Word: kandahar
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Before Omar left Kandahar, he opened the marble vault in the city's most venerated shrine and held up the Respectable Cloak of the Prophet Muhammad, seen publicly only two times previously in more than a millennium. The sight inspired Taliban foot soldiers for a final assault against Kabul in 1996. By then even the U.S. was quietly encouraging Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to back a movement they hoped might eliminate the heroin trade, open access for a gas pipeline and confine Shi'ite Iran...
...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...
Omar prefers to rule from the shadows of Kandahar, while his feared Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice enforces Taliban law through religious police with kohl-rimmed eyes, wearing black turbans, who crack whips at recalcitrant mosquegoers and banish women to the window-blocked confines of their homes. Life is severely constricted by an endless list of rules creating a variant of Islam never seen before, say Muslim scholars. In a country in which there is no television and only Islamic radio, Omar shows little knowledge of or concern for the outside world. When officials...
...Then came a day in mid-1994 when Omar, around 35 and preaching at a mosque in his native village of Singhesar, near the religious center of Kandahar, put down his Koran to act. Like so many saints and tyrants before him, Omar says he discovered his destiny in a dream: God was calling him to save his country from the warlords. He had already given his right eye as a young mujahedin to Soviet shrapnel. Now, according to Taliban lore, he gathered together 30 like-minded men to avenge the abduction and rape of two young women; the guilty...
...other extremists have made Afghanistan an academy for terrorists. Welcomed back by the Taliban in 1996, bin Laden has about a dozen training camps here and provides a 1,000-man brigade of fighters to the Taliban for their civil war. While his family is believed to be in Kandahar, bin Laden moves daily in an elusive caravan...