Taliban leader recreates 'time of the Prophet' by torture and repression

Terror in America: Profile of the Emir

The man whom the Taliban calls the Emir of Afghanistan or Amir-ul-Momineem, "Commander of the Faithful", implying that he is the rightful leader of all Muslims everywhere, was born to an obscure and landless peasant family in a village of mud huts near the southern city of Kandahar sometime around 1959.

He is tall and well built, wears a black turban and the compulsory long beard. His three wives and his children, who number at least five, continue to live in the village where he was born and raised, Singesar.

He lost the sight in his right eye in 1989 when a rocket exploded near him.

Omar is anextraordinary national leader. It is very difficult to get a handle on him, because he has rarely been photographed and never interviewed by a foreigner.

He is said to be an unimpressive speaker, with little obvious charisma. Even his Islamic education is deficient, having been interrupted by interludes of fighting against the Russians with the mujahedin.

How did such a diffident figure attain absolute power over his movement and most of his country?

The Taliban accounts for it with tales of his manly compassion, portraying Omar as rushing to the rescue of rape victims and punishing profligate chiefs by stringing them up from tank barrels.

There is no way of verifying such yarns, which have the unreal, hagiographic glow of the sort of stories published about the youthful deeds of the late North Korean dictator, Kim-il Sung.

What is clear, however, is that Mullah Omar and his followers are Golden Age romantics. Everything they have done points to the same crazy goal, including sequestering women and preventing them from studying and working, banning all forms of diversion from chess to racing pigeons, and punishing crim-inals by amputating limbs or burying them alive.

"We want to live a life like the Prophet lived 1400 years ago," Omar's aide Mullah Wakil told the journalist Ahmed Rashid. "We want to recreate the time of the Prophet."

But the Taliban has grown even nastier as its reach has grown. Stoning and amputation are bad enough. But how about locking prisoners of war in containers until they all suffocate? Or shooting women and children at random?

In 1998 in Mazar-I-Sharif, after wreaking bloody vengeance on the civilians, the Taliban rounded up 11 Iranian diplomats and shot them dead. According to good sources, the killings were explicitly authorised by Mullah Omar.

In the Taliban's early years, Omar was accessible to his comrades and often seen at prayers in Kandahar.

But since the capture of Kabul – which he has never visited – he has become more reclusive and his movement more truculent and unpredictable. The main reason, Afghanistan watchers believe, is because Mullah Omar is no longer his own man. The man with the money in Afghanistan, with up to half of the Taliban's fighters in his pocket, is Osama bin Laden.

Now it's Mr bin Laden who is pulling the strings.