Word: mullah
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...Half my country was destroyed by 23 years of war," Mullah Mohammed Omar told Time earlier this year. "If the remaining half of Afghanistan is destroyed in trying to save [Osama] bin Laden, I am ready." He had no illusions, therefore, about the choice he and his country faced after Sept...
Omar is not really a Mullah. He prefers to be called a talib (student), because his religious studies were interrupted by the Soviet invasion in 1979. As a mujahed, he earned a reputation as a marksman, but the conflict cost him his right eye. After the Soviets pulled out and Afghanistan descended into civil war, he lived simply as a village clergyman until, he claims, he had a dream in which the Prophet Muhammad revealed that he, Omar, should lead the country out of lawlessness and immorality. He and a few dozen other clerics became the foundation of the Taliban...
...Mullah Omar and bin Laden are animated by a vision. They really do believe--or perhaps did believe--that their destiny was to unite all the Muslim lands from the Pyrenees to the Philippines and re-establish the original caliphate of a millennium ago. Omar took the sacred robe, attributed to Muhammad and locked away for more than 60 years, and triumphantly donned it in public as if to declare his succession to the Prophet's earthly rule. (Osama harbored similar fantasies about himself, although he fed Omar's, as a form of flattery and enticement...
...Laden. No Mullah Omar. The suspected top two in the al Qaeda machine are still at large and probably long gone, and the natives are getting restless. In a Washington Post-ABC poll released Thursday, two-thirds of Americans believe the war on terrorism will be a success only with the capture of bin Laden - and they want Saddam Hussein out of Iraq too, which is exactly the point at which public opinion starts to bump into that "unprecedented coalition" we've been hearing about. But how long can Bush keep those 86-percent approval ratings going without bringing home...
...commanders turned against him?and then vanished. The bulk of the Afghan Taliban fled in the middle of the night to avoid reprisals by the tribal elders who immediately carved up the city. On liberation day Kandahar was as chaotic as it was joyous. Non-Taliban forces led by Mullah Naqib Ullah, an Omar backer and member of the Alokzai tribe who was handed control of part of the city, skirmished with men loyal to Sherzai trying to grab their share. Meanwhile, the Pentagon said, anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 Taliban troops?most of them Pakistanis, Chechens, Algerians...