Taliban founder Mullah Omar, who had US$10 million bounty on his head, lived next to US bases for years, book claims
- The account exposes an embarrassing failure of US intelligence
- US put a US$10 million bounty on Mullah Omar’s head after the 9/11 attacks
Taliban founder Mullah Omar lived within walking distance of US bases in Afghanistan for years, according to a new book that highlights embarrassing failures of American intelligence.
Washington believed the one-eyed, fugitive leader had fled to Pakistan, but the new biography says Omar was in fact living just 5km from a major US Forward Operating Base in his home province of Zabul before his death in 2013.
Searching for an Enemy, by Dutch journalist Bette Dam, reveals the Taliban chief lived as a virtual hermit, refusing visits from his family and filling notebooks with jottings in an imaginary language.
Dam spent more than five years researching the book and interviewed Jabbar Omari, Omar’s bodyguard who hid and protected him after the Taliban regime was overthrown.
According to the book, Omar listened to the BBC’s Pashto-language news broadcasts in the evenings, but even when he learned about the death of al-Qaeda supremo Osama bin Laden rarely commented on developments in the outside world.
Following the 9/11 attacks in 2001 which led to the fall of the Taliban, the US put a US$10 million bounty on Omar and he went into hiding in a small compound in the regional capital Qalat, Dam writes.