Inside Mullah Omar's palace of kitsch

13 Dec, 2001 03:29 AM4 mins to read

By JUSTIN HUGGLER

KANDAHAR - It was not the sort of house where you would have expected to find a dictator so austere he banned music. It turns out that Mullah Mohammed Omar, the supreme leader of the Taleban, lived in a strange sort of luxury. Gold-plated chandeliers hung above his bed. He even had his own private mosque, complete with mirrored minarets.

Triumphant anti-Taleban fighters were giving guided tours yesterday at Mullah Omar's vast compound on the edge of Kandahar, the city where the Taleban first took power, and where they finally lost it last week. Mujahideen sat relaxing on Mullah Omar's imported mattress - beds are a rare luxury in Afghanistan, where most people sleep on the floor.

But, for all that, Mullah Omar's palace resembled nothing so much as a seventies motel. The walls of the bedroom were decorated with moulded formica painted brown to look like wood. The private mosque was painted a lurid mixture of green and blue. The minarets even had little bits of mirror stuck to them to catch the light.

Visitors trampled all over what was once Mullah Omar's private world, mocking the rather naive murals of waterfalls and villages painted on the inside of the compound walls. You could even inspect his private bathroom, complete with not one but two squatter toilets, side by side. His and hers?

Kandahar is dotted with strangely luxurious houses. They are dotted among the long bombed out ruins of the city, some unrepaired for as many as 20 years. Many belonged to senior Taleban - and some are thought to have belonged to senior members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. It was a far cry from the austere caves in which bin Laden is supposed to have lived in Afghanistan. Perhaps he once stayed in Mullah Omar's home. In some ways, it resembles an American ranch: the large open air compound, and the stabling for crowds of horses - as well as camels.

Yesterday, half of Mullah Omar's ranch lay in ruins, entire buildings reduced to rubble by American bombs. Here and there was the smell of a rotting corpse. Apparently the destroyed buildings included the house of one of Mullah Omar's three wives, where he would sometimes have slept.

Much has been said about the accuracy of the American bombing here. No civilians were hit. But they were bombing a huge compound, in which Mullah Omar lived along with 250 of his retainers. There were no civilians to hit.

The bombs hit some buildings, and left next-door ones intact. That sort of accuracy begs the question why American bombs repeatedly ploughed into civilian homes elsewhere in Afghanistan, killing at least 100 civilians over several days in the town of Khanabad alone.

Inside Mullah Omar's own house, there were signs that someone had searched room to room. Doors had been smashed open. Of the mullah himself, there was no sign. He has reportedly fled Kandahar, and is on the run, hunted by US marines who are scouring southern Afghanistan.

The strangest sight of all in Mullah Omar's compound is a bizarre giant sculpture of a dead tree. Made of plastic painted brown, a life-size giant tree trunk lies slanting across a barren rock - not unlike a miniature version of the jagged mountains that surround Kandahar. At the far end, two cactus saplings are springing into life.

"I don't know why everybody mocks it so much," said Habibullah, a young Afghan looking at the sculpture. "There are sculptures like this in cities all over the West. But it's very unusual in Afghanistan. It proves Mullah Omar was an educated man."

Mullah Omar enforced a theocratic system of government so harsh it took Afghanistan back to the dark ages. He personally ordered music banned. The mullah himself refused even to have his photograph taken - very few pictures of him exist - and almost never gave interviews.

And yet the strange luxury in which he lived was not entirely out of keeping with the man. He did, after all, dramatically brandish the cloak of the Prophet Mohammed, Kandahar's greatest treasure, before a huge crowd of worshippers. And he ordered the destruction of the Buddhas because they depicted the human form, in contravention of Islamic law. None of his private artwork did that.

As the mujahideen gleefully pointed out the hypocrisy of Mullah Omar's lifestyle yesterday, at the other end of the compound, their own leader was busy moving in. Hamid Karzai, the leader of Afghanistan's new interim government agreed in Bonn, seems to have taken a fancy to Mullah Omar's ranch. The leaders change, but the lifestyle remains.

- INDEPENDENT

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