World
August 4, 2015
Mullah Omar worked as potato vendor to escape detection in Pakistan
Highlights
Sources: Low profile helped Taliban leader avoid capture
Avoided support networks for fear of informants, U.S. bounty
Taliban leader worried Pakistan military would collect multimillion-dollar reward
ISLAMABAD —
After fleeing the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Taliban chief Mullah Mohammed Omar took refuge in Pakistan’s densely populated southern port city of Karachi.
His cover? Potato trader in a downtown market.
For nearly three years, according to senior Pakistani intelligence operatives and a former Taliban government minister, Mullah Omar, among the most wanted men in the world, worked among the vegetable purveyors in low-end marketplaces in crowded Karachi.
He ceased all overt Taliban activity. He stopped trying to raise money or recruit new adherents. He even refused help from a support network operated by Pakistani militant groups allied with the Taliban, for fear informants would lead the Pakistani military intelligence services to his doorstep in Karachi’s downtown Lea Market, where he lived between late 2002 and early 2005, according to the accounts.
It’s impossible to independently confirm this version of Mullah Omar’s activities as U.S. forces swept aside the Taliban government in Afghanistan in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in the United States. The Pakistani intelligence officers spoke on condition of anonymity, because they were not authorized to speak to journalists, and the former Taliban minister cited threats to his personal security in asking not to be identified.
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If we’d known of Mullah Omar’s whereabouts then, doubtless he would have been sold to the Americans.
Anonymous senior Pakistani officer
But their accounts provide one explanation for how Mullah Omar managed to slip through a U.S.-imposed dragnet and remain at large, returning to Afghanistan in 2005, as the U.S. became increasingly focused on Iraq, to lead a resurgence of the Taliban until his death in a Karachi hospital two years ago. That death became public only last month.
What Pakistani officials knew about Mullah Omar’s presence in Pakistan remains an open question, just as it does for Osama bin Laden, the al Qaida founder who was discovered and killed by U.S. military raiders in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in May 2011. An investigation by Pakistan of bin Laden’s presence found no senior leaders knew that he was living in a walled compound less than a mile from the country’s premier military academy.
Similarly, the accounts offered of Mullah Omar’s early years of exile absolve Pakistani officials of involvement in the Taliban leader’s protection. The sources said the Taliban maintained a highly secretive, compartmentalized network in Karachi to keep its top operatives’ whereabouts hidden precisely because they feared Pakistani military officers could profit personally from their capture. The United States, for example, had offered a $10 million reward for Omar’s capture.
Karachi was the favored place of exile for Omar and other top Taliban functionaries because they’d previously lived there.
“From their perspective, it was the right thing to do,” said a ranking officer of the military’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, Pakistan’s top spy agency. “If we’d known of Mullah Omar’s whereabouts then, doubtless he would have been sold to the Americans.”
The sources said Karachi was the favored place of exile for Omar and other top functionaries of the Taliban regime overthrown in 2001 because they’d previously lived there for many years prior to the militant group’s emergence in the mid-1990s.
Omar first arrived in Karachi in 1979 to study at the Jamia Binoria Dar-ul-Aloom, the city’s premier seminary for orthodox Sunni Muslims, they said.
Like other students, Omar was bound by the strict discipline of the seminary and lived in on-campus dormitories while undergoing a series of courses in religious instruction, starting with basic Arabic-language recitation of the Quran and culminating in rote memorization of Islam’s holy book before he graduated in 1982 and returned to Afghanistan, the sources said.
Omar regularly visited Karachi until founding the Taliban movement in the mid-1990s and its subsequent seizure of most of Afghanistan, they said.
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