Muhammed Omar was born between 1950 and 1962 into a poor and large Pashtun family in the village of Chah-i-Himmat in Khakrez of Kandahar, Kingdom of Afghanistan. He came from a line of Islamic scholars and teachers. At, he was the tallest boy in his family.His father was Mawlawi Ghulam Nabi, his grandfather Mawlawi Muhammad Rasool, and his great-grandfather Mawlawi Baz Muhammad. They were of the Tomzi clan of the Hotak tribe, which is part of the larger Ghilji tribal confederation of the Pashtuns. His father, born in Khakrez District, was a poor, landless itinerant teacher who taught the Quran to village boys and received alms from their families. He died when Omar was three years old, according to Omar's own words, or five years old, according to the Taliban biography. Thereafter Omar was raised by his uncles. One of his father's brothers, Maulawi Muzafer, married Omar's widowed mother, as was often done in rural Afghanistan.
The family moved to the village of Dehwanawark, several miles from the town of Deh Rawood, in the poor Deh Rawood District in Uruzgan Province, where the uncle was a religious teacher. According to former Afghan president Hamid Karzai, "Omar's father was a local religious leader, but the family was poor and had absolutely no political links in Kandahar or Kabul. They were essentially lower middle class Afghans and were definitely not members of the elite."
Omar studied at a religious school or madrasa run by his uncle. According to Gopal and Strick van Linschoten, all of his religious education was in Afghan hujras, which are small religious schools annexed to village mosques. He completed his primary and secondary religious education, then began higher religious studies at 18. His studies were interrupted before completion and he did not properly earn the title "Mullah." Later, he would be awarded an honorary degree by the Jamia Uloom-ul-Islamia seminary in Karachi, Pakistan, but never studied there, contrary to some reports. He was also given an honorary doctorate by Darul Uloom Haqqania in northwestern Pakistan, where numerous other senior Taliban leaders studied. Some sources have claimed that he studied there, but its leader Sami-ul-Haq said that he did not know of Omar until 1994.
Much of Omar's early and personal life remains either secret or is the subject of conflicting reports. In April 2015, during the time when his death was being kept secret, the Taliban published a biography of Omar to mark his "19th year as their supreme leader"; in fact, he had died on 23 April 2013.
Soviet–Afghan War (1979–1989)
After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Omar joined the mujahideen in Deh Rawood to fight the Soviets. In 1983 he moved with mujahideen friends to Maywand District in Kandahar Province and fought under Faizullah Akhundzada, the commander of a group affiliated with Harakat-i-Inqilab-i-Islami. Abdul Ghani Baradar was another from Deh Rawood who was in the group. Omar fought in the Maiwand, Zhari, Panjwai and Dand districts and was an expert in using rocket-propelled grenades against tanks. In the last years of the war, some mujahideen groups split up, and Omar and his friends left Faizullah Akhundzada's group. They formed a new group under Omar's leadership, based at Aday, in the Singesar area, then in the Panjwayi District and now in Zhari District, and became registered with Harakat-i-Inqilab-i-Islami as an affiliated group. Omar was wounded four times. Abdul Salam Zaeef has said he was present when exploding shrapnel destroyed Omar's right eye at Singesar during the 1987 Battle of Arghandab. Other sources place this event in 1986 or in the 1989 Battle of Jalalabad. Omar went to a hospital in Quetta, Pakistan, for treatment to his eye wound. According to former Taliban official Abdul Hai Mutmaen, this was the only time that Omar ever went to Pakistan, and that he returned after treatment. According to Dutch journalist Bette Dam, in research published in 2019, he went to Pakistan on one other occasion during the war, to fetch weapons following a dispute within his mujahideen group. Mutmaen denies that Omar went there for weapons, but acknowledges that a few members of Omar's family claim he visited Pakistan four times during the waronce for the injury, then to register his group, and two visits to injured friends.Soviet withdrawal and fight against the Democratic Republic
The Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. According to Ahmed Rashid, Omar joined the mujahideen group Hezb-i Islami Khalis and fought under the command of Nek Mohammed against Mohammad Najibullah's communist regime between 1989 and 1992.After Najibullah's government collapsed in 1992, Omar and a group of mujahideen turned their base near Haji Ibrahim Mosque in Gheshano village, in the Singesar area, into a madrassa. As well as teaching there, Omar resumed his own studies that had been interrupted by the war. Unlike many Afghan mujaheddin, Omar spoke Arabic. He was devoted to the lectures of Sheikh Abdullah Azzam.
Forming the Taliban (1994)
After Najibullah's regime ended, the country fell into chaos as various mujahideen factions fought for control. According to one legend, Omar had a dream in 1994 in which a woman told him: "We need your help; you must rise. You must end the chaos. God will help you." Omar started his movement with fewer than 50 armed madrasa students who were simply known as the Taliban. His recruits came from madrasas located in Afghanistan and the Afghan refugee camps across the border with Pakistan. They fought against the rampant corruption which had emerged during the civil war period and were initially welcomed by Afghans weary of warlord rule. Sickened by the abusive raping of children by warlords and turned against their authority in the mountainous country of Afghanistan from 1994 onwards.Two influential anti-Soviet political leaders who were connected with Peshawar during this era were Mohammad Yunus Khalis and Mohammad Nabi Mohammadi; both exerted a considerable influence over the Taliban, particularly in the southern parts of the country, including Kandahar. Many of those who later formed the core of the Taliban, including Omar, fought under the command of factions that were loyal to Nabi Mohammadi. These factions had helped proliferate madrasas, attended by many of the Kandahar Taliban, throughout the southern regions of Afghanistan.
The practice of bacha bazi by warlords was one of the key factors in Omar mobilizing the Taliban. In early 1994, Omar led 30 men armed with 16 rifles to free two young girls who had been kidnapped and raped by a warlord, hanging him from a tank gun barrel. Another instance arose when in 1994, a few months before the Taliban took control of Kandahar, two militia commanders confronted each other over a young boy whom they both wanted to sodomize. In the ensuing fight, Omar's group freed the boy; appeals soon flooded in for Omar to intercede in other disputes. His movement gained momentum through the year and he quickly gathered recruits from Islamic schools totaling 12,000 by the year's end with some Pakistani volunteers. By November 1994, Omar's movement managed to capture the whole of the Kandahar Province and then captured the Herat Province in September 1995. Some accounts estimated that by the spring of 1995 he had already taken 12 of the 31 provinces in Afghanistan.