Mohammed Omar

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Mohammed Omar (ملا محمد عمر, known as Mullah Omar ; * January 3, 1960 in Tschah-i-Himmat in the Chakrez district of the Afghan province of Kandahar ; † probably in April 2013 in Pakistan ) was the leader of the Taliban in Afghanistan and as such was head of state of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 .

Leaflet demoralizing the Taliban with Mohammed Omar and his car as the target

Life

Omar was the son of poor Ghilzai - Pashtun farmers in a village around Kandahar born. After the death of his father, Omar went to the small village of Sanghissar in late 1979 to work as a village mullah.

Soviet invasion of Afghanistan

After the withdrawal of the Soviet troops from Afghanistan , Omar fought from 1989 to 1992 in the Hizb-i Islāmī movement under commandant Nek Mohammed against the government of Mohammed Najibullāh . He was wounded four times and lost his right eye to shrapnel .

Rise to leader of the Taliban

In the summer of 1994 Omar is said to have founded a movement with 33 like-minded people, which achieved military rule over Afghanistan in September 1996 with the capture of Kabul . Various sources cite the kidnapping and rape of two girls by a mujahideen commandant as the triggering factor , for whose liberation the men united under the leadership of Mullah Omar. After the girls had been rescued, the commandant was hanged from an armored pipe. With these fundamentalist militias , which were recruited from the Koran schools and from the refugee camps along the Pakistani border and called themselves Taliban , he began the government to fight the warring mujahideen and warlords . Although the Taliban's archaic goals and brutal methods were not unreservedly popular, they received support mainly from the poorest social classes of the Pashtun population.

A gathering of 1,600 Afghan clergymen awarded him the title in 1996 (أمير المؤمنين, Amir al-Mu'minin , “leader of the believers”). Omar was head of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan . He triggered international protests with his order in March 2001 to destroy the Buddha statues in Bamiyan .

His first meeting with a United Nations diplomat , Lakhdar Brahimi , took place in October 1998 . He was not photographed until he was 39 years old. Omar lived and worked in seclusion in his government villa in Kandahar, even after the Taliban captured the Afghan capital, Kabul. He rarely met with non-Muslims and there are very few photos of him.

Omar had three wives. The first and third come from Urozgan and his second wife Guljana from Singesar, whom he married in 1995 as a minor. He also had five children, of whom his eldest son, Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob, is active in the leadership of the Taliban movement.

Overthrow of the Taliban

The extradition of Osama bin Laden demanded by the USA after September 11, 2001 , was rejected by Omar in a telephone interview as "un-Islamic" and made the past US foreign policy responsible for the terrorist attacks. After the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, Omar was on the run. The US government offered a $ 10 million bounty on his capture. He is said to have been under the protection of a local tribal leader in Kandahar at the time. He then became the leader of the militant organization Quetta Shura , which was formed from the remnants of the overthrown Taliban government.

On July 25, 2005, Omar reportedly reported on a tape message calling for attacks on foreign troops in Afghanistan to be intensified. He also demanded that the Afghan civilian population should not be harmed by the actions. However, the authenticity of the tape could not be confirmed.

On October 22, 2006, Omar called on NATO troops stationed in Afghanistan to leave the country and announced attacks against the troops. His whereabouts were unknown at the time. In January 2007, former Taliban spokesman Muhammad Hanif claimed that Mullah Omar was operating from Pakistan and was hiding there with the help of Pakistani intelligence.

The Saudi King Abdullah is said to have offered Mullah Omar political asylum in order to accelerate the Afghan reconciliation process.

For 2009, Mullah Omar announced "an explosion of violence in Afghanistan". His whereabouts were suspected at the time in the Pakistani city of Quetta . In autumn 2009 he is said to have fled to Karachi with the support of the Pakistani secret service ISI .

In mid-November 2010, Omar addressed several media outlets in a multilingual message. In it he called on Muslims worldwide to donate. In addition, he turned down an offer from the Afghan government for 35,000 jobs for his fighters in the talks between the Taliban and the Karzai government.

According to media reports, Omar may have been in Quetta , Pakistan in May 2011 , where Pakistani intelligence allegedly asked him to leave the country.

death

It was only in the summer of 2015 that it became known that Omar has probably been dead since 2013. According to various sources, he died in a hospital in Karachi , possibly of tuberculosis . His death has been confirmed by the Afghan government, the Taliban and Pakistani military and intelligence circles. The US also believes these reports are credible.

The Dutch journalist Bette Dam published the book The Secret Life of Mullah Omar in February 2019 . According to this publication, Omar is said to never have left Afghanistan. According to his bodyguard, Omar's last place to stay, a back room of a hut accessible through a secret passage, is said to have been only a few kilometers from the American army base in Wolverine. In 2013, the self-appointed emir apparently died of an illness. His bodyguard drew the picture of a curious hermit who, afraid of being discovered, stopped recording religious chants and refused any medical assistance.

literature

  • Ahmed Rashid: Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. Yale University Press, Yale 2010, ISBN 0-30-016368-1 .
  • Kamal Matinuddin: Taliban Phenomenon: Afghanistan 1994–1997. Diane Publishing Co, Collingdale 1999, ISBN 0-75-676280-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Afghan Taliban publish Mullah Omar biography. Article from April 5, 2015 on the BBC website. Retrieved September 6, 2018.
  2. ↑ Mullah Omar, the influential stranger. In: The time . July 29, 2015, accessed on March 20, 2019 : "The leader of the Taliban in Afghanistan died in April 2013 in a hospital in the Pakistani city of Karachi, said the spokesman for the Afghan National Directorate for Security."
  3. ↑ a b c The man without a face. Article by Thomas Ruttig from January 29, 1999 on freitag.de. Retrieved August 6, 2018.
  4. ↑ Mullah Mohammad Omar, Taliban leader - obituary . July 30, 2015, ISSN  0307-1235 ( telegraph.co.uk [accessed November 4, 2018]).
  5. ↑ Afghanistan elects - The most important actors. Article by Christoph Ehrhardt from August 19, 2009 for the FAZ. Retrieved August 6, 2018.
  6. ↑ Mullah Yaqoob biography on afghan-bios.info. Retrieved August 6, 2018.
  7. ↑ Mullah Omar - in his own words. Telephone interview transcript on The Guardian page. Retrieved September 6, 2018.
  8. ↑ Wanted Mullah Omar Up to $ 10 Million Reward ( Memento from August 19, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  9. ↑ Mullah Omar allegedly under the protection of tribal warriors in Kandahar. Spiegel Online , December 8, 2001.
  10. ↑ Mullah Omar 'hiding in Pakistan'. BBC News , Jan. 17, 2007.
  11. ↑ Saudi Arabia offers Taliban leader Omar asylum. Spiegel Online , November 28, 2008.
  12. ↑ Taliban leader threatens an explosion of violence. Spiegel Online , December 8, 2008.
  13. ↑ ISI helped Taliban supremo Mullah Omar flee from Quetta to Karachi. The Times of India , November 20, 2009.
  14. ↑ Mullah Omar continues to rely on war of attrition. Telepolis, November 16, 2010.
  15. ↑ Mullah Omar the next destination after Bin Laden? Retrieved May 18, 2011 .
  16. ↑ The Secret Life of Mullah Omar static1.squarespace.com, accessed March 12, 2019 (English)
  17. ↑ The last hiding place of the Taliban leader Mullah Omar . Neue Zürcher Zeitung from March 12, 2019
personal data
SURNAME Omar, Mohammed
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Omar, Mullah; ملا محمد عمر (Arabic)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Afghan Taliban leader
DATE OF BIRTH January 3, 1960
PLACE OF BIRTH Tschah-i-Himmat in the Chakrez district of the Kandahar province of Afghanistan
DATE OF DEATH April 2013
Place of death Karachi , Pakistan