Taliban Forces Desperate to Hear from Their Absent Leader, Mullah Omar -- Daily Beast
A group of Taliban leaders are challenging those who say they speak for Muhammad Omar, the organization’s absent chief. Ron Moreau reports on the leadership crisis.
Abdul Qayyum Zakir, the Taliban’s abrasive, often brutal, senior military commander, received a summons from the Quetta shura, the insurgency’s ruling council, last December. The shura’s verbal message was brief, blunt, and shocking: Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban’s supreme leader, had decided to remove Zakir from his powerful position and to promote Zakir’s rival and co-equal, Akhtar Mohammad Mansoor, to become the insurgency's undisputed number-one military man. The former Guantánamo inmate protested vehemently, saying there was no proof that Omar had sent the message, according to several well-placed Taliban sources. Zakir, and other top Taliban leaders who had received similar messages ousting them in the name of Omar, know that there have been no verifiable communications on paper, by phone, or in audio or video recordings from the so-called Leader of the Faithful, since he disappeared into the Kandahar mountains on the back of a motorcycle in November 2001 as his regime collapsed. Not surprisingly, Zakir flatly refused to comply with the order that demoted him to commander of Kandahar Province. As Zakir wields enormous clout with many insurgent commanders in the field, there was little the council could do to move against him and make its decision stick.
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My Comment: You do not fight a war by hiding in the shadows. Mullah Omar is definitely not running the Taliban .... and if he is alive, he is now acting more as a figurehead and person of legend.
On a side note .... when reading the above Daily Beast article, I was struck on how many ex-Guantanamo detainees are now in senior positions of the Taliban.