Kandahar, Afghanistan — The mullah arrived at the Kandahar branch of Afghanistan's central bank during regular business hours, asked to see the manager, who was another mullah, and presented a check signed by a third, Mohammad Omar.
It was Oct. 16, nine days after the first U.S. bombs began falling on Afghanistan, and this dirt-poor country was once again embroiled in war. The mullah, a senior member of Omar's Taliban leadership, stayed only as long as it took to justify the abrupt withdrawal, open the safe in the basement and stuff $5 million in U.S. dollars and Pakistani rupees into a big burlap sack, two bank employees said Monday. The sack was then carried to a waiting Toyota Land Cruiser.
None of it has been seen since.
Nor has more than $6 million that senior Taliban leaders carried away from the bank's Kabul office on Nov. 12, according to the manager there. Millions of dollars more are presumed missing from other branches of Da Afghanistan Bank, as the central bank is formally known. But with the Taliban driven from power and the new Afghan government possessing only scant vestiges of infrastructure, bank officials said they have no idea how much.
"They took all the money from the other branches, but we don't know the details," said Allah Hashmee, manager of the Kabul bank, where the Taliban did not bother with paperwork. "No check, no receipt," Hashmee said. "They just came and took it."
One official with Kandahar's post-Taliban administration, Khalid Pashtoon, said last month that Omar had absconded with $100 million when he fled this southern city.
Bank managers said Omar's aides gathered $11 million at just the Kabul and Kandahar branches of the central bank. Other major cities have two or three banks, and the Taliban may have kept funds in all of them.
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