- In a radio broadcast to his Taliban fighters last month
Mullah Mohammad Omar urged them to stand and fight rather than die like
chickens.
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- "I order you to obey your commanders completely
and not to go hither and thither," said the one-eyed leader.
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- "Any person who goes hither and thither is like
a slaughtered chicken that falls and dies."
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- On Thursday, as the Taliban negotiated the surrender
of Kandahar, the city where they first rose to prominence in 1994, it was
clear that Omar's exhortations had failed to stir the desired suicidal
defiance.
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- Tall, Shy and Hardly Cut Out to be a
Leader
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- Broken by American airpower, the Taliban soldiers ignored
the orders of the man they call Amir ul Momineen, commander of the
faithful,
went into headlong retreat and are now teetering on the brink of final
collapse.
-
- The fate of Omar, who has also said he "prefers
death to the government of fascists," is unclear.
-
- Although tall and well-built with a flourishing, long
black beard and a black turban, Omar is shy, and hardly cut out as a
leader.
-
- He is a poor public speaker and has only rarely travelled
in his own country, let alone seen any other.
-
- Omar, who has three wives and five children, is such
an enigma that at first many Afghans thought he did not exist and was a
figment of the imagination of Pakistani intelligence agencies who supported
the Taliban.
-
- He has never posed for a photograph, he makes no public
appearances or speeches and has visited Kabul, the capital, only twice
since the rise of the Taliban.
-
- He does not meet non-Muslim diplomats or journalists
and met the UN mediator for Afghanistan for the first time only in
1998.
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- Peasant Boy...
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- Omar was born in 1959 into a family of landless peasants
in a village near Kandahar. He studied at a madrassa (religious school)
and became a mullah in the village mosque of Singesar in Kandahar
province.
-
- At the tail end of the war against the Soviets in the
1980s he fought for the Afghan mujahideen and lost an eye in battle.
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- Mujahideen Fighter...
-
- Along with many former comrades, he was disgusted with
the rampant warlordism, crime and mayhem that reigned in the south of the
country between 1992-94.
-
- They formed an organisation called Taliban (Islamic
students),
which pledged to cleanse Afghan society, impose law and order and create
a pure, Islamic society.
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- Liberator...
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- According to a common story, early in 1994 Omar enlisted
about 30 men after hearing that two teenage girls had been raped by a
mujahideen
commander. With 16 rifles among them, the group attacked his base, freed
the girls and captured arms.
-
- In November that year they seized Kandahar and 12 months
later won control of Herat, in western Afghanistan. Taking Kabul took
another
year, several setbacks and a siege that lasted months.
-
- To achieve it, Mullah Omar retrieved the sacred cloak
of the Prophet Mohammad from its Kandahar shrine, where it had lain in
darkness for 60 years, emerged on to the roof of a building wrapped in
the garment, and was cheered by mullahs assembled below him.
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- 'Amir' of the Muslim World
-
- The meeting agreed to declare jihad, or holy war, against
President Burhanuddin Rabbani, and the Taliban entered the capital in
September
1996. There, Omar first met bin Laden, recently exiled from Sudan, and
the two became close friends.
-
- Needing the Taliban to give him sanctuary, bin Laden
flattered Omar, calling him the amir, or leader, of the whole Muslim world,
not just Afghanistan.
-
- In the past two months Omar's determination to protect
bin Laden has cost him the loss of his government, his country, his
people's
support and possibly his life.
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- It has been a high price to pay for friendship and has
brought enormous suffering to most of the Afghan people.
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