Word: omar
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...leader was probably sitting as he often does, cross-legged on the floor, praying and reading the Koran, which has guided him, since the formation of the Taliban in 1994, from scholarly obscurity to spiritual leader of the movement and temporal ruler of the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan. Yet Omar may find little explicit instruction there for a decision that could equally satisfy his tribal ethics, his puritanical version of Islam and his nation's interests. If he delivers bin Laden to the West, he betrays the man who helped bring him to power and sustains his rule...
...TIME reporter who talked to Omar several months ago says he was pondering such dangers. "Did we invite him in?" said Omar of bin Laden. "He was already here. But we don't know how to get rid of him or where to send him." Now Omar's dilemma has reached cataclysmic proportions, and no one knows if he has any real-world grasp of the consequences...
...Saturday, Omar had made up his mind: "No, no, no." He overruled even the tempering recommendation of a 600-man body of senior clerics last Thursday to "encourage" bin Laden to leave Afghanistan "in his own free will" at a time and to a place of his choosing. Now, said the Taliban, Afghanistan is ready for a "showdown of might...
...idea of Talibanizing the Muslim world. The CIA estimates that of tens of thousands of fighters who have graduated from Afghan terror camps, only 3,000 or so are loyal directly to bin Laden. Yet the ties of like mind and mutual interest between bin Laden and Omar, between the cells of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, are so entwined that no quest for freedom from terror can win with the elimination of just...
...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...