Where's Mullah Omar?

Afghan insurgent leaders keep trying not to think about it. “At the moment, questions of Mullah Omar’s health and whereabouts are not so important,” a member of the Taliban’s ruling council, the Quetta Shura, tells Newsweek. “The focus should be on jihad and resistance.” But the fighters can’t help wondering and worrying—especially around this time of year. They’re fast approaching yet another anniversary of the day their supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, vanished into the mountains outside the city of Kandahar. He was perched on the back of a motorcycle driven by his brother-in-law and right-hand man, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, getting away as the U.S.-led invasion force and its Northern Alliance partners closed in. Senior and former Taliban officials say there has not been one confirmed sighting of their Amir-ul-Momineen—“commander of the faithful”—in the 11 years since.

Many past and present Taliban officials privately fear the worst. Omar could be dead or otherwise incapacitated, they suspect, or secretly imprisoned by Pakistan’s all-powerful Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence. Something must be preventing him from contacting them. Otherwise he could at least send them a recording of his voice—perhaps offering his condolences for the thousands of Afghans who have died fighting the Americans, suggests a former senior official who has left the Taliban. A former aide to Omar echoes the thought: “If Mullah Omar were in good condition he would send proof that he’s alive.” After all, the former aide argues, there’s a $25 million bounty on al Qaeda’s Ayman al-Zawahiri, and he still issues regular messages. “Why not Mullah Omar?”…

Some even suggest that Mullah Omar suffered a mental breakdown in the wake of the invasion. People who once were close to him say he had been suffering from severe depression since August 1999, when a massive truck bomb detonated directly outside his home in Kandahar City. At the time of the explosion, Omar was in his bedroom, toward the back of the compound. He emerged physically unscathed. But two of his brothers were not so lucky: they had been in rooms that fronted the street and both of them were killed, together with five bodyguards.