Word: amir
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...Atta's day of infamy is typical among those he left behind in Cairo nine years ago. Although they immediately recognized the face on the mug shot of Atta flashed around the world, they recognized little else about him - not even his name. "Atta" was born Mohammed Mohammed El Amir; Atta had been a disused name on his father's side adopted, possibly, as an alias. Nothing that Ismail and her circle remembered about the shy, sensitive, gentle striver had prepared them to make sense of his horrendous final...
...Indeed, his father, also Mohammed El Amir, is so deep in denial that he insists that the September 11 attack was carried out by Israel's Mossad spy agency. He even told TIME that he had actually spoken to his son after the atrocity...
...lawyer father and the academic success of his two elder sisters, one who lectured at Cairo University and the other who became a doctor. A quiet only son who was strongly attached to his mother, Atta's father nicknamed him "Bolbol" - Arabic for a little bird. Mohammed El Amir recalls his son as a timid boy who avoided fights or squabbles between friends. "In his behavior, my son was almost like an angel," he said. "He is like a virgin girl in his politeness and shyness. Growing up he never got into mischief, he was soft spoken and God blessed...
...political views were mainstream Egyptian middle class, so was his uphill struggle for a good education, a well-paying job and the means to marry and raise a family in one of the world's most overcrowded and impoverished cities. College friends still don't believe that Mohammed El Amir could have committed the atrocity of Sept. 11, but that if he had indeed become Mohammed Atta that would have required significant personality changes or brainwashing during his sojourn in Hamburg...
...Taliban remains one of the world's most inscrutable regimes, fanatically loyal to one of the world's most mysterious leaders. The devout Omar, self-declared "Amir-ul-Momineen," or Commander of the Faithful, has lived in seclusion in a Kandahar compound ever since a 1999 bomb killed 40 people near his old mud-brick home in his former village. He permits no photographs and rarely appears in public. He is said to be 5 ft. 10 in. tall, heavily bearded and imposing despite his stitched-shut eye. He is thought to confer personally with perhaps eight...