Mohammed Omar
January 1, 1960 – April 23, 2013
Afghan cleric who founded the Taliban and led its Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan from 1996 until the US invasion in 2001.
Biography
Mohammed Omar, known as Mullah Omar, was born in Kandahar province some time between 1950 and 1962 into a poor family of village religious teachers. He studied at local madrasas but never completed the higher training that would formally have made him a mullah.
After the Soviet invasion of 1979 he fought with mujahideen groups in Kandahar province, lost his right eye to shrapnel, and after the Soviet withdrawal continued fighting the communist government until it fell in 1992. He then returned to teaching and study near Kandahar.
In 1994 he gathered religious students into the Taliban movement, which took Kandahar that year and Kabul in September 1996. As supreme leader of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan he ruled from Kandahar, imposed a strict interpretation of sharia, and in 2001 ordered the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan.
He refused to hand over Osama bin Laden after the September 11 attacks, and the US-led invasion toppled his government in late 2001. Omar went into hiding in Zabul province, where he died in April 2013; the Taliban kept his death secret until 2015.
Offices held
Mohammad Rabbani Succeeded by
Abdul Rahim Ghafoorzai
