Who was Taliban leader Mullah Omar? By Jane Onyanga-Omara

(Photo: Handout, EPA)

Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar — confirmed dead by Afghanistan's main intelligence agency Wednesday — has been the United States' most sought after Taliban figure for 14 years.

Believed to have been born in 1960 in the village of Chah-i-Himmat, in Kandahar province in southern Afghanistan, Mullah Omar led the Taliban as it ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001, when U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan a month after the 9/11 attacks and toppled the Taliban regime for giving safe haven to al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind of the U.S. attacks.

Mullah Omar went into hiding and was believed to have fled to neighboring Pakistan, where he lived in Quetta and Karachi since then, Afghan broadcaster TOLOnewsreported. The U.S. State Department placed a $10 million bounty on his head.

In April, the Afghan Taliban published a 5,000-word biography of Mullah Omar online to mark his 19th year as their supreme leader.

An extract of the biography said that despite being "regularly tracked by the enemy, no major change and disruption has been observed in the routine works of (Mullah Omar) in... organizing the jihadi (holy war) activities as the leader of the Islamic Emirate," according to Al Jazeera.

The biography said that Mullah Omar quit studying in an Islamic religious school after Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and became a jihadist "to discharge his religious obligation," the BBC reported.

The BBC said Mullah Omar fought Russian forces from 1983 to 1991, losing his right eye. The militant, described as having a "charismatic personality" and "special sense of humor," became Afghan Taliban supreme leader in 1996, according to the document.

In recent months, the Taliban has been resisting efforts by the Islamic State militant group from gaining influence in Afghanistan and Pakistan by courting defections from the Taliban.