The Taliban's founder hid right under the nose of the U.S. military for years, new report says

Mullah Mohammad Omar, the founder of the Taliban, spent the last years of his life hiding in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2013, a new report details. The U.S. government and the CIA, meanwhile, long believed that Omar had fled to Pakistan, reports The Wall Street Journal, which exclusively reviewed the findings from the Zomia Center, a research group in New York affiliated with the nonpartisan think tank New America.

Omar initially went into hiding after U.S. military forces expelled the Taliban from Afghanistan following the post-9/11 invasion of the country. The consensus among U.S. intelligence experts and officials at the time was that the Taliban leader made his way into Pakistan, where they believed he remained until his death in 2013. But through interviews with "previously inaccessible sources," including members of the Afghan government, the Afghan intelligence agency, the Taliban, and Omar's bodyguard, the Zomia Center discovered that he did not leave Afghanistan.

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Tim O'Donnell

Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.