Afghanistan Says Taliban Leader Died in 2013

KABUL, Afghanistan: After months of speculation, Afghan officials announced Wednesday that they were now certain that the Taliban's reclusive leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, died in Pakistan in 2013.

The announcement came two days before negotiators claiming to represent the Taliban leadership are scheduled to sit down and talk peace with the Afghan government in a second face-to-face session.

"There's no doubt," said Abdul Haseeb Sediqi, the spokesman for the Afghan spy agency, the National Directorate of Security, in a telephone interview late Wednesday. "We confirm he is dead. He died in April 2013, two years back, in Karachi. We have confirmed it and erased all our doubts."

The spy agency also pronounced Omar dead in 2011, only to back off those claims later. And a spokesman for the Taliban, Zabihullah Mujahid, told the Voice of America on Wednesday that the new death claims were false.

The reports of Omar's death cast further uncertainty over the fate of the current peace talks, which began July 7 with the first official face-to-face meeting between Afghan government and Taliban representatives at a resort near Islamabad, Pakistan. Another meeting is set for Friday in Pakistan.

The peace process has proved a divisive issue within the Taliban and has become evidence of a potential power struggle among its leaders. The insurgents' official political office, in Doha, Qatar, initially declared that the July meeting was invalid because Taliban officials in Qatar were not present and had not approved it. At the same time, the man believed to be the Taliban's deputy leader, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, said that he had authorized the talks.

Still, a senior Afghan government official said Omar's death could be good news for the peace process. "He was seen as being among the most hard-line, extremist members of the leadership council of the Quetta Shura," the Taliban's central organization, the official said.

On the other hand, a statement attributed to Omar in his annual message commemorating the Eid holiday this month expressed his supposed support for the peace talks.

Reports about the Taliban leader's death have surfaced repeatedly over the past decade, fueled by his complete absence from public view since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001. But they intensified last week when a breakaway faction, Feday-e-Mahaz, posted a statement saying Omar had died two years ago and was buried in Zabul province in southern Afghanistan.

On Wednesday, the Afghan government hurriedly convened a news conference at which, officials told journalists beforehand, they planned to announce Omar's death. But at the news conference, Sayed Zafar Hashemi, the deputy spokesman for President Ashraf Ghani, said only, "We have seen those reports, but we are still in the process of assessing those reports."

A government official said that the spy agency had brought the reports to the weekly meeting of the Afghan national security council, led by Ghani, on Wednesday morning but that the agency had later expressed concern about prematurely releasing the information, hence the confusion over what officials would say at the news conference.

Sediqi said Omar died in a Karachi hospital but did not say which hospital or what he died of; nor did he reveal how the agency knew this. He said it had no information on where he was buried.

A different NDS official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence, said Omar had been "suffering from a disease" at the time of his death. The official added, "We do not know about the whereabouts of his graveyard or whether he received a ceremony."

The official said that the Afghan intelligence service had learned of Omar's death a year and a half ago and that since then, "a lot of our international allies have confirmed the death."

He said he could not discuss the evidence that had led the Afghan government to conclude that Omar had died.

The official said that in the last years of his life, Omar had been relatively itinerant and was believed to have spent some time in Rawalpindi, home to the headquarters of the Pakistani military, among a host of other places.

"Because of the American drones, they were changing his place very often," the official said.

In 2011, a spokesman for the Afghan intelligence service, Lotfullah Mashal, was quoted as saying that Pakistan's spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, had killed Omar after U.S. Navy SEAL members killed Osama bin Laden. The Afghan agency later backed off that claim, saying at a news conference late last year that he "might" be dead but that they were unsure.

Speculation about Omar's death has intensified over the years since he disappeared from public life, with the exception of written pronouncements issued by spokesmen claiming to speak for him, after his regime was toppled in 2001.

The last audio statement attributed to Omar was issued nine years ago, in 2006, and its authenticity has been questioned.

Feday-e-Mahaz posted a statement on its Facebook page last week scoffing at claims by the Taliban spokesman, Mujahid, that Omar was alive. Mujahid said the mullah stayed out of sight and did not even issue audio statements for his own safety.

"We would like to say that the whereabouts of Mullah Omar is known to everyone, and his grave is in Zabul, may his soul rest in peace," the Feday-e-Mahaz statement said.

Feday-e-Mahaz, about which little is known, said its claims were more credible than the Taliban's denials, boasting that it had previously revealed plans by the Taliban to open an office for peace talks in Qatar, which the insurgents had initially denied. The group also made widely disputed claims that it had carried out the killing of a Swedish radio reporter, Nils Horner, in Kabul in 2014. On Tuesday, it claimed that Tayyeb Agha had been removed as the leader of the Taliban's peace office in Qatar.

Members of Feday-e-Mahaz are among the hard-liners who oppose peace talks between the government and insurgents.

A senior Western diplomat in Afghanistan said recently that diplomats had seen no recent evidence that Omar was alive.

"The theory that most Western embassies believe is that he is likely dead, or if not dead, then very ill," the diplomat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to discuss intelligence issues. That is a change from a few years ago, when Western intelligence officials said they believed Omar was alive and living under official protection in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city.

Even when he was clearly still alive, Omar was rarely seen by most Afghans because of the Taliban's religious prohibition on photography of living creatures. There is only one confirmed photograph of him. There were many audio messages, however, and Feday-e-Mahaz scoffed at Taliban claims that he was refraining from making new audio messages for security reasons. "That is an illogical argument, and no one will accept this," the group said.

The belief, even among many lower-level Taliban commanders, that their leader is no longer alive has fed dissension in Taliban ranks and is cited as one of the reasons that the Islamic State extremist group has begun to make some inroads in Afghanistan. A commander in Helmand province named Mirwais explained his defection to the Islamic State by saying: "We respect Mullah Omar.

But if he is alive, why does he not appear and guide us?"

Feday-e-Mahaz claimed that it had "exact information about the martyrdom of Mullah Omar and where it took place," and said it would reveal more on that subject later. "Right now," it said, "it is enough to say that his last testament was after drinking afternoon tea." The extremists did not elaborate.