Omar Gives Up Kandahar Town

ISLAMABAD, Thursday - Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar has decided to surrender the Islamic militia’s last major stronghold of Kandahar to a local mujahedin commander who controlled the city in the early 1990s, the Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) reported yesterday. “Mullah Mohammad Omar has decided that Kandahar should be handed over to former jihad commander Mullah Naqibullah,” a Taliban spokesman told the Pakistan-based news agency. “A decision has also been taken to form a commission which would be headed by Mullah Naqibullah who will also act as governor of Kandahar. “Mullah Omar has taken the decision in consultation with tribal leaders and his associates and ulema (Islamic scholars). The decision will be implemented in one or two days,” the spokesman said. The report could not be independently confirmed, but a spokesman for the US-led coalition here in the Pakistani capital earlier said reports that Omar was negotiating a surrender with the new head of Afghanistan’s interim government, Hamid Karzai, should be taken seriously. “I can tell you authoritatively that some of Mullah Omar’s most senior commanders are negotiating their own surrender,” coalition spokesman Kenton Keith told a news conference. AIP did not indicate whether Omar was preparing his personal surrender, but Keith told reporters: “You should also take seriously reports that Mullah Omar himself is negotiating to save his own skin. “If he is prepared privately to bargain for himself, there is no possible justification for sending others to their own deaths or using civilians as human shields in a war which by his own private actions he admits he cannot win.” AFP Ends