KABUL, Afghanistan -- For someone whose face is known to only a few, Mullah Mohammed Omar emerges from the rubble of the Taliban movement a marked man.
With the fall of his last stronghold, Kandahar, the one-eyed cleric who led the Taliban march to power now faces arrest, exile or even death.
The Taliban exodus from Kandahar -- the southern Afghan city where the movement was born and its spiritual center during years of oppressive rule over Afghanistan -- triggered scenes of rejoicing Friday.
Witnesses said people poured into the streets to rip down white Taliban flags, symbol of the militia's purist interpretation of Islam.
As the city changed hands, Omar was no where to be found. But Afghanistan's interim leader said he was firmly on the new government's wanted list.
"Of course I want to arrest him," the incoming prime minister, Hamid Karzai, told The Associated Press by satellite telephone from his desert base outside Kandahar, a staging ground for anti-Taliban fighters who moved into the city. "He is a fugitive from justice."
The commander of the U.S. military campaign, Gen. Tommy Franks, said "we simply do not know where he is right now."
Speaking in Tampa, Fla., with reporters there and at the Pentagon, Franks said U.S. forces were firing on Taliban fighters as they fled Kandahar with their weapons.
The United States has made no secret of the fact that it would like to see Omar under arrest _ or dead. As the city fell, American warplanes continued to hit targets around it, and the Pentagon said U.S. Marines destroyed a convoy carrying members of the Taliban and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network.
Although the Taliban had agreed to lay down their arms as part of the surrender agreement, some escaped with their weapons and were thought to be heading for the hills. Karzai speculated that holdout Taliban fighters -- along with foreign fighters loyal to al-Qaida -- might seek to regroup on the steep, jagged mountains north of Kandahar.
Karzai and a Pakistani intelligence source who spoke on condition of anonymity said Taliban forces and bin Laden loyalists might be headed for rugged Zabul province, northeast of the city. Another potential sanctuary would be Islam Dara, a heavily fortified warren of caves dug deep into a mountainside in neighboring Helmand province.
From there, guerrilla bands could make their way toward Bamiyan, in the remote highlands of central Afghanistan, about 200 miles northeast of Kandahar, with a wealth of mountain hide-outs into which holdout fighters could vanish for months, even years.
If Omar turned his energies to rallying what remained of his troops, he would be coming full circle -- falling back on a role he played in the 1980s, during Afghanistan's bloody struggle with the Soviets. It was during his years as a guerrilla chieftain that he lost an eye to a shrapnel wound.
After the end of the Soviet war, in the early 1990s, Omar began cultivating young disciples -- students, or talibs -- of his rigorous brand of Islam. That group eventually formed the hard core of the Taliban.
Even at the height of his power, Omar was said to remain simple in his tastes -- a tendency that might serve him well in an austere life of mountain exile. Back in the 1970s, as a cleric in a small village mosque, he would hold prayer services in exchange for money to feed his family.
Mountain life might suit Omar in another respect _ his preference for solitude.
During his years at the helm of the Taliban, Omar spent his days in Quranic studies, only reluctantly receiving visitors to his compound outside Kandahar.
In keeping with his reclusive nature _ as well as his belief, eventually imposed on all Afghans, that images of living things were a violation of Islam _ Omar refused to allow his photograph to be taken. Only a few, old and blurry photos are known to exist.
Discredited and defeated as the Taliban appear now, it is possible that by disappearing into the hills and defying his pursuers, Omar could once again fuel the mystique that helped the Taliban win a following in the first place. And like bin Laden, his death or capture could set him up as a martyr to be rallied around by his followers.
While some Taliban seem to still be spoiling for a fight, thousands of other foot soldiers who laid down their weapons over the past month of military defeats are quietly melting back into ordinary Afghan life.
The Taliban's former ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef, insisted on Thursday -- as the agreement to surrender Kandahar was unveiled -- that many of them would hold to their beliefs, and bide their time.
"In every village, mosque, home and province," said Zaeef, "there is a Talib."
