Word: fathers
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After the carnage of 9/11, there was no going back. Many of Omar's siblings who stayed behind are probably dead, and his father is the most famous mass murderer alive today. "During these years of loss and sorrow, I have had to reconcile myself to the truth about my father," writes Omar. "I know now that since the first day of the first battle against the Soviets in Afghanistan, my father has been killing other humans. I often wonder if my father has killed so many times that the act of killing no longer brings him pleasure or pain...
...interview with TIME, Omar said that as a private citizen working for the construction company owned by his father's estranged family, he had little insight on how the U.S. should fight al-Qaeda. He turned down a U.S. government offer of asylum for cooperation in finding his father. "I said you - the CIA and the FBI - you should know where he is, but I can't help you because I don't," Omar said by phone from a Middle Eastern country he refused to name either for fear of his safety or residency status. He has technically been reinstated...
...remarkable achievement - to have maintained humane beliefs despite being pulled from school at the age of 12 and exposed to a near constant deluge of hateful propaganda, isolation and family pressure - seems to have been helped by a love of animals. A constant collector of pets - against his father's wishes - and an avid horseman, Omar's awareness of the madness of al-Qaeda was fueled in part by several acts of animal cruelty by his father's men. When they lived in Sudan, one of the family guards killed Omar's pet monkey by running it over with...
...adult and free from his father, Omar talks about starting a worldwide peace movement. But having spent much of his life in the wilds of Afghanistan, his ideas about how the world works are hazy. The U.S. government is unlikely to start a dialogue with Osama bin Laden, as he suggests. Another idea, a horse race across North Africa, seems more appropriate. Perhaps a world where people are kinder to animals will be one where they are kinder to one another...
Fast Facts: • Born in a stable to a poor family in Savnik, Montenegro (then part of Yugoslavia), in 1945. His father was a member of the Chetniks, the remnants of the army of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and was wounded in World War II while fighting Nazi occupiers...