Mullah Umar leading anti-govt insurgency: Taliban

Kabul—The Taliban’s leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, is alive and leading the anti-government insurgency from inside Afghanistan, a purported top spokesman for the militant chief said on Saturday.
“Mullah Omar has been in Afghanistan and still is in Afghanistan and will remain here to lead the jihad (holy war) against the American troops,” said a man claiming to be Taliban spokesman Abdul-Hai Mutmaen.
Afghanistan has been saying that Pakistan is giving a safe heaven to the Taliban and Al Qaeda chiefs, the charges strongly denied by Pakistan. Mutmaen in a satellite telephone call from an undisclosed location that that the Taliban and Al Qaeda chiefs had not seen each other since the toppling of the Taliban regime.
“Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar separated from each other. Each of them took their own destiny and have not seen each other since 2001,” he said.
“We have spiritual sympathy with each other but we are not in touch. Our resistance is a pure Afghan resistance.” He also rejected claims by Afghan officials that most insurgency-linked attacks in Afghanistan are carried out by insurgents trained in Pakistan with support from fundamentalist elements there.
The fighters are based within Afghanistan and the Taliban considers Pakistan as “our second enemy,” he said. “Pakistan, as an ally of the United States, is as bad as the Afghan puppet government. We are here and fighting here.
No one is helping us—it’s an Afghan resistance,” he said. The Taliban were steadfast in their commitment to overthrowing the new Afghan government, Mutmaen said.—Inp