Word: omar
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...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...
...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...
...switchback valleys and rugged passes, bin Laden offered the Taliban money and fighters. Afghan and Western sources say he gave $3 million that helped push the Taliban into control of the capital and the country in September 1996. It was, according to intelligence reports, one of the last times Omar set foot in Kabul...
...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...