THIS picture is the only one of Mullah Omar that is confirmed as genuine. It was taken in 1993, the year before he founded the Taliban, when he was merely a fighter against the Soviet occupation of his country. He needed it as evidence that he had lost his right eye to enemy shrapnel, so that he could claim compensation. He never knowingly faced the camera again, since it was contrary to Islamic law.

The flyers dropped by American planes over Kandahar later, offering $10m for information about him, showed a photograph; it was not him. Portraits appeared of a man among yellow chrysanthemums, turning his right eye away. It was not him. Even when, as leader of the Taliban, he became emir of Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, he so seldom left his house in Kandahar that most of his followers had no idea what he looked like. He saw almost no journalists, and hardly talked when he did. Discussion was difficult, and negotiation impossible. After 2001 he was in hiding, flitting between Afghanistan and Pakistan. “Nobody recognises him,” said Hamid Karzai, who led Afghanistan in his turn. “This is a man nobody has seen.”

There was a story about his eye. He was said to have extracted the remains himself, stitched it up, bandaged his face and sprung from his bed, singing a Persian poem, when he heard the Soviet army was retreating. He was hailed as a ferocious jihadist and a brilliant marksman, taking out a slew of Soviet tanks and galvanising the other students (taliban) at his madrassa into a ruthless fighting force. In fact, he was a lowly and undisciplined fighter; and the Taliban began as a vigilante group of refugees and dropouts, as he was, taking revenge round his home village of Sangasar on warlords who were raping local boys and girls. Gradually they were called in to tackle more cases of crime and corruption in their collapsed country until, after reaching and taking Kabul in 1996, they became its moral guardians and rulers.

The cloak of Muhammad

Omar was the spiritual leader of his movement, a role confirmed when he removed the cloak of Muhammad from the three chests that protected it in a mosque in Kandahar in 1996 and, standing tall and thin on a rooftop, draped it briefly on his own shoulders. This single act made him the leader of the faithful, the title in which he issued his military and social decrees. His impoverished childhood and the early death of his father encouraged parallels with the life of the Prophet. Allah, too, appeared to him in dreams: once to encourage him to form the Taliban, and in 2001 to urge him to destroy the giant and ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan, as relics of idolatry.

His piety, strong and sincere, was not the learned or bookish sort. He could recite as much of the Koran as he had picked up from his father and uncle, itinerant preachers, in the mud-hut village in Uruzgan province where he had been brought up. Though he became a mullah in Sangasar, he preferred to call himself a talib, a man who was still seeking. In his hard-set rural ways, however, flavoured with fundamentalist Deobandi Islam, he already had the answers. For boys, fighting against unbelievers; for women, seclusion and subjugation; for thieves, amputation; for all Afghans, no more cinema, football, television, music or kite-flying. In the governor’s palace in Kandahar he set an ascetic example: a cement floor, a wooden camp-bed, meals of soup and dry bread. He wore old-fashioned curled slippers, a sure sign of poverty, communicated mainly by letter and courier and, for a while, signed off permits on empty cigarette packets. An RPG7 was said to be his favourite weapon.

From 1996 he gave Osama bin Laden refuge in his country. Their relations seemed simple. Bin Laden, shrewder and more intelligent, charmed him, paid him homage as emir and gave him money and Land Cruisers. In exchange Omar refused to surrender him to the Americans after the September 11th attacks, admitting—in a rare flash of temper—that he wanted to kill the man who had asked him. Yet he was also unhappy when bin Laden launched his terror from Afghanistan. His defiance of the Americans was based both on principle—it was simply right, therefore God would protect him—and his estimate of a “less than ten per cent” chance that America would attack him. This conviction cost him his power and his country.

Real power, according to the Western intelligence agencies who struggled to read him, had seldom been his anyway. Although he came from the dominant Pushtuns, he was a member of the poorer Ghilzai tribe, without contacts or influence politically. He knew nothing of the outside world, and could barely do more than sign the statements issued in his name. Though he kept tight control of his field commanders as emir, strings were also pulled elsewhere: in Saudi Arabia, which provided many of the dollars he dispensed to his deputies from a large tin box beside his bed; and in Pakistan, where the Inter-Services Intelligence agency gave him training and, after 2001, intermittent shelter.

Together, these supporters kept his myth going. Whether he was dead or alive, the Taliban united round him and, throughout the late 2000s, regrouped to make war against the West. Unseen and unknown, he haunted the scene. Peace remains as elusive as he was.