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The Last Days of Taliban Head Mullah Omar
CIA, others were wrong about Taliban leader’s hideout, new report says
A U.S. armored combat vehicle leaves Forward Operating Base Wolverine in 2009. A new report says Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar spent his last years in hiding nearby.
By Jessica Donati
March 10, 2019 10:00 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON—Mullah Mohammad Omar, the founder of the Taliban, lived in hiding near a U.S. base in southern Afghanistan until his death, according to a new research-group report that contradicts long-held theories by U.S. officials about the notorious one-eyed leader.
The consensus among experts, including at the Central Intelligence Agency, was that Mullah Omar fled to Pakistan after the U.S. ousted the Taliban following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks orchestrated by al Qaeda, which operated in Afghanistan under the Taliban’s protection.
The new report, reviewed exclusively by The Wall Street Journal, provides a detailed picture of Mullah Omar’s final years spent mostly in seclusion in Afghanistan, not Pakistan. The report contends he lived with his bodyguard, Jabbar Omari, receiving infrequent visits from a messenger who traveled every few months between his location and the Taliban’s decision-making body in Quetta, Pakistan.
The report is due to be published in the coming days by the Zomia Center, a research group in New York affiliated with New America, a Washington-based nonpartisan think tank. The research relies on interviews with some previously inaccessible sources, including current and former members of the Afghan government, the Afghan intelligence agency, the Taliban and Mullah Omar’s bodyguard, Mr. Omari, who protected him until his death and now lives under house arrest in Kabul.
The Taliban hid news of Mullah Omar’s death for more than two years, until it was revealed by the Afghan intelligence agency in 2015.
The suggestion that U.S. intelligence assessments about Mullah Omar may have been in error comes as the U.S. holds talks with the Taliban’s political office to end the war that began with the post-9/11 U.S. invasion. Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s top representative in the talks, was among Mullah Omar’s close friends.
“The report shows that the U.S. got one of the biggest claims about the war wrong, and it also shows how little we understand the Taliban movement,” the report’s author, Bette Dam, said in an interview. Ms. Dam is a Dutch journalist who has spent years reporting from Afghanistan and searching for the Taliban’s elusive leader and has written about her experiences in a book released this month in the Netherlands.
The CIA declined to comment.
David Petraeus, a former CIA director and a onetime U.S. military commander in Afghanistan and Iraq, said it seemed unlikely that Mullah Omar remained in Afghanistan, where he could have been more easily targeted.
“We had access, as needed, to anywhere inside Afghanistan, and I would be very surprised if Mullah Omar would have taken the risk that we could come calling some evening,” Mr. Petraeus said in an interview.
Mr. Petraeus had noted previously that the U.S. not only believed Mullah Omar was in Pakistan, but also had an idea of his movements between Baluchistan province and the metropolis of Karachi on the south coast, where he was believed to have been treated in a hospital.
The U.S. has long hunted members of the Taliban and al Qaeda, often blaming Pakistan for sheltering them. Pakistan denies helping insurgent groups, even though top members have been found on its soil.
U.S. forces located al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden near a military base in Pakistan and killed him in 2011. The U.S. also killed the Taliban’s new leader, Mullah Akhtar Mansour, with a drone strike in Pakistan in 2016.
Mullah Omar proved elusive to U.S. searchers. Until the announcement of his death, there had been no audio or video recordings for years.
The Zomia Center report says that Mullah Omar in late 2001 handed over the Taliban’s daily operations to his former defense minister, Mullah Obaidullah, and fled Kandahar to his native Zabul province in the south. He spent several years in the provincial capital, Qalat, hiding in the private home of his driver, a man named Abdul Samad Ustaz, the report says, citing Mr. Omari, his bodyguard, and former Afghan officials.
U.S. special-operations forces searched the house once, according to Mr. Omari, the report says, but didn’t enter the concealed room where Mullah Omar lived until 2004. The Pentagon declined a request for comment.
Borhan Osman, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, which studies conflict, said Mullah Omar was deeply suspicious of Pakistan’s intentions because other senior Taliban figures had been placed under house arrest. Mr. Osman, who has studied the Taliban, said his research also indicated that Mullah Omar had remained in Zabul province.
“It looks consistent across the various sources,” Mr. Osman said. Mullah Omar, he added, thought Pakistani leaders “would play him or use his presence to divert the direction of the movement.”
After the U.S. military established a permanent base only a few minutes’ walk from his safe house in Afghanistan, Mullah Omar relocated to a more remote district called Siuray, where his family came from. Mr. Omari, his bodyguard, found him a mud-brick family home and looked after him there until his death in 2013, the Zomia report says.
The second safe house was only a few miles away from a smaller U.S. base, known as Forward Operating Base Wolverine, according to Mr. Omari in the report. FOB Wolverine was south of Qalat, the provincial capital, and many villages in the area were assessed to be Taliban-controlled, a person who served at the base told the Journal. Several U.S. soldiers were killed there while on patrol.
The Zomia Center report said that Afghan intelligence officials repeatedly tried to question Mullah Omar’s driver, but that provincial officials stepped in to protect him.
“They [secret police] went away because I said Abdul Samad Ustaz was innocent,” tribal leader Muhammad Daud Gulzar told Ms. Dam referring to the driver, according to the report. “Later, I heard that Abdul Samad Ustaz protected Mullah Omar. I did not know that.”
The report describes Mullah Omar as living his last years in isolation in Siuray, in the company only of Mr. Omari and a host family, with whom he rarely interacted. Mullah Omar seldom left the dwelling except for brief periods to take in the sunlight and asked only for henna, a dye for his beard, and naswar, a local tobacco.
Mr. Omari told Ms. Dam that Mullah Omar grew ill in 2013, refused to see a doctor or travel to hospitals in Pakistan, and died in Zabul. His family came to bury his body, and a small group of Taliban leaders agreed to keep the death a secret while the U.S. military was preparing to fully withdraw as first planned by the Obama administration.
“Today, for the first time in nearly two decades, the prospect of peace is on the table,” Ms. Dam said in the report. “[If] a negotiated settlement is to succeed, bringing to light such hidden stories of this war will be essential.”
Write to Jessica Donati at jessica.donati@wsj.com
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