Spiritual leader of the Taleban lurks in shadows

ISLAMABAD - He is the most secretive leader in the world. Not even a photograph of Afghanistan's Mullah Mohammad Omar exists.

Omar is the spiritual leader of the Taleban movement that rules most of the rugged and inhospitable terrain of Afghanistan and provides sanctuary to the man shaping up as the world's most wanted - Osama bin Laden.

Omar is believed to have been seen by only two non-Muslims - and indeed by few of his own 20 million people.

But his passion for hiding in the shadows has not hampered his swift and dramatic accumulation of power over a land so ravaged by war that its people have returned to a life more akin to the Middle Ages than the 21st century.

His rigid devotion to Islam is the force that governs his existence, and it is this faith that now rules the lives of Afghans.

Women are barred from education and must be covered from head to foot in public, all men must grow beards and photographs, pictures, music, television and other "entertainments" are banned.

Omar's leadership and the purist Taleban movement that grew up under that leadership were born together amid frustration and despair after years of internecine war among the factions of the mujahideen that had effectively defeated the Soviet Union and then turned on one another in 1992.

One story goes that in early 1994, Omar enlisted about 30 talebs - the word means student of Islam - after hearing that two teenage girls had been snatched from their village by a mujahideen commander and raped.

With 16 rifles among them, the group attacked the base, freed the girls and captured quantities of arms and ammunition.

"We were fighting against Muslims who had gone wrong. How could we remain quiet when we could see crimes being committed against women and the poor," Omar told a Pakistani reporter.



In November 1994, his movement was strong enough to capture Afghanistan's second city of Kandahar. By early 1995, his fanatical fighters were sweeping north and by the end of the year, the western city of Herat was in their hands.

The taking of Kabul took another year. To achieve it, Mullah Omar resorted to an astonishing gesture.

He retrieved the sacred cloak of the Prophet Mohammad from its Kandahar shrine where it had lain in darkness for 60 years, emerged on to a roof wrapped in the garment and was cheered by delighted mullahs assembled below him.

The result of the meeting was an agreement to declare jihad, or a Muslim holy war, against President Burhanuddin Rabbani.

Kabul fell to the Taleban on September 26, 1996.

- REUTERS

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