Taliban leader Mullah Omar died in a Karachi hospital in 2013, From TB

By Tahir Khan / Reuters
Published: July 29, 2015

Mullah Omar 

Taliban leader Mullah Omar. PHOTO: REUTERS

KABUL: Supreme leader of the Afghan Taliban Mullah Omar died suffering from tuberculosis two years ago in a Karachi hospital, Afghanistan’s top intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security (NDS) confirmed on Wednesday.

“The Afghan government has received confirmed reports that Mullah Omar died nearly two years ago in Karachi,” NDS spokesperson Abdul Haseeb Siddiqui told BBC Pushto. “We are happy that now the foreign sources have also confirmed that Mullah Omar is no more alive.”

“We still have a lot of questions how Mullah Omar died,” he said, adding that, “We have been told that the Taliban leader died owing to an illness.”

The deputy spokesperson for the Afghan President also confirmed that Mullah Omar had died in 2013.

https://twitter.com/ZafarHashemi/status/626417739838681088

“The government of Afghanistan believes that grounds for the Afghan peace talks are more paved now than before, and thus calls on all armed opposition groups to seize the opportunity and join the peace process,” the statement added.

Earlier, a former Afghan Taliban minister and member of the central leadership council had revealed to The Express Tribune that Mullah Omar had died owing to Tuberculosis, however, he had not disclose the location of his death.

“Mullah Omar died two years and four months ago owing to Tuberculosis. He has been buried on Afghan side of the border,” the former minister had said on the condition of anonymity.

Further, he added, “Mullah Omar’s son had identified the body of his father.”

Read: Afghan Taliban release Mullah Omar biography amid growing frustration within ranks

Meanwhile, some Afghan government officials told the media in Kabul that the Pakistani government has also conveyed to them that Mullah Omar has died.

The Taliban have not yet commented on reports of Mullah Omar’s death, however, they are mulling a formal response to be release later today.

Read: Mullah Omar endorses ‘political endeavours and peaceful pathways’

Mullah Omar’s successor

The disclosure came as reports of the Afghan Taliban chief’s death sprung up yet again when the Afghan Taliban summoned a meeting on Wednesday to elect a new chief after some leaders of the militant group confirmed Mullah Omar’s death.

The former minister also disclosed that he was invited to attend the meeting.

Taliban sources told The Express Tribune that consultations for a new leader are under way and a successor will be announced before the next round of peace talks scheduled to be held in Pakistan on July 31.

Read: Afghan reconciliation: Mullah Omar’s aide likely to join peace talks

It is widely speculated that Mullah Baradar Akhund will succeed Mullah Omar as the supreme leader of the Afghan Taliban.

Mullah Omar had appointed Mullah Baradar and Mullah Ubaidullah Akhund as deputy leaders while he was alive.

Mullah Ubaidullah died in a jail in Pakistan, according to the Taliban which leaves Mullah Baradar next in line.

Mullah Baradar was reportedly released by Pakistan along with some other Taliban leaders in 2013; however, some Taliban leaders still insist he has not been allowed to rejoin his family.

Read: Doubts and divisions among commanders as Taliban talk peace

Some Taliban leaders told The Express Tribune that Mullah Baradar enjoys the support of Sayed Tayyab Agha, the head of the Afghan Taliban’s political office in Qatar.

Tayyab Agha himself was a close confidante of Mullah Omar. Further, sources say that Mullah Yaqub, the son of Mullah Omar, is also in favour of Mullah Baradar succeeding his father.

Read: Mullah Omar endorses Taliban peace talks

Other Taliban sources say that the incumbent Taliban acting chief Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, a former aviation minister, is also among the few aspiring for this position. However, sources added that Mansoor’s position in the Taliban has been widely damaged for spreading news of Mullah Omar’s death.

Read: The Taliban in Afghanistan

Another choice for Mullah Omar’s successor could be Mullah Yaqub, his son. Yaqub recently graduated from a religious school in Karachi. However, several Taliban leaders are of the view that Yaqub is too young and may be ‘unsuitable’ for the post. A Taliban leader told The Express Tribune that Mullah Omar never wished for someone from his family to succeed him.

Mullah Omar’s brother Mullah Abdul Manan has also been actively involved in Taliban affairs in recent years.

Afghanistan investigating reports of Mullah Omar’s death

An Afghan government official said that a press conference had been called on the subject of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, amid rumours of his death.

The official, who declined to be named because he was not authorised to give statements to the press, did not provide further details.

Further, the Afghan government is investigating reports of the death of Taliban supremo Mullah Omar, a presidential spokesman said.

The announcement from spokesperson Sayed Zafar Hashemi came after unnamed government and militant sources told media that the one-eyed leader died two or three years ago.

“We have seen reports in the media regarding the death of Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar,” Hashemi told a press conference.

“We are investigating these reports… and will comment once the accuracy of these reports are confirmed.”

The elusive leader of the militant group, which ruled Afghanistan in the late 1990s until it was toppled by a US-led offensive in 2001, has not been seen in public for years, leading to speculation he has been dead for some time.

The Taliban has been fighting an insurgency against the Western-backed government in Kabul since its ouster, killing thousands of civilians and security personnel and making significant territorial gains in recent months.

Tentative peace talks have begun aimed at ending the war, with the Taliban split between those who support dialogue and others who want to continue to fight for power.
source: http://tribune.com.pk/story/928571/afghan-taliban-leader-mullah-omar-is-dead/

RAW OR RAWHEEL SHARIF ???

The Pervaiz Rasheed affair

PERVEZ HOODBHOY — The writers teaches physics in Islamabad and Lahore.

PERVAIZ HOODBHOY 

When Information Minister Pervaiz Rasheed spoke at the Karachi Arts Council on May 3, he stated the self-evident. Without explicitly naming madressahs, he said large numbers of factories mass-produce ignorance in Pakistan through propagating “murda fikr” (dead knowledge). They use loudspeakers as tools, leaving well over two million young minds ignorant, confused, and confounded. The early tradition of Muslim scholars and scientists was very vibrant and different, he said. But now blind rote learning and use of books like Maut ka manzar — marnay kay baad kya hoga? (Spectre of death — what happens after you die?) is common.

That last reference made me sit up. A best-seller in Pakistan for decades, I had bought and read my copy some 40 years ago and have since re-read it from time to time. My fascination with it, as with Dante’s Inferno, comes from the carefully detailed, blood-curdling horrors that await us in the grave and then beyond. One part of the book reports upon conversations between the inhabitants of heaven and hell. Another section specifies punishments for grave dwellers guilty of treating one of two wives unequally, disobeying one’s mother, owning more houses than necessary, or urinating incorrectly. While doubtless of grave importance, the minister’s point is easy to see.

The speech was extempore, and the minister rambled. Yet he set off a firestorm. Accused of making fun of Islamic books and Islamic teachings, clerics across Pakistan competed to denounce him. Authored by an extremist sectarian outfit, the JASWJ, banners on Islamabad’s roads appeared. They demanded that Rasheed be publicly hanged. Taken down by the police, they reappeared elsewhere. The police accosted those putting them up, but withdrew after being confronted by youthful stick-bearing students from an illegally constructed madressah in Islamabad’s posh F-6/4 area — one of the scores of other such madressahs in the city. The police chief expressed his views frankly: he was not equipped to take on religious extremists and suicide bombers.
The episode involving the information minister illustrates the present condition of state and society.

The story gets curiouser. Mufti Naeem — the powerful cleric of Karachi’s Jamia Binoria who had issued the fatwa of apostasy on Mr Rasheed — was a guest on a TV television talk show broadcast live on May 24. He reaffirmed his fatwa at the outset of the conversation. The two other guests were the Punjab law minister, Rana Sanaullah, and myself. One might have expected the law minister to insist on the rule of law, and to challenge the extrajudicial sentence passed against a colleague who sits with him in the cabinet. On the contrary, Mr Sanaullah expressed his high regard for the mufti and the mufti duly returned the compliment, expressing his delight at the minister’s recent reappointment.

The pressure on Rasheed was unbearable. Many, including the minister of defence, rushed to offer explanations and excuses for his May 3 speech. Privately they agree with him but taking a public position is another matter. Mr Rasheed too has retreated since and apologised, claiming he has been misunderstood. He was later seen at a dastarbandi (graduation) ceremony at the Al-Khalil Qur’an Complex in Rawalpindi where he distributed prizes to madressah students who had memorised the Quran. By doing so, he showed his lack of keenness in following in the footsteps of governor Salmaan Taseer.

Irrespective of the final outcome, or the personality of the individual, the Pervaiz Rasheed episode starkly illustrates the present condition of state, society, and politics in Pakistan today. One takes from it some important conclusions.

First, the urban-based clerical establishment grows bolder by the day, believing it can take on even sitting ministers or, if need be, generals. They have many tanks and nuclear weapons but didn’t Islamabad’s Lal Masjid — now grandly reconstructed — finally triumph over the Pakistan Army? Even though the clerics lost 150 students and other fighters, the then army chief sits in the dock, accused of quelling an armed insurrection against Pakistan and killing one of its ringleaders. Chastened by this episode and others, the establishment now seeks to appease the mullah. Not a single voice in government defended the information minister. Like the brave Sherry Rehman, who was also abandoned by her own party in a similar crisis situation, he was left to fend for himself.

Second, by refusing to own the remarks of its own information minister the government has signalled its retreat on a critical front — madressah reform. This part of the National Action Plan to counter terrorism involves financial audits of madressahs, revealing funding sources, curriculum expansion and revision, and monitoring of activities. Some apparent urgency was injected after Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar’s off-the-cuff remark earlier this year that about 10pc of madressahs were extremist. Even if one-third of this is true, this suggests that there are many hundreds of such seminaries. Plans for dealing with them have apparently been shelved once again.

Third, one sees that open television access was given to clerics and other hardliners who claimed that Mr Rasheed had forfeited his right to be called a Muslim. This is clear incitement to murder since a good fraction of society believes that apostates need to be eliminated. Such ideological extremism on TV is far too common these days to deserve much comment. Still, it is remarkable that a serving minister — and that too of information and communications — was allowed to be targeted. Has Pemra also fallen in the hands of extremist sympathisers?

For a while the Peshawar massacre had interrupted the deep slumber of Pakistan’s military and civil establishment. That those who slaughtered children at the Army Public School were not agents of India, Israel, or America came as a huge shock. It turned out that the killers were religious fanatics who saw their acts as paving their path to al-jannah. But dealing with this disturbing reality requires more wisdom and courage than Pakistan’s establishment can presently muster. It is lulling itself back to sleep by tossing more bombs into Waziristan, and lazily blaming five subsequent massacres upon RAW’s hidden hand. This is infinitely easier than dealing with the enemy within. Unfortunately it cannot work.

SOURCE : http://www.dawn.com/news/1186434