WASHINGTON ,MAR 11 (DNA) — Mullah Mohammad Omar “never stepped foot in Pakistan,” and instead chose to hide in his native land Afghanistan where he lived “just a few miles from a major US base” housing thousands of soldiers, a new biography of the reclusive Afghan Taliban founder claims.

“The story that emerges is that the US, and almost everyone else, had it wrong,” claims an investigative biography, Searching for An Enemy, by a Dutch journalist Bette Dam.

The book was published in Dutch last month and some of its extracts were published in English by a new think-tank Zomia.

“He never lived in Pakistan. Instead, he spent the remainder of his life in a pair of small villages in the remote, mountainous province of Zabul,” Dam was told by Abdul Jabbar Omari, Mullah Omar s bodyguard from the moment the Taliban leader went into hiding until his death in 2013.

Omari was the person who traveled to Pakistan to share the news of Mullah Omar s death with the senior Taliban commanders. He was arrested after his return and remains in the custody of Afghan intelligence agency National Directorate of Security (or NDS) since 2017.

Afghan government and Taliban didn t immediately comment on the new claims.=DNA

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