Notes on Mullah Omar’s Eid Message
So is Mullah Omar, the mysterious (even mythical?) “supreme leader” of the Taliban, still alive?
That’s still unclear but the Taliban obviously want everyone to think he is, releasing on Wednesday a long Eid message signed off by him.
Obviously, it wasn’t really about Eid celebrations. Instead it was a carefully crafted statement outlining the Taliban’s reactions to some of the questions and challenges they are facing: whether Mullah Omar is alive, his position on peace talks with the government, and Daesh (ISIS) — because everyone has something to say about them.
Last week, representatives from the Taliban and Afghan government finally opened official peace talks in a short meeting in neighboring Pakistan. But there was confusion about whether Mullah Omar had backed the talks.
When murmurs emerged that maybe he hadn’t, the group’s spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid did little to clear up the situation. “I can’t confirm these rumours right now. We will announce our official stance soon,” he told us (Anadolu Agency).
This Eid message appears to be that confirmation and, it seems, aimed to address the confusion, which according to Afghan media reports was creating division within the Taliban. Not knowing their leader’s position (or whether he was even alive), was concerning some of the fighters.
The Taliban and government have been holding preliminary talks for months but that hadn’t stopped the group from continuing its “spring offensive,” including a failed attack on parliament. They even rejected a request from Afghan scholars for a Ramadan ceasefire.
Suddenly, in Mullah Omar’s Eid message, he was trying to convince his fighters that there was a need for peace talks — though it also suggested that they would continue fighting in the meantime.
Concurrently with armed Jihad, political endeavors and peaceful pathways for achieving these sacred goals is a legitimate Islamic principle and an integral part of Prophetic politics. As our holy leader, the beloved Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him), was actively engaged in fighting the infidels in the fields of ‘Badr’ and ‘Khyber’, he simultaneously participated in agreements beneficial for Muslims, held meetings with envoys of infidels, sent messages and delegations to them and on various occasions even undertook the policy of face to face talks with warring infidel parties. If we look into our religious regulations, we can find that meetings and even peaceful interactions with the enemies is not prohibited
First, by attributing the messsage to Mullah Omar, the Taliban wanted to assure the fighters that the leader is alive.
Secondly, they wanted to finally confirm and justify their involvement in the talks, considering many Taliban would rather defeat the “invaders” and the government militarily than sit with them.
The other theme in the message seems to be directed at Daesh, or rather the former Taliban fighters who have switched the white flag of the Taliban for the black flag of Daesh but don’t yet seem to have a direct operational link to the Syria-based group.
At the moment, Daesh in Afghanistan appears to be little more than a breakaway group of former Taliban commanders, some of whom are reportedly actively clashing with the Taliban for control of certain districts.
More Taliban fighters have threatened to join this Daesh group, who outright reject peace talks, unless they receive audio and video evidence that Mullah Omar is alive.
So the letter, supposedly in Mullah Omar’s voice, spoke also about disunity and how Afghanistan faltered after the anti-Soviet Muhajihideen fractured. It claimed religious scholars in Afghanistan and outside had approved his leadership of Muslims during the Taliban regime of the 1990s; an attempt it seems to establish his own legitimacy as the “leader of believers” over that of Daesh’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Then there’s the argument that the Taliban weren’t behind this statement at all. It’s the same argument that says only a certain faction, influenced by Pakistan, entered the talks. Some even said that the Pashto-language version of the statement had bad grammar, an indication, they said, that it was written by Pakistani intelligence officers who could not properly speak the language (used in the Afghan-Pakistan border region).
