KABUL, Afghanistan (SW) – Afghanistan has strongly rejected a report claiming the founder of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammad Omar, spent his final years in Afghanistan, not in neighboring Pakistan.
Haroon Chakhansuri, spokesman for President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani, noted in a statement that this delusional claim is an effort to create and build identify for the Taliban and their foreign backers. “We have sufficient evidence which shows he lived and died in Pakistan”, he tweeted.
‘’Searching For An Enemy’’, by Dutch journalist and writer Bette Dam, says the fugitive leader never hid in Pakistan as was believed by U.S. and Afghan officials. Dam spent five years researching and interviewing Taliban members for the biography of the one-eyed militant leader, which was published in Dutch last month.
A summary of the findings was published in English by the U.S.-based Zomia think tank.
According to Dam, Omar lived in Zabul Province's capital, Qalat, until 2004, when U.S. troops began building Forward Operating Base (FOB) Lagman, just a few minutes' walk from his hideout. Omar then moved to Shinkay district, and the United States soon afterward started building FOB Wolverine just 5 kilometers away. At the peak of the war, FOB Wolverine housed more than 1,000 troops from the United States and its NATO allies, but Omar did not move again, Dam says.
The report noted Omar could not run the Taliban group from his hiding places, but he is said to have approved a Taliban office in Qatar, where U.S. and Taliban negotiators have been holding peace talks in a bid to end the 17-year war in Afghanistan. He was wanted in the United States for providing a safe haven for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who masterminded the 9/11 attacks on the United States and lived in hiding in Pakistan, and Washington had placed a $10 million bounty on his head.
Dam managed to speak to Jabbar Omari, the man who effectively became Omar's bodyguard when he went into hiding. Omari, who is now in the custody of Afghanistan’s spy agency, said the Taliban leader died from illness on April 23, 2013.
The Taliban confirmed Omar's death in 2015 after Afghan intelligence revealed that the militant leader had died in a hospital in the Pakistani city of Karachi.
ENDS