Word: omar
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...lieutenants, Tora Bora is the last sanctuary. The Taliban's barbaric and medieval rule unraveled for good last week as the regime's soldiers fled from Kandahar, their last stronghold. Some skulked back to their home villages with the idea of starting new lives. Others, like Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader, went missing. As a fresh power struggle raged in Kandahar and a new Afghan government prepared to take over in Kabul, the black turbans and medieval strictures of Taliban rule began to seem like a bad dream...
...there was no champagne in the allies' high command. Anti-Taliban forces in Kandahar led by Hamid Karzai, the interim Prime Minister of Afghanistan, failed to capture Omar. That left the U.S. and its allies embroiled in a two-front manhunt for the Taliban chief and his even more high-profile Saudi guest. "We simply don't know right now where Omar is," the U.S. Central Command chief, General Tommy Franks, said Friday. A Kandahar eyewitness told TIME that early in the week Omar was spotted heading into the hills around Argandhab, west of Kandahar, with five bodyguards...
...allies have long believed that Omar and bin Laden would choose to go down in a blaze of martyrdom. But with the storm gathering around them, both men appeared intent on survival. Perhaps their only way out was a dangerous route through the snowy passes of the White Mountains and into one of the border towns of Pakistan. Once there, they could receive refuge from sympathetic Pashtun tribesmen and be absorbed into the anonymous urban surroundings...
...were inside Kandahar, bivouacked behind the blue arched Governor's House. They rode into town with the anti-Taliban soldiers of Ghul Agha Sherzai, a former governor who had been run out by the Taliban for his excesses. Sherzai's boys were celebrating. They'd captured one of Mullah Omar's cars, a sinister black Lexus 4x4 and were parading it around the driveway of the governor's house. Inside one of the many rooms in the vaulted mansion, they were horsing around with a bunch of leather straps used by the Taliban's dreaded religious police to whack...
...This war in Afghanistan is about real estate. And now that the Taliban are vanishing into the dust, the battle is on for the choice symbols of power. Omar's house, with its sentimental frescoes of waterfalls and flowers and plastic bedroom chandeliers, may not fit Karzai's urbane, westernized tastes. But Karzai is canny enough to know the importance of destroying the Afghan myth of Omar, the one-eyed visionary who conversed with the Prophet Mohammed in his dreams. And part of that destruction involves camping in Omar's kitsch mansion, and letting a common sentry snooze...