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| Afghanistan |
| Mullah Omar subject to siezures, irrationality |
| 2001-10-07 |
The man leading his country in a desperate and high-stakes game of chess against the United States suffers fits and brain seizures and often babbles like a child, according to the doctor who treats Mullah Mohammed Omar, the one-eyed Taliban leader. Omar's mental instability is the real reason he is so reclusive, rarely travelling out of Kandahar and virtually unknown even to the Afghan people, said the doctor who works at a hospital in Omar's hometown of Kandahar and spoke to The Sunday Telegraph's Christina Lamb on condition of anonymity. "He locks himself away for two or three days at a time and the official line is that he is having visions, but in fact he is suffering brain seizures," the doctor told Lamb, who has travelled extensively in the region and has written a book, 'Behind the Veil' on Pakistan. Lamb says that Omar's 'visions', which he passes off as periods of silent communion with God when he receives "instructions for creating a pure Islamic state", are responsible for his edicts, including the ban on flying kites, football and high-heeled shoes for women or indeed any footwear that "clicks" under the burqa. His doctors also describe alarming mood swings, including deep depression, alternating with "bouts of childlike behaviour", which causes him "to sit in the driving seat of one of his cars, turning the wheel while making the noise of an engine". Analysts pointed out that the portrait of a gibbering idiot, as painted by The Sunday Telegraph, contrasts oddly with the apparent public obedience Omar seems to receive from America's public enemy number one, his good friend and alleged relation by marriage, Osama bin Laden, in his last television interview. The 1998 interview to the Doha-based Al Jazeera Arabic TV station, is being re-run by the British media and bin Laden is quoted to say that he has always respected the restrictions placed on him by the "head of believers", Omar, who became only the third person to acquire the title Amir ul-Momein (ruler of all believers) in 1998. Lamb adds that Omar's doctors believe the Taliban's supreme spiritual leader brain seizures and mood swings may be on account of shrapnel lodged in his brain when he lost his eye in 1989 during a Russian rocket attack on his village mosque. The doctors lamented that their patient had always refused to undergo a brain scan. Referring to Omar's prescriptions for beards to be of a minimum length and for homosexuals to be crushed to death under walls, his chief doctor, who told his British interlocutor that his outspoken remarks could result in his death, said Omar's 'visions' were "the product of an unstable and manipulative mind, cynically exploiting the fact that the majority of Afghans are illiterate." |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |