Mullah Omar, with the title Amir-ul-Momineen (Commander of the Faithful) was the man who presided over the Taliban and Afghanistan while Osama bin Laden and his Qaeda trained to overthrow governments of infidels. On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was putting together that evening’s Rightsided Newsletter, reading a story about Clinton speaking in Australia about Afghan refugees washing ashore on their islands. I had just finished a sentence about the “harsh reign of Mullah Omar” when my wife called up telling me to turn on CNN. I turned on Fox.
There was some doubt, within Afghanistan and without, if there really were a Mullah Omar. Few were granted an audience with the man, said to suffer seizures from shrapnel lodged in his brain while fighting the Soviets in the 1980s. The theory went that he was a facade created by the Taliban to frighten the citizenry of tribal Afghanistan.
After the war, the media asked: “Where’s Osama bin Laden, huh?” Few wondered about Mullah Omar, and I thought that maybe, if he really were extant, he crawled off somewhere and died of injuries sustained in the war.
U.S. troops are busy routing the few thousand Taliban who trying to resume power in that gawdforsaken country, and there was a rumor that Mullah Omar was one of them. Here’s this from Reuters in which someone claims that he is somewhere else: Taliban Deny Mullah Omar at Scene of Fighting .
