As the Taliban seek new ways to show their power, a white Toyota Corolla wagon was found in southern Afghanistan.
Mullah Mohammad, the founder of the militant group, used the vehicle to flee from U.S. troops following their invasion in 2001.
It was buried in an unidentified area, but it was found Tuesday, after Omar’s grave in Zabul, a provincial in the country’s southern, was identified.
Maulvi Arifullah, an official from the Interior Ministry, stated to NBC News that the car belonged to their late dearest supreme leader. The vehicle will then be moved to a museum.
According to the Taliban, Omar fled Kandahar in a Toyota car when the U.S.-led invasion began. Omar hid in a small mudhouse until his death in 2013. However, the Taliban is now ruling Afghanistan and his Toyota could soon be open to the public.
Anas Haqqani (a Taliban leader) urged via Twitter that the vehicle be placed in Kabul’s National Museum of Afghanistan.
Photographs of the excavation revealed that the vehicle was covered with dirt and plastic sheeting. The vehicle was still being cleaned and maintained.
Omar, who suffered a shrapnel injury while fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s, was known for being one-eyed.
Experts believe that the decision to exhume his car was made by the Islamic hard-line movement to consolidate control over the country. The country is currently facing an economic crisis and hunger crisis due to the cutoff of humanitarian aid from foreign countries because of its restrictions on women’s rights.
Shuja Nawaz (a Washington-based political analyst at South Asia Center at The Atlantic Council) said Wednesday that the Taliban were trying to consolidate power by resurrecting symbolisms of their own history.
“They don’t respect the history or culture of other sects in Islam or other religions.”
He said that the Taliban’s poor governance has been exposed by the devastation caused by the earthquake in June, which claimed over 1,000 lives.
Others noted the irony of the Taliban’s attempts to commemorate the vehicle, when they have destroyed so much of Afghanistan’s cultural heritage.
After years of destruction of cultural sites and relics in Afghanistan, the group has planned to venerate the car. This is a continuation and extension of the extremist ideology it has imposed in Afghanistan since its reign from 1996 to 2001 and then again last August.
The Taliban destroyed huge Buddhas that had been carved into the cliffs of Bamiyan Valley in the sixties, months before they lost control over Afghanistan. Since then, the group has attempted to revive the site and encourage the public to visit the caves where the statues were once located.
“The Taliban’s discovery of Mullah Olmar’s Toyota is bittersweet irony… given their disrespect of much of Afghanistan’s history and culture,” stated Emily Winterbotham (director of the terrorism conflict research group at RUSI), a British security think-tank.
