Afghanistan media reports have claimed that Taliban leader Mullah Omar has died. However, there have been no comments from the terror group.
According to reports, deputy spokesman for the President of Afghanistan Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, Sayed Zafar Hashemi has called a news conference in Kabul on Wednesday afternoon.
In 2011, Afghani media reported the killing of the Islamist leader but this was later dismissed by Pakistani officials. The Taliban said their phones had been hacked and messages sent out claiming that Mullah Omar was dead.
Mullah Omar, an ethnic Pashtun, was born into an impoverished family in the town of Nodeh in Afghanistan's southern Uruzgan province, some time between 1959 and 1962. After studying at several Islamic schools, he emerged as a Muslim cleric.
After the Soviet invasion in 1979, he joined the jihad and was appointed a commander of the anti-Soviet Mujahideen guerrillas, losing his right eye to shrapnel in fighting.
In 1996, Omar was named the Amir ul-Moemineen, "Commander of the Faithful", by a group of Islamic scholars made up of Taliban - the once ragtag group of fighters that he helped found in 1994 ostensibly to combat post-war lawlessness.
He effectively ruled Afghanistan from his base in Kandahar, rather than the capital Kabul, for five years. His refusal to surrender the fugitive Osama bin Laden to the United States after the September 11, 2001 attacks led to US-backed attacks that toppled the Taliban. Osama bin Laden was killed by a team of the elite US Navy SEALS in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad near Islamabad on May 2, 2012
He is believed to have been hiding in Pakistan more or less since then, and carries a $10 million bounty on his head from the United States.
Though the Taliban is splintered and made of many factions, all the Taliban acknowledged Mullah Omar as their supreme leader who wielded control through the supreme leadership council, or the shura, a 22-member body which he headed.
Among those on the shura are leaders of powerful regional groups, close associates of Omar as well some relatively unknown figures. Some others in the past have put the strength of the shura at 10, indicating just how little is known about the top decision-making body.
Omar was the figurehead of the Quetta shura, considered the most powerful, directing the deadly insurgency in southern and western Afghanistan, ex-Taliban have said.
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