ISLAMABAD – Mullah Omar, the former supreme leader of the Taliban, neverlived in Pakistan, something US intelligence officials have long claimed.
This revelation was made in a paper, *The Secret Life of Mullah Omar* byBette Dam and Zomia. The paper is a precursor to an investigative biographyon Mullah Omar by the same author *Searching for An Enemy*. To read thecomplete paper, click here.link
According to the US, Mullah Omar remained the head of the Taliban andconducted distributed funds to Taliban movement figures to be used tomanage and execute terrorist attacks and met with Osama Bin Laden inPakistan, where he had allegedly sought refuge following the fall of theTaliban.
In 2015, the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s intelligenceagency, and the Afghan presidential office announced, based on “credibleinformation,” that he had died in a Karachi hospital. “We knew he was inPakistan,” said then CIA director David Petraeus.
“He was really generally down in Balochistan and would go to Karachi andthat’s where the hospital was, but we just didn’t have the ability tooperate in Pakistan, and couldn’t get our Pakistani partners to go afterhim.”
But, according to Dam, none of this is true. After five years of researchand interviews, and an exclusive interview with Mullah Omar’s formerbodyguard, she found that he never left Afghanistan.
“The story that emerges is that the US, and almost everyone else, had itwrong. After 2001, Mullah Omar never stepped foot in Pakistan, insteadopting to hide in his native land— and for eight years, lived just a fewmiles from a major US Forward Operating Base that housed thousands ofsoldiers,” she wrote.
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“This finding, corroborated by the Taliban and Afghan officials, suggests astaggering US intelligence failure, and casts even further doubt onAmerica’s claims about the Afghan war.”
She wrote that Mullah Omar refused to go to Pakistan because of hisdeep-seated mistrust of the country and his involvement in the insurgencywas minimal.
As per interview with Abdul Jabbar Omari, Mullah Omar’s bodyguard from themoment he vanished in Kandahar in 2001 after handing over control of theTaliban until his death in 2013, and by triangulating his story throughsources knowledgeable about Mullah Omar’s whereabouts, Dam pieced togetherMullah Omar’s life after 2001.
He never lived in Pakistan. Instead, he spent the remainder of his life ina pair of small villages in the remote, mountainous province of Zabul.
She wrote that contrary to US claims, he never headed the Taliban after hisresignation in Kandahar and lived a life of solitude. US soldiers enteredthe house at which he was staying at least twice but failed to find him.
