Taliban’s supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar has emerged from the shadows and is planning a military push against US-led forces like never before, a media report said quoting his field commanders.
“We respect him even more than we did five years ago,” says one Taliban field commander, Ghul Agha Akhund, speaking to Newsweek by mobile phone from his redoubt in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. “He refuses to give up, no matter what the odds.”
Newsweek quotes Agha as saying that he has received two communications from Omar this year— for the first time since the US-led 2001 invasion. The recent communication was a photocopy of a handwritten note congratulating the group’s fighting forces on “getting even with infidel invaders” last year and urging them to launch “a more intensive jihad.”
“This message from our leader is like tonic medicine,” Ghul Agha tells Newsweek. “It makes us stronger.” The commander and his men are preparing to launch an offensive as soon as the snow melts. Agha hopes this year they will cut off the provincial capital.
Newsweek says it has viewed a new recruiting video in which the Taliban’s notoriously cruel commander the one-legged Mullah Dadullah Akhund addresses an audience of some 400 suicide bombers ready to die on his order.
“Our suicide bombers are countless,” he says in a videotaped response to questions from Newsweek. “Hundreds have already registered their names, and hundreds more are on the waiting list.”
The magazine reports these claims are impossible to verify, but can’t be discounted, either.
In an interview that aired on Al-Jazeera last week, Dadullah claimed to have more than 6,000 armed guerrillas waiting to strike. “The attack is imminent,” he told the Arabic TV channel.