as part of which American and other international troops would withdraw from Afghanistan in return for the Taliban’s assurance that they won’t let foreign terrorists use Afghan soil. Earlier this year, they reached an agreement with the U.S. Almost 20 years after they lost Kabul, the Taliban are now controlling almost half of the country. The war continued, killing hundreds of thousands of people, and wounding and displacing many more. in 2001 following the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Taliban would retreat to the mountainous hinterlands of Afghanistan, while their leadership crossed the border to Pakistan. Omar would rule most of the country for the next five years.
The Taliban would capture Kabul within a few months and establish the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. The New Yorker, was Omar’s “coronation” as the leader of the most powerful insurgency in the country. But what happened in Kandahar, as Steve Coll wrote in his profile of the Taliban leader in The rank and file were divided on whether the Taliban, consisting of mainly madrassa students, should take the war to the capitalwhere the government of President Burhanuddin Rabbani was already under attack by Hizb-e-Islami of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, also known as the ‘Butcher of Kabul’. Omar appeared with the relic at a critical juncture of the Taliban’s history. He held it aloft before the cheering crowd, who named him ‘Amir ul-Momineen’, the commander of the faithful. Then Mullah Mohammed Omar appeared on its roof, with the cloak in his hands. Those who had assembled before an old mosque in central Kandahar were clueless what they were going to see. Very rarely has it been shown to the public. The legend is that King Durrani, who ruled the country from 1747 to 1772, brought the cloak to Kandahar from a conquest. Next to the shrine is the tomb of King Ahmad Shah Durrani, the founder of modern Afghanistan. The city hosts one of the holiest shrines in the country - The Shrine of the Cloak of the Prophet Mohammed, which keeps a robe that Afghans believe was worn by the Prophet.
In the spring of 1996, the Taliban, who had taken southern Afghanistan under their control, organised a conference of their fighters, commanders and mullahs in downtown Kandahar, the movement’s political and spiritual base.
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