The Taliban's one-eyed leader Mullah Mohammed Omar has abandoned his border hide-out and taken refuge in the port city of Karachi, according to U.S. intelligence officials.
These officials confirmed that Mullah Omar, who went into hiding after the start of the U.S. war in Afghanistan in October of 2001, has recently been spotted in Karachi, the Washington Times reported on Friday. Bruce Riedel, a CIA veteran who led a review of U.S. policy in Pakistan and Afghanistan, confirmed the sighting. “Some sources claim the ISI decided to move him further from the battlefield to keep him safe” from U.S. drone attacks, Riedel told the paper. “There are huge madrassas in Karachi where Mullah Omar could easily be kept.”
Pakistani officials, however, deny any knowledge of the Taliban leader's whereabouts.
Karachi appears to have become a safe haven for terrorists. Earlier this month, an operational head of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, the Pakistani Taliban, was captured on the outskirts of the city. A number of other suspected Taliban leaders have also been arrested in the city.
In an interview with Bloomberg News, Karachi's senior superintendent of investigations, Syed Mazhar Mashwani said, “Terrorists are fleeing to areas that are as far away as possible from the conflict and populated enough to hide. In Karachi, they find places to shelter and it will take a couple of months to clean them out after the operation ends.”
U.S. air strikes and Pakistani military operations along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border the likely reason why Omar quit his hide-out in Quetta. Intelligence officials told the Times Pakistan's intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence, had helped Omar move to Karachi at the end of Ramadan last month. The cleric has reportedly set up a new senior leadership council in the city. "The development reinforces suspicions that the ISI, which helped create the Taliban in the 1990s to expand Pakistani influence in Afghanistan, is working against U.S. interests in Afghanistan as the Obama administration prepares to send more U.S. troops to fight there," the paper said.
Riedel noted a dip in suicide bombings in Karachi, which, he said, was an indicator that the Taliban and al Qaeda did not want to attract too much attention to the city. A U.S. counterterrorism official said, “There are indications of some kind of bleed-out of Taliban types from Quetta to Karachi, but no one should assume at this point that the entire Afghan Taliban leadership has packed up its bags and headed for another Pakistani city.”
A second intelligence official said, “One reason, [al Qaeda] and Taliban leaders are relocating to Karachi is because they believe U.S. drones do not strike there... It is a densely populated urban area.”
U.S. officials are concerned that Pakistani military operations against terrorists in the Swat Valley and South Waziristan are only aimed at militants threatening the Pakistani state, while groups operating against Afghanistan have been left untouched.
In an interview with Radio Azadi in Afghanistan, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was asked about U.S. efforts to press the Pakistani military to act against Mullah Omar’s Taliban and the Quetta shura.
“We will continue to press them to go after all of the extremists in Pakistan, some of whom target Pakistan, some of whom, as you know, target Afghanistan,” she said, adding, “And we think there has to be an effort to root out the extremists in Pakistan who threaten Afghanistan.”
“Afghanistan cannot get control over its territory and defeat the Taliban if they can go across the border into Pakistan as a safe haven,” Clinton noted, adding, “And similarly, Pakistan cannot root out the people that threaten them and their government if they can seek refuge across the border in Afghanistan.
