Word: omar
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...accounts of defectors and Taliban prisoners held by the Northern Alliance allowed U.S. intelligence agents to check hunches about the location of bin Laden and Omar, who early last week was thought to be hiding with bin Laden. Military officials believe the two men later split up, communicating via human messengers and walkie-talkies. The implosion of Taliban-held territory left both men with few places to run outside of southeastern Afghanistan, and intelligence sources told TIME they believed friction between the two would lead one of them to make a fateful blunder that gave away their locations. "The confidence...
...Taliban has not vanished completely; fighters loyal to Omar may attempt to strike back with guerrilla ambushes or die trying. So for now, at least, America's campaign against al-Qaeda and the Taliban will still be authored largely from the air. The U.S. plans to send another 50 to 70 warplanes to a base in Tajikistan. The number of AC-130 gunships, used to hover over targets and destroy them with devastating firepower, is rising from six to nine...
...days with Taliban representatives negotiating the handover of Kandahar and three other southern Afghan provinces. Under the plan, Mullah Naqib, an ex-commander, and Haji Bashar, a businessman allegedly linked to the opium trade, would both become interim leaders of Kandahar. According to sources in the city, a distraught Omar, at times on the verge of weeping, met briefly with the elders on Friday to press them to accept the plan, which would allow him to retain influence in Kandahar and make an unimpeded flight into the mountains. But the elders rejected the presence of these pro-Taliban commanders...
...This may account for why the rhetoric of the Taliban leader took on apocalyptic tones last week that seemed to betray his despair about the fate of his movement and his own dim prospects for survival. From an undisclosed location, Omar broadcast messages predicting his death in battle and naming Mullah Baradar, a former governor in Herat who commanded Taliban troops in Kabul, his successor. Early in the week he gave an interview to the BBC's Pashtu news service in which he predicted "the destruction of America. If Allah's help is with us, this will happen within...
...Afghans listened. "Omar doesn't have the same power he had in the past," says Haqiq, the Pashtun commander. "They keep saying he will fight to the end, but we don't think that's true." Across Afghanistan, people deserted the regime as soon as it started losing, exposing its shallow hold on them. "The Taliban showed they were good at enforcing beard lengths," says a Western diplomat, "and that's about it." The first, pivotal defeat of the Taliban, in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, was greased by local Pashtun fed up with taking orders from "these...