Why the U.S. Never Caught Mullah Omar --- The Taliban's late founder hid out for years in Afghan homes while the U.S. hunted for him in Pakistan.

"In 2004, around the time he turned 10, Mohammed Asrar learned that someone had been living for more than two years behind a hidden door in his family's house in southern Afghanistan. The shadowy guest was Mullah Omar, the Taliban's founder and spiritual leader and one of America's most wanted men.

After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, Mullah Omar had disappeared, evading U.S. efforts to capture or kill him for more than a dozen years. A $10 million bounty on his head failed to expose him, and the Taliban even kept secret his death from natural causes in 2013. He officially remained a U.S. target for two more years.

The U.S. has long maintained that Mullah Omar fled to neighboring Pakistan, and the now-fallen Afghan government agreed. But his relatives, Afghans who sheltered him and Taliban officials familiar with his escape -- and now willing to speak about it since the Taliban have regained power -- tell a different story.

Today Mr. Asrar is a cumin farmer living in the same home where he grew up, in the remote village of Ghoara in Zabul province. Tucked away in a corner of his house, a traditional mud-walled compound with a big inner courtyard, is a door disguised as bathroom shelving. "If pushed, it would open," Mr. Asrar said as he showed it to me this summer. The door no longer moves; the wall closing off the room has since been torn down and Mr. Asrar now stores his dried cumin in the space. While Mullah Omar was living there, Mr. Asrar added, the shelves held shampoos as decoys.

"The Americans came here two or three times, but they never entered this room," Mr. Asrar said. Mr. Asrar's older brother Abdul Samad, a taxi driver, built the secret room; even his family members were long unaware it existed. But by the end of 2004, confidantes say, Mullah Omar shifted his location again, to a house in another Zabul province town, only a few minutes' drive from a U.S. military base.

This month, the U.S. announced success in a different long-term manhunt: A drone strike killed the current al Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in his safe house in the middle of the Afghan capital, Kabul. Eleven years ago, U.S. Navy Seals raided a compound in Pakistan and killed Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda chief who oversaw the 9/11 attacks. But never finding Mullah Omar still ranks as one of the biggest failures of U.S. intelligence in the region: It built up his mystique and raised the prestige of the Taliban as they fought their guerrilla war.

Now, a year after the Taliban swept back into control in Kabul and toppled the U.S.-backed Afghan republic, Mullah Omar's posthumous influence is growing. He is being cast as a national hero, his time in power in the 1990s offering a blueprint for the new Taliban government of Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, his heir as supreme leader.

"We are 100% following Mullah Omar," Abdul Rahman Tayebi, an aide to Mullah Haibatullah, told me in his office in Kandahar, the Taliban's spiritual homeland. That includes reviving government departments that Mullah Omar established, such as Mr. Tayebi's own Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, which oversees the religious police. The Taliban have also brought back restrictions on women's ability to work and study. Schools for girls beyond the sixth grade remain shut. (Under Mullah Omar's rule, girls were barred from primary school, too.) Mullah Haibatullah also emulates his predecessor's reclusiveness: He has never shown his face in public.

Senior Taliban officials acknowledge that most of their leaders, including Mullah Haibatullah and some of Mullah Omar's own relatives, were based in Pakistan for much of the war. But they say that Mullah Omar didn't go with them. The Dutch author Bette Dam, who spent years based in Afghanistan trying to piece together Mullah Omar's life, concluded that he had lived in Afghanistan until his death. Her findings, included in her 2019 biography of the Taliban leader, were dismissed by the former Afghan government and by U.S. officials.

Philip Raveling, a former CIA officer who served extensively in Afghanistan and oversaw operations to find Mullah Omar, calls it "highly unlikely" that the Taliban leader spent over a decade in Zabul. "From early in the war through at least 2012, Mullah Omar was believed to be hiding in Pakistan," he said. "He was never located with high confidence, and so it is not known exactly where he was in hiding. However, all data pointed to Pakistan." Mr. Raveling added that efforts to find Mullah Omar only intensified after bin Laden was killed in 2011, when an interagency task force was set up to track him down.

This summer, I traveled to Afghanistan, accompanied by Ms. Dam, to trace the footsteps of Mullah Omar and to see how his legacy lives on. With the Taliban back in power, areas that were once off-limits to foreigners, such as rural Zabul, have become accessible. Those familiar with his escape have become more willing to speak and offer evidence about what happened.

When Taliban forces swept through Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, the republic's army collapsed faster than anyone had expected. Most of the young, educated Afghan men and women I knew when I lived there in the mid-2010s fled. But many other Afghans welcomed the Taliban's return. In the eucalyptus tree-lined streets of Kandahar, the city's Taliban past is being revived.

Mullah Haibatullah is based here, rather than in the national capital with the rest of his government. During the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr in May, crowds of men packed an open-air mosque at Kandahar University to watch him lead prayers, just as Mullah Omar did in the 1990s. Construction work on a mosque commissioned during Mullah Omar's rule and bearing his name is finally being completed. Sales of black turbans, a style popular with the Taliban, have surged among residents. The city's Arab cemetery, where al Qaeda fighters are believed to be buried, is again a popular attraction, drawing people who come to pay tribute to the dead fighters, pray by their graves and ask them for miracles.

Hajji Ibrahim, a village less than an hour's drive away, holds a special place in Taliban lore: It's where Mullah Omar lived as a preacher with his young family and fought with the mujahedeen against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. It's also here that he founded the Taliban movement in 1994.

During the U.S. war in Afghanistan, foreign and Afghan troops frequently patrolled the village and searched its homes, including the mud-brick house where Mullah Omar had lived before the Taliban first came to power. "The Americans used to come with their dogs and mine-clearing tools and searched this house almost every day. They asked us the same questions over and over again: 'Where is the house? Where did he hide his weapons? Show us where the weapons are,'" recalls Abdul Mohammed, a 60-year-old farmer. To bring an end to this practice, three years ago villagers razed the house.

Many locals took up arms with the Taliban. Among them is Mohammad Hashan, a tribal elder with piercing blue eyes who recalled fighting alongside Mullah Omar against the Soviets. He remembers when a Soviet bomb ripped through the village mosque, injuring Mullah Omar, who lost his right eye. Mr. Hashan says he wiped blood off Mullah Omar's wounded face.

"I stood by his side against the Soviets, and I stood by him against the Americans," says Mr. Hashan, who used to make homemade bombs targeting foreign troops. When we visited, he rolled out a plastic carpet for us under a tree, serving us cups of green tea and sugar candy. "We welcome any foreigner if he or she comes here the way you did. But if they come to invade us, we will resist regardless of how powerful and well-equipped they might be," he said.

Mullah Omar's eldest son, Mullah Yacoub, is now the defense minister and one of the Taliban's most powerful and popular leaders. He was 8 years old when, in the fall of 2001, he says he saw his father alive for the last time. After narrowly surviving a U.S. airstrike in Kandahar that targeted his car, Mullah Omar split from his family, Mullah Yacoub said recently at an event in Kabul commemorating his father. "After he left us, he decided to stay inside his country," he said. "He went to Zabul and lived there for 13 years, in two villages."

He and others close to Mullah Omar said he fled Kandahar by car in December 2001. He was accompanied by Abdul Jabbar Omari, a mid-ranking Taliban with roots in Zabul, who remained with him until his death. It was Mr. Omari -- who eventually also hosted Mullah Omar -- who connected him with Mr. Asrar's older brother, Abdul Samad, the taxi driver who built the hidden room.

The house is about a 40-minute drive from Qalat, the provincial capital of Zabul. The last stretch follows a dry, gravelly riverbed with no discernible road. It leads to the small farming village of Ghoara, where cumin, almonds and wheat are the main crops.

Ms. Dam and I knocked on the door unannounced. Mr. Asrar told us the family's story. Mr. Asrar said his brother, who died a few years ago, only gradually revealed to family members that Mullah Omar was living in their house. He says that it was during Eid when he found out, because Mr. Samad had bought new clothes as a gift for the Taliban leader. "I saw him sitting with my brother, it was late in the evening. I was the one who brought the new clothes to him," recalled Mr. Asrar. Mullah Omar was startled to see him for the first time. "Don't worry, he is my brother," Mr. Asrar remembered Mr. Samad saying.

After Ghoara, Mullah Omar moved a few miles down the provincial road to the home of Mr. Omari, his de facto bodyguard, according to Mr. Omari and Taliban officials. "He lived in my house like a family member. He was there when my kids were born and chose their names. They remember that kind old man who gave them dried fruit," Mr. Omari, who is now based in Kabul, said at the recent event commemorating Mullah Omar. "My family members didn't know he was Mullah Omar. I told only my wife, and that is how Allah kept him safe."

Mr. Omari's family home is in the village of Omarzo, a cluster of mud-walled houses not far from the only well-paved road in the district. Around five minutes down the road is what's left of Forward Operating Base Wolverine, a U.S. military base that that was set up as part of the surge of U.S. and NATO troops in 2009.

U.S. and Afghan government soldiers searched the house many times during the eight-and-a-half years Mullah Omar lived there, according to Mr. Omari. Each time, he and Mullah Omar were able to slip out. Mr. Omari said his children were their sentinels and gave warning when foreign troops approached.

U.S. Army Lt. Col. Burton Shields says that when he deployed to the Wolverine base in the summer of 2009, there was no indication Mullah Omar was in the area -- but in hindsight, the area was so remote that it's plausible the Taliban leader lived there. "It would have been a good place to hide," he said in an interview. While locals were friendly, "they never gave us any information about the Taliban."

The Taliban government is planning to turn Mr. Omari's house into a national monument to honor its founder. For now, a sign pinned to the side of the house warns off the curious, saying that "pilgrimages to the house of Supreme Leader Mullah Mohammad Omar are strictly banned until further notice, even if you are a dignitary."

Mullah Omar died in Zabul province and was buried near Omarzo, according to Mr. Omari, Ms. Dam's research and Taliban officials. The Western-backed Afghan government said Mullah Omar died in a hospital in Karachi, Pakistan.

There are few known reports of sightings of Mullah Omar in Pakistan. A Norwegian diplomat has said he met a person he believed to be Mullah Omar there in 2009. "It's possible that while in Afghanistan he went to Pakistan for some purpose," says Carter Malkasian, a historian and former adviser to U.S. commanders in Afghanistan. "I see as more compelling the evidence that he was in Afghanistan the whole time."

Ms. Dam says that staying in Zabul made sense for Mullah Omar because he could count on broad tribal support. "He felt safer in that area, with Afghans, than he would have in Pakistan," says Ms. Dam. "He went for a strategy of complete disappearance. He relied on just four to five people he knew. He basically disappeared from the insurgency." Zabul was also a Taliban stronghold and close to the Pakistani border, allowing messengers to travel between his hiding places and other Taliban leaders, says Ms. Dam. But communication, including with his family, was sporadic.

Mullah Omar's younger brother, Mullah Abdul Manan, told us the last time he saw his brother was in Kandahar in 2001, just before the city fell to the invading U.S. forces. He said he traveled to Zabul to bury him. "Living three kilometers away from a U.S. military base was hugely risky for Mullah Omar," said Mullah Manan, who lived in Pakistan for years and is now the Taliban's minister for public works. "He was advised to leave Zabul, because the plain, mountainous landscape made it difficult to protect him there. But he insisted he would be fine. It was his decision alone to stay in Zabul."

We met Mullah Manan at his Kabul house, in a fortified neighborhood once home to foreign diplomats, military contractors and the CIA. In the corner of the living room stood a small Christmas tree with pink, blue and silver baubles hanging from its plastic branches: a piece of flotsam from the foreigners who left in a rush as the Taliban closed in on Kabul one year ago." [1]

1. REVIEW --- Why the U.S. Never Caught Mullah Omar --- The Taliban's late founder hid out for years in Afghan homes while the U.S. hunted for him in Pakistan. The new Kabul regime is eager to celebrate his mystique and legacy.
Stancati, Margherita. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 13 Aug 2022: C.1.