The man who refused to hand over bin Laden

(Baonghean.vn) - His death is as mysterious as his life: Mullah Omar, one of the world's most wanted men, died in a hospital in Karachi, Pakistan, more than two years ago, according to Afghan government officials. US officials said they believe this is a "credible" explanation.

Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, is believed to have died in April 2013 in Pakistan. Photo: Internet.

This fits perfectly with the life of Mullah Omar. He rose from an obscure village mullah to the head of Afghanistan in the years before the 9/11 attacks on America, yet he rarely appeared in public and was rarely photographed.

Mullah Omar will be remembered in history as the man who refused to hand over Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks. Immediately after the attacks, the Bush Administration demanded that the Taliban hand over bin Laden.

Ten days after 9/11, the American Radio station asked Mullah Omar: “You will not hand over Osama bin Laden?” Omar replied: “No. We cannot do that. If we do, it means we are not Muslims, Islam is no more. If we were afraid of being attacked, we would have surrendered and handed over people when threatened.”

Mullah Omar explained to the Taliban insiders: “Islam says that when a believer asks for refuge, give him refuge and never hand him over to the enemy. And our Afghan tradition says that even if your enemy asks for refuge, forgive him and give him refuge. Osama helped the jihad in Afghanistan, he was on our side in times of trouble and I will not hand him over to anyone.”

Rahimullah Yusufzai, one of Pakistan’s leading journalists, is one of the few people to have interviewed Mullah Omar. Before and after 9/11, the Taliban leader remained adamant about handing over bin Laden to the Americans, according to Yusufzai, who said: “I do not want to go down in history as a traitor to my guest. I am willing to sacrifice my life and my regime. Because we have given him shelter, I cannot hand him over now.”

Omar also believed that threats from Washington that there would be dire consequences if bin Laden was not handed over were almost entirely bluff. Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban's emissary in Pakistan, said that Mullah Omar simply believed that the United States would not launch a military operation in Afghanistan: "In Mullah Omar's mind, there was less than a 10 percent chance that America would rely on anything other than threats, and therefore an attack was impossible." Zaeef assured Mullah Omar that "America would definitely attack Afghanistan."

Big statements, limited worldview

Mullah Omar’s ignorance of the likely American response to 9/11 can be explained in part by the fact that he rarely met with anyone outside his inner circle. His interactions with the press before 9/11 were rare and non-existent afterward. He also almost never met with “infidels,” meaning most non-Muslims.

Despite his humble origins, in 1996 Mullah Omar proclaimed himself Amīr al-Mu'minīn, meaning “Commander of the Believers,” a title rarely used since the seventh century that implied he was not only the leader of the Taliban, but of Muslims everywhere.

To cement his place as a historic Muslim leader, Mullah Omar literally and figuratively donned the “Cloak of the Prophet,” a religious relic once worn by the Prophet Mohammed that had been kept in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar for centuries and almost never publicly displayed. Mullah Omar took the cloak from storage and climbed to the top floor of a building, donning it in front of hundreds of cheering Taliban.

Despite his grand claims to be the Commander of the Faithful, the Taliban leader remained resolutely provincial; in his five years in control of Afghanistan, he barely set foot in the capital Kabul, viewing it as a place of prostitution and debauchery.

Taliban tyranny

When the Taliban first emerged in Afghanistan under the leadership of Mullah Omar, the force enjoyed a high level of popularity and legitimacy in its early years, bringing order and a measure of peace to a country that had suffered 15 years of civil war.

Initially, the Taliban were also seen as innocent, with few people interested in seizing power for themselves. However, the adage that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is almost a perfect description of how the Taliban regime evolved over the years. The Taliban increasingly transformed their rule of law and order into something approaching a truly totalitarian Islamic state.

The Taliban banned football, kite flying, music, television, and banned women from school and work. Men were not allowed to shave or trim their beards. Women were required to wear burqas and stay at home unless accompanied by a male relative. Deviant behavior was subject to medieval punishments. Taliban religious scholars struggled to answer the question of how to deal with homosexuality. Some said they should be buried alive, others said they should be thrown from tall buildings.

“The Taliban are ruthless torturers, and the most common method they use is to beat people with electric wires,” said Vahid Mojdeh, a former Taliban official.

Model for IS

A decade and a half later the Taliban serves as a model for the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS).

The destruction of much of Iraq and Syria’s cultural heritage by IS in recent months was prefigured by Mullah Omar’s handling of the issue of two giant Buddha statues that have stood in the snow-covered Bamiyan valley in central Afghanistan for more than 1,500 years. In May 2001, the Taliban used explosives and tank fire to destroy Afghanistan’s most famous tourist attraction.

Almost every country in the world, including many Muslim countries, has pleaded with the Taliban not to get involved in this act of cultural vandalism. Their desperate pleas seem to have only made Mullah Omar more determined to blow up the statues. He told a visiting delegation of Pakistani officials that over the centuries the monsoon had created large holes near the statues’ feet, which, in the words of God, “is where you should bury the explosives” to destroy the statues.

After 9/11, US officials quickly determined that it was a bin Laden operation and that they knew he was in Afghanistan. On October 7, 2001, the day the US began bombing the Taliban, Faraj Ismail, an Indian journalist, interviewed Mullah Omar in Kandahar. He assured himself that bin Laden had no role in the attacks: “I control all of Afghanistan. I am sure he did not do it.”

The US invasion of Afghanistan defeated the Taliban within weeks and on December 7, 2001, Mullah Omar abandoned the city of Kandahar, where he had held absolute power for seven years.

The last time Mullah Omar released audio tapes was a decade ago, on25/7/2005. Since then, he has disappeared from public view, issuing written statements each year around the end of Ramadan, including one on July 15. Written statements, of course, are not “proof of life.”

Who represents the Taliban gangs?

So what does Mullah Omar’s death mean? It certainly raises significant doubts about the prospects for ongoing peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government. After all, without a common leader, who represents the Taliban’s many factions?

“It raises doubts about who, if anyone, can negotiate on behalf of Taliban fighters on the ground,” said Barnett Rubin, one of the world’s leading experts on Afghanistan.

Hassan Abbas, a leading Taliban expert who teaches at the National Defense University in Washington, shares this view: “No one in the second tier of the Taliban in Afghanistan has the prestige and status to replace Mullah Omar.”

Both al-Qaeda leaders – including bin Laden and his successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri – pledged allegiance to Mullah Omar as the spiritual leader of the global jihad. With Omar gone, to whom will al-Zawahiri pledge allegiance? Certainly not to the head of IS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, with whom Zawahiri has openly disagreed. Baghdadi was once a member of al-Qaeda but broke away to form IS.

Finally, the news of Mullah Omar’s death in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi raises some interesting questions for the government there. Senior US military officials said in 2010 that in their view Mullah Omar had been living in Karachi for at least some of his life. How did one of the world’s most wanted men survive in Pakistan for so many years without being caught? Many have asked the same question about Osama bin Laden.

Thu Giang

(According to CNN)