Iran accuses Pakistan of harboring Mullah Omar and helping Taliban
‘Pakistan harboring Mullah Omar’
A former senior member of the militant group says Pakistani security forces are harboring the fugitive Taliban leader, Mullah Omar in Karachi.
Mullah Abdul Salam Hanafi told an Afghan news website that Mullah Omar is now in the Pakistani city of Karachi. Hanafi was the governor of central Urozgan Province under the Taliban regime.
The developments come as US and its allies intend to remove Mullah Omar from the black list in a bid to provide a suitable seedbed for holding contacts.
Senior officials in the UK have spread the idea of making peace with the Taliban – the militant group whose uprooting was ostensibly one of the main objectives of the 2001 US-led invasion.
Omar, the founder of the Taliban, was Afghanistan’s de facto head of state from 1996 to 2001.
He was unseated in the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan. However, the US forces have not yet managed to apprehend Omar, or al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden after the elapse of nine years.
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=129880§ionid=351020401
Hanafi also claimed that the foreign troops and Taliban are engaged in a complicated game in Afghanistan.
He said British troops trained Taliban forces and paid each militant three-hundred dollars per month.
The former official said Taliban members supported by the UK live freely in Helmand province and have never been a target of attacks.
He says British forces told him that they plan to stay in Afghanistan for the next 40 years.
As the tempo of Omar stories increases, so does the pressure on Pakistan and its Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), as well as the Obama administration and the CIA to deal with the Omar issue.
My prognostication is that sooner, rather than later, we’ll hear that Omar was taken out in a successful drone strike. This will allow the Pakistanis to avoid having to admit they ever had him in the first place (thereby circumventing Taliban reprisals and large scale rioting across Pakistan) and it will also allow the Obama Administration to claim they were able to do something the Bush Administration couldn’t — kill Mullah Omar