The Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar is still alive and actively involved in the movement, the interior minister of Afghanistan’s interim government said today.
"Mullah Omar still exists. He is out of Afghanistan most of the time," Mr Yunis Qanuni said.
It was the first time an Afghan minister has confirmed the one-eyed Taliban chief and protector of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was still alive.
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Mullah Omar
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"He comes and goes to his hideouts in mountainous areas along the border," said Mr Qanuni, referring to the southern areas of Afghanistan on the border with Pakistan.
"Unfortunately, those areas are out of our access," he replied, when asked why the Afghan government and coalition forces led by the United States have failed to arrest him.
The comments follow reports that Taliban sympathizers operating on both sides of the southern Afghan border are pasting up stickers warning the United States of a Taliban comeback.
Omar, a former mujahideen who lost an eye fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, rose from obscurity as a village mullah to lead the fundamentalist Taliban to power in the mid-1990s.
After the US assault last year, Omar fled southern Kandahar, the main stronghold of the Taliban, in December vowing to wage a guerrilla war in Afghanistan's forbidding, mountainous terrain.
"The future of America in Afghanistan is fire, hell and a certain loss ...," pan-Arab newspaper al-Hayatquoted Omar as saying in April.
The newspaper quoted Omar as saying in an interview conducted in Afghanistan that bin Laden was also alive, despite the intense US bombardment and subsequent hunt for him.
Yesterday Al-Hayatpublished what it said was a statement from an al-Qaeda spokesman warning the United States to get ready for another attack.
"What is coming to the Americans will not, by the will of God, be less than what has come," the paper quoted al-Qaeda spokesman Sulaiman bu Ghaith as saying in a statement.
"So beware, America. Get ready. Get prepared. Put on the safety belt," he was quoted as saying.