“Army units raided the houses of the suspects in the Bekaa towns of Britel, Haour Taala and Ayn al-Jouz,” the statement said, adding that the units found the suspects in possession of weapons.

Liban Lait is one of the largest dairy companies in Lebanon and its owner was kidnapped by gunmen at gunpoint in Talia a Bekaa town in Eastern Lebanon , National News Agency ( NNA) reported on Wednesday

Omar is alive and the reports “are just propaganda against our leader and our mission,” spokesman Zabihullah Nujahid told CNN.

NATO said it has no operational knowledge of Omar’s condition or whereabouts.

This is not the first time speculation of Omar’s death has surfaced.

In May, the Taliban forcefully denied reports that their leader is dead, dismissing them as “claims and rumors” from the “Kabul stooge regime’s intelligence directorate.”

At the time, a news report by Afghanistan’s TOLOnews suggested Omar was dead.

A spokesman for Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security, said in May that Omar had disappeared. Lutfullah Mashal said at the time that he hoped Omar was dead, but could not confirm it.

Omar was a rural Islamic cleric when he became a leader of a group of students — or “Taliban” — who took over Afghanistan in the early 1990s and established a hard-line Islamic fundamentalist regime that gave shelter to Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist network.

U.S. Navy SEALs killed bin Laden in May in Pakistan, nearly 10 years after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

The United States led an invasion of Afghanistan soon after the attacks, toppling the Taliban and sending bin Laden into hiding.

The secluded Omar refused to be photographed or filmed, and rarely traveled. He infrequently gave interviews and was thought to have met only two non-Muslims in recent years.

Nonetheless what Omar said passed as law when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan, and to challenge him was unknown.

Those who had met Omar said he cast an imposing figure — bearded with a black turban and one eye stitched shut; the result of a wound suffered during a gunfight with Soviet troops during their occupation of Afghanistan.

In the wake of the Soviet withdrawal, Omar created the Taliban to overcome what he saw as Afghanistan’s descent into a lawlessness landscape dominated by warlords.

His recruits came from the Islamic schools within Afghanistan and in the Afghan refugee camps across the border in Pakistan. Driven largely by faith, they swept across the country.

With most of the country under Taliban control, he set himself the goal of transforming Afghanistan into the purest Islamic state in the world, declaring himself Amir-ul-Momineen, or head of the Muslims.

While many ordinary Afghans disagreed with his hard-line interpretation of Islam, others were willing to endure the Taliban’s excesses in exchange for the relative peace they brought to the territory they controlled.

In building the perfect Islamic state, though, he had little regard for the concerns of the outside world.

Public executions and amputations were common, and the Taliban’s treatment of women attracted much international condemnation.

Omar vanished after a U.S.-led coalition booted the Taliban and their leaders from power in Afghanistan in December 2001 for refusing to hand over bin Laden after the 9/11 terror attacks.

His appearance has remained a mystery to many, and that presented a challenge to those on his trail, according to Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

The U.S. government offered a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to Omar’s capture.
CNN

Obama said he would pull 10,000 troops from Afghanistan by year’s end, followed by about 23,000 more by the end of next summer and a steady withdrawal of remaining troops after that.

In a 15-minute televised address, Obama vowed that the United States — struggling to restore its global image, repair its faltering economy and bring down the high jobless rate at home — would end a decade of military adventures prompted by the September 11 attacks in 2001 and exercise new restraint with American military power.

“Tonight, we take comfort in knowing that the tide of war is receding,” Obama said, heralding the gradual drawdown of U.S. forces in Iraq and the limited U.S. involvement in the ongoing international campaign in Libya.

“America, it is time to focus on nation building at home.”

Yet news that Obama will pull the entire ’surge’ force he sent to Afghanistan in 2010 is certain to fuel friction between Obama and his military advisors who have warned about the perils of a hasty drawdown.

Nearly 10 years after the Taliban government was toppled, U.S. and NATO forces have been unable to deal a decisive blow to the resurgent Islamist group. The Afghan government remains weak and notoriously corrupt, and billions of dollars in foreign aid efforts have yielded meager results.

Obama’s decision on trimming the U.S. force was a more aggressive approach than many expected. It went beyond the options offered by General David Petraeus, the outgoing commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan, whom Obama has picked to lead the CIA.

The president’s decision appears to reflect the competing pressures he faces as he seeks to rein in government spending and halt American casualties without endangering the gains his commanders say they have made across southern Afghanistan.

Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he supported Obama’s decision, but the plan is unlikely to sit well with the Pentagon’s top brass who worry insurgents could regain lost territory and that fighting along Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan will intensify.

Jeffrey Dressler, a military analyst at the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, said the Pentagon would have favored a much smaller initial withdrawal.

“But the fact is that the conditions on the ground don’t merit any sort of withdrawal — it’s not time to be pulling out a substantive amount of troops,” he said. “There’s a lot that has to be done in the east and you’re not out of the woods in the south yet.”

Yet Obama also faces mounting demands from some quarters of the Congress, impatient with a war that now costs more than $110 billion a year, for a larger initial drawdown.

Even after the withdrawal of the 33,00 U.S. troops, about 70,000 will remain in Afghanistan by the autumn of 2012, more than were there when Obama took office.

SHIFT SINCE BIN LADEN’S DEATH

The debate in Washington has shifted palpably since U.S. special forces killed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan last month, which Obama said showed al Qaeda was ‘under enormous strain.’

Bin Laden’s death has given critics from both parties ammunition to argue that the Obama administration must narrow U.S. goals in desperately poor Afghanistan — focusing on lawless havens insurgents can use to launch attacks.

“We will not try to make Afghanistan a perfect place. We will not police its streets or patrol its mountains indefinitely,” Obama said. “That is the responsibility of the Afghan government.”

Obama said the United States would continue to support efforts to foster a political settlement with the Taliban. Officials acknowledge a peace deal may be far in the future even if one could be had.

Obama is mindful of the American public’s lack of support for the war as he looks to his 2012 re-election campaign.

A Pew Research poll released on Tuesday found a record 56 percent of Americans favor bringing U.S. forces in Afghanistan home as quickly as possible.

Still, the situation on the ground in Afghanistan remains volatile and Obama will face heat from Republicans if he is seen as rushing toward the exit.

The Taliban has been pushed out of some areas of their southern heartland, but the insurgency has intensified along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan.

July marks the official start of NATO’s handover to local security forces in keeping with a plan to put Afghan soldiers in charge across the country by the end of 2014.

Serious doubts remain about whether Afghan forces, plagued by desertion and illiteracy, will be up to the task.

The more limited U.S. involvement in Libya, where NATO and its allies have been conducting air strikes since March in hopes leader Muammar Gaddafi will halt attacks on civilians, may be the model for future U.S. military engagement overseas.

“What I worry about is the message that is going to be taken away by our allies and potential allies about America’s orientation in the world,” said retired Lieutenant General David Barno, a former senior commander in Afghanistan.

“That sounded an awful lot like an ‘America come home’ speech,” he said.

Even as Obama charts a course for leaving Afghanistan, a major threat remains in nuclear-armed Pakistan. Obama warned Pakistan that the United States would not hesitate to launch strikes on militants targeting Americans.

Still, analysts have cautioned that if the United States walks away from Afghanistan, it does so at its own peril because of the risk the country could topple back into the grip of extremism or renewed civil war. Both of these scenarios could again open the door to al Qaeda.

“What will be important is what happens in two or three years from now,” said Tomas Valasek of the Center for European Reform in London.

“If Obama gets re-elected, and it all goes wrong, and Kabul has turned into another Mogadishu — then he would clearly have some explaining to do.”

Reuters

The reports led some Afghan media outlets to say that Omar may have been killed. But the Taliban staunchly denied that in a statement issued Monday.

“Claims and rumors were spread this morning by the Kabul stooge regime’s intelligence directorate, other officials and some media outlets that the esteemed Amir ul Mumineen was martyred in Pakistan,” the Taliban statement about Omar said. “We strongly reject these false claims of the enemy.”

A spokesman for Afghanistan’s intelligence bureau then told reporters in the Afghan capital that he “cannot confirm officially whether [Omar] is dead or alive.”

“According to our sources at the other side of the border Mullah Mohammad Omar, the leader of the Taliban, [who] has been living in Quetta, Baluchistan for 10 years, had been disappeared from his location in the last four or five days,” said the spokesman, Lutfullah Mashal.

“Our sources and senior Taliban commanders have confirmed that they have not been able to contact Mullah Omar. So far, we cannot confirm the death or killing of Mullah Omar officially, but we can confirm that he has been disappeared from his hideout in Quetta of Baluchistan.”

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Any increased use of women as bombers may complicate efforts by Pakistani security forces to stem a spreading wave of Islamist suicide attacks because it is harder to spot and search burqa-clad attackers in conservative tribal society.

Saturday’s bombing illustrated the resilient ability of militants to stage attacks despite army offensives against them.

The woman blew herself amid a crowd of men, women and children heading toward a food distribution center of the World Food Program in the Bajaur region on the Afghan border.

“Initially there was confusion as to whether the attacker was a man or woman but now we have established that (it) was a woman,” senior government official Sohail Ahmed told Reuters.

Government officials in Bajaur said they had recovered the head, burqa and clothes of the bomber.

PREVIOUS WOMAN BOMBER IN 2007

It was the second such attack by a female militant in Pakistan. In the first episode, a woman detonated explosives near a military checkpost in the northwestern city of Peshawar in 2007, but she killed no one except herself.

On Saturday, the woman initially threw hand grenades at people heading toward the food center to receive aid before blowing herself up. Forty-three people were killed and more than 60 were wounded in the attack.

“If militants use more women for such attacks then it is going to be a very huge problem for the security forces,” said Rahimullah Yusufzai, an expert on tribal and militant affairs.

“They don’t have enough women (in the) police force and even (if) they have policewomen, because of our conservative culture, people don’t want their women to be subjected to body searches. It’s going to be a big problem.”

The attack happened a day after battles between security forces and insurgents in the neighboring Mohmand region that killed 11 soldiers and 40 insurgents, the government said. Militants disputed the official death toll.

The Pakistani army has conducted a series of offensives in its lawless Pashtun tribal belt, known as the global hub of Islamist militants, in recent years, killing hundreds of militants and destroying many of their bastions.

But the insurgents have still been able to strike back and have kept up a campaign of suicide and bomb attacks across the country, killing hundreds of people.

“The militants’ strongholds have been smashed…they are on the run and that’s why they are now hitting soft targets,” Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani told reporters in comments broadcast by local television.

Saturday’s attack targeted members of Salarzai, a major pro-government tribe backing army offensives against militants. Salarzai tribesmen have been a key role in mobilizing lashkars, or tribal militia, to back government military operations.

A Taliban spokesman, Azam Tariq, claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing, saying that it was retaliation for “Salarzai activities against the Taliban.” Reuters

Police say Saturday’s attacker was in a rickshaw when he blew himself up at a security checkpoint in the town of Saidu Sharif. Officials say two soldiers and at least two policemen were among the dead.

On Friday, back-to-back suicide attacks killed at least 55 people in the eastern city of Lahore. Witnesses say the blasts targeted a convoy of military vehicles. At least 10 of the dead were soldiers.

Five smaller explosions were reported in Lahore following the attack, causing panic but no deaths.

On Monday, another suicide bombing in Lahore killed 13 people and wounded more than 80 others.

Taliban militants have claimed responsibility for the violence.

A spokesman for the group is reported as saying that more attacks will be carried out unless Pakistan’s army stops operations against Taliban fighters in the country’s tribal regions bordering Afghanistan.

The military action triggered a wave of deadly suicide and other attacks late last year, killing hundreds of people across the country. But the violence had significantly declined since the beginning of the new year. vOA

The cooperation with the White House added another layer of intrigue to the Times’ exclusive report about the arrest of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar by Pakistani and U.S. intelligence forces. The newspaper broke the news on its Web site on Monday night, at least three days after its reporters learned about the action. AP