Sewing Circles of Herat

Rebound by Sagebrush

The instructions from the commanding officer were clear.'You must become so notorious for bad things that when youcome into an area people will tremble in their sandals. Anyone cando beatings and starve people of food and water. I want your unitto find new ways of torture so terrible that the screams will frighteneven crows from their nests, and if the person survives he will neveragain have a night's sleep.'

I listened in horror. We were sitting at a table in the orchard ofthe Serena Hotel in Quetta in early October and the evenings werejust starting to turn cold. There was a homely scent of apples fromthe trees all around and the sound of water trickling through narrowpebble-filled canals crisscrossing the orchard. Up above, the MilkyWay cut a dusty path through a sky sprinkled with stars. I rememberedlong ago, on a chilly mountaintop in Paktia, a mujahidtelling me that this was the trail left by the Prophet's winged horseBuraq as he galloped towards the heavens.

Sitting at the table with me were Jamil Karzai, the young nephew of an old friend Hamid Karzai, who handed me a letter that I didnot open till later, and three people Jamil had brought to talk to me.All three had been members of the Taliban but it was one in particularwho was holding my attention.

His name was Mullah Khalil Ahmed Hassani and he was a small thinman who seemed anxious to be liked, with the pinched face and restlesshands of one whose darkness hours are constantly haunted. His eyebrowswere unusually highly arched under a gold-embroidered Kandahariskullcap that perched rather than fitted on his head, and as he spokeshadows played in the dark recesses of his face. He looked like a torturevictim. Instead, as a member of the Taliban's feared secret police, forthe previous three and a half years he had been one of the perpetratorscharged with carrying out the commanding officer's instructions.

Aged thirty and married with a wife and a one-year-old babydaughter, he was a graduate in business studies and had been workingas an accountant until he joined the Taliban. Like many in the movement,Khalil had been largely educated in Pakistan where he hadgrown up as a refugee, and two of his elder brothers had died fightingamong the forces of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the most fundamentalistof the seven mujaheddin leaders, in the jihad, or holy war, againstthe Russians. But his family was well off, owning lands and severalhouses in Kandahar to which they returned after the war, while heremained doing a degree at Peshawar University. Although he hadintroduced himself as Mullah Hassani, he explained with a nervouslaugh, 'I became a mullah just by joining the Taliban. I'm not areligious scholar.'

'Like many people, I did not become a Talib by choice,' he continued.'In early 1998 I was working here in Quetta as accountant fora company trading dried fruit, almonds and pistachio nuts when Igot a message that my grandfather, who was eighty-five, had beenarrested by the Taliban in Kandahar and was being badly beaten andwould probably die. They would only release him if we provided amale member of his family as a conscript, so I had to go.'

Many of Khalil's friends had already joined the Taliban. Somebecause their families had been told their lands would be confiscatedif they did not, though a few got round this by paying a bribe of $20a month not to be conscripted, a huge amount in a country wherethe average salary is less than $200 a year. Others had been luredinto its ranks with offers of money and Datsun two-door pick-upswith bumper bars--the vehicle of choice of the Taliban--which wereprovided to the leadership by smugglers and drug-barons in returnfor being able to ply their lucrative trade as Afghanistan became theworld's largest producer of opium1. The deliberate destruction of theirrigation channels by the Russians during their ten-year occupationmeant that poppies were all that would grow in much of the country,and were the main crop in the south-western provinces of Helmand,Zabul and, to a lesser extent, Kandahar. Although the Taliban hadbanned the consumption of narcotics as un-Islamic, and in July 2000had banned cultivation of opium poppies, the trade continued and the country remained one of the world's major trafficking routes,known as the Golden Crescent.

Assigned to the secret police, Khalil patrolled the streets at nightlooking for thieves and signs of subversion. Initially he thought theTaliban were doing an effective job. 'It had been a crazy situationafter the Russians left,' he explained. 'In Kandahar warlords wereselling everything, even stripping the telephone wires, kidnappingyoung girls and boys, robbing people and blocking the roads, andthe Taliban seemed like good people who brought law and order.'

This was something I had heard over and over again. Afghanistanis roughly speaking, split into north and south by the Hindu Kush.To the north are mostly Persian and Turkic peoples, and to the souththe Pashtuns, while Tajiks and Hazaras live in the mountains. By thetime the Taliban emerged in 1994, ethnic and tribal divisions in aland awash with weaponry2 had turned the country into a shiftingpatchwork of fiefdoms run by warlords who switched sides withbewildering frequency.

The predominantly Tajik government of President BurhanuddinRabbani controlled Kabul and the northeast, backed by commanderAhmad Shah Massoud, the famous Lion of the Panjshir, but wasunder siege from the forces of the fundamentalist Gulbuddin Hekmatyarbased to the south, a man who had once stopped an interviewwith me because he could see my ankle. Herat and the three westernmostprovinces were ruled by Ismael Khan, an egocentric mujaheddincommander whose men wore black and white checked scarves, calledhim 'Excellency' and carried pictures of him with flowing black beardon a white horse. Mazar-i-Sharif and the six northern provinceswere governed by the vodka-swilling Uzbek warlord General RashidDostum, who had been on the Soviet payroll during the jihad. Dostum's 20,000-strong Jawzjani militia was so terrifying that they wereknown as galamjam or carpet-thieves, the ultimate Afghan insult.After the collapse of the Communists, he had subsequently alliedwith and betrayed just about every faction and at the time of theemergence of the Taliban had just switched his support from Rabbanito Hekmatyar. In the mountains of central Afghanistan, Hazaras ranthe province of Bamiyan. A shura of bickering commanders in Jalalabadgoverned the three eastern provinces bordering Pakistan.

The worst situation was to the south of the Hindu Kush among Pashtuns,Afghanistan's largest ethnic group, particularly around Kandahar.Gul Agha, the Governor, son of the late Haji Latif, a notorious banditleaderturned mujaheddin commander, was said to have controlled nomore than his office and the stretch of road outside. Small-time warlordsand petty commanders had stripped the city of anything thatcould be sold for scrap and set up their own checkpoints.

Everyone talked of the chains across the roads, five on the mainstreet of Kandahar, fifty just on the two-hour sixty-five-mile stretchbetween Spin Boldak and Kandahar, each manned by different warlordsdemanding money. Businessmen and truckers were paying farmore in bribes to transport things than the value of the goods themselves.Wali Jan, sardar of the Noorzai tribe, and owner of a petrolstation and one of the principal bazaars in Kandahar, whom I metat his marble-floored house in Quetta, told me he had happily givenmoney to Mullah Omar. 'It had been a terrible situation,' heexplained. 'The roads were full of dacoits and we had to pay a fortuneto transport our stuff and our market was full of thieves.'

Then there were the rapes. No one slept safely in their homes asyoung girls and boys were kidnapped and violated, causing manyparents to stop sending them to school. According to Taliban legend,the whole movement was sparked off in the spring of 1994 when acommander paraded on his tank around town a young boy that hehad taken as his bride after a dispute with another commander whohad also wanted to sodomise the boy. Another version was that a commander had abducted two young sisters from the village ofSanghisar where Mullah Omar preached at the small local mosque,taken them to his military camp and repeatedly gang-raped them.Mullah Omar was said to have gathered thirty men and attacked,hanging the commander from the barrel of his own tank.

Later interviews with some of the founding members of the Taliban,as well as villagers from Sanghisar and officers from Pakistan'sInter-Services Intelligence (ISI ), which gave military and financialsupport to the movement, cast doubt on both these versions andmade it clear that it had been planned for some time with activerecruitment going on among madrassa students in Baluchistan. Howeverwar-weary the population and eager for change, it seems inconceivablethat a bunch of illiterate small-town mullahs and religiousstudents could have masterminded the often sophisticated militaryoffensives that saw them capture ninety percent of the country withinfour years, not to mention economic measures such as flooding thecurrency markets of Mazar-i-Sharif with counterfeit Afghani notesto destroy confidence in the local administration. All of this pointedto the involvement of the ISI, which for years had been trying toinstall a sympathetic government in Kabul. General Nasirullah Babar,Interior Minister in the government of Benazir Bhutto who was rulingPakistan at the time the movement emerged, publicly referred to theTaliban as 'our boys'. Whatever the truth there is no doubt thatinitially Mullah Omar and his men were seen as noble figures simplyintent on restoring law and order to the country, then to hand overcontrol to someone else.

'Mullah Omar told me we don't want chairs, you tribal leaderscan have those, we just want food for our men,' said Wali Jan. 'Forthe four days it took them to capture Kandahar our nan shops gaveall the bread they produced to them. We also gave them watermelons.Then they said they wanted to take Herat which was good for us aswe import through Iran and wanted that road cleared so we gavethem money and they captured Herat and again Mullah Omar told me don't worry, we don't want chairs. They also said we don't want taxes, just zakat, the Islamic tax, just 2.5%. But they cheated us forthey took the chairs and then they started taxes, demanding moreand more money.'

Patrolling the streets of Kandahar in his black Taliban turban, MullahKhalil Hassani also felt cheated. Throughout 1998 the leadership beganissuing more and more radical edicts and his duties changed. Insteadof searching for criminals or subversives, the night patrols were taskedwith finding people watching videos, listening to music, playing cardsor chess, or keeping birds, something that had always been popular inKandahar where people would train so-called Judas pigeons to lurebirds from other people's flocks and capture them. Men sportingbeards that did not meet the regulation length of being long enoughto squeeze a fist around it and still have some beard protruding atthe bottom, were to be arrested and beaten, as were any women whodared venture outside the house in squeaky shoes, white shoes, orshoes that clicked. Even owning a kite became a criminal offence.

One of Wali Jan's market stalls was burnt down for selling Malaysiansoap because printed on the green and yellow packets was asilhouette of a woman; another for stocking washing powder with aphotograph of a housewife and children. 'It was a nightmare--thepolice were always confiscating food because they had pictures ofpeople on them,' he recalled. 'We had to close down the photo boothsand video shops, and could no longer sell music, only the TalibanTop Ten.' According to him, the Taliban's favourite singer was aman called Siraji, who intoned monotonous war chants incitingpeople into battle with lyrics such as:

This is our house, the home of lions and tigers
We will beat everyone who attacks us
We are the defenders of our great country.

'They banned everything,' he continued. 'The only entertainmentwas public executions. The only safe activity was sleeping. Once Iasked Mullah Omar what people were supposed to do for enjoymentand he said, 'walk in gardens and look at flowers'. But the funnything is after he took over there were five years of drought andeverything died so there weren't even flowers.'

'Was there a list of forbidden things?' I asked Khalil. 'Not exactlya list,' he replied. 'Most of the things we knew and notices wouldcome round with new ones as well as orders, such as to keep ourturbans straight.' He thought for a while then asked for a sheet ofpaper from my notebook and wrote down the following, adding tothem throughout our conversation as he remembered more. I laterhad it translated.

All men to attend prayers in mosques five times daily.No woman allowed outside the home unless accompanied by a mahram (close male relative such as a father, brother or husband).Women not allowed to buy from male shopkeepers.Women must be covered by burqa.Any woman showing her ankles must be whipped.Women must not talk or shake hands with men.Ban on laughing in public. No stranger should hear a woman's voice.Ban on wearing shoes with heels or that make any noise as no stranger should hear a woman's footsteps.Ban on cosmetics. Any woman with painted nails should have her fingers cut off.No woman allowed to play sports or enter a sports club.Ban on clothes in 'sexually attracting colours', (basically anything other than light blue or mustard).Ban on flared trousers, even under a burqa.Ban on women washing clothes in rivers or any public place.Ban on women appearing on the balconies of their houses. All windows were supposed to be painted so women could not be seen from outside their homes.No one allowed to listen to music.No television or video allowed.No playing of cards.No playing of chess.No flying of kites.No keeping of birds--any bird-keepers to be imprisoned and the birds killed.Men must not shave or trim their beards which should grow long enough to protrude from a fist clasped at the point of the chin.All men to wear Islamic clothes and cap. Shirts with collars banned.Anyone carrying un-Islamic books to be executed.Ban on all pictures in books or houses.All people to have Islamic names.Any street or place bearing a woman's name or any female reference to be changed.All boy students to wear turbans.Any non-Muslim must wear a yellow cloth stitched onto their clothes to differentiate them.All sportsmen to have legs and arms fully covered.All audiences at sporting events to refrain from cheering or clapping but only to chant Allah-o-Akbar.

'Basically any form of pleasure was outlawed,' said Khalil, 'and if wefound people doing any of these things we would beat them withlogs soaked in water like a knife cutting through meat until the roomran with their blood or their spines snapped. We did different things,we would put some of them standing on their heads to sleep, hangothers upside down with their legs tied together, and stretch the armsout of others and nail them to posts. Sometimes when their spineswere broken we would throw bread to them so they would try tocrawl. Then I would write the report to our commanding officer sohe could see how innovative we had been.

'Once in Kandahar Jail, I watched the prison superintendent MullahBurki beat people so harshly that it was impossible to tell afterwardswhether or not they had been wearing clothes and when theydrifted into unconsciousness we put salt on the wounds to makethem scream.'

The state of terror spread by the Taliban was so pervasive that itbegan to seem as if the whole country was spying on each other. 'Aswe drove around at night with our guns, local people would cometo us and say there's someone watching a video in this house or somemen playing cards in that house,' he said. 'I was shocked. We are aland of feuds and I suppose some people were using us to settle oldscores.'

After Kandahar, Khalil was put in charge of secret police cells inthe provincial capitals of Ghazni and then Herat, a once beautifulPersian city in western Afghanistan that had suffered terribly underthe Soviet occupation and had fallen to the Taliban in September1995. It was renowned as a highly-cultured place where women woulddance at weddings and many girls had been in school until the Talibanclosed them all down. Mullah Omar was infuriated when 150 womendared appear on the streets of Herat to protest against the closure ofthe female public bath-houses. Khalil and his men were told to beparticularly cruel to the Heratis who were Persian-speaking and hada large Shia minority, unlike the Pashto-speaking Taliban who were all Sunni Muslims. Speaking in Persian was forbidden and a strictcurfew imposed from 8 p.m. to 7 a.m. Anyone out on the streets inthose hours, even for emergencies such as illness or giving birth, wasarrested. 'Some Taliban had been killed by the ordinary people inHerat,' he explained, 'so we were told to beat them much moreharshly.'

Another group that came in for particularly harsh treatment werethe Hazaras who make up about 19 percent3 of the population andlive mostly in the infertile central Afghanistan highlands of Hazarajatas well as large communities in Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif. PersianspeakingShias with flat Asiatic features, the word 'hazar' in Persianmeans thousands and they were said to be descended from GenghisKhan and his hordes of Mongol warriors who had swept through theregion in 1221-2. Genghis Khan detested cities because they deprivedhis warriors' horses of grazing and he razed them wherever possible,wiping out the ancient cities of Balkh, Herat, Bamiyan and Ghazni,leaving only a single watchtower at Bamiyan, and slaughtering somany of the inhabitants of Balkh that a visitor reported arriving andfinding only dogs.

The Hazaras had grown to expect a rough time from Pashtunrulers. In 1838 Alexander 'Bokhara' Burnes, a young Scot whose bookTravels into Bokhara had been a bestseller, was sent as British emissaryto the court of Dost Mohammed supposedly on a trade mission butin fact part of a network of British agents in Central Asia gatheringintelligence about Russian plans to secure warmwater ports to thesouth which they had coveted since the time of Peter the Great. Inhis subsequent account Cabool, he wrote of the Hazaras as 'oppressed by all the neighbouring nations whom they serve as hewers of woodand drawers of water', adding that 'many are sold into slavery andthere is little doubt that they barter their children for cloth'. Worsewas to come in the 1890s when the British-backed king Abdul Rehmanmassacred thousands and took thousands more to Kabul as slaves.When the Tajiks took power in Kabul, a minority themselves, theytoo did not spare the Hazaras. In 1993 Ahmad Shah Massoud's menswept through the capital's Hazara suburbs, killing an estimated 1000civilians, beheading old men, women and children and stuffing thebodies down wells, cutting off hands and throwing them to dogs,and raping the women.

But the Taliban took this discrimination to new extremes. Notonly did they see them as heretics--at almost five million people theHazara make up Afghanistan's largest Shia community--but theyalso resented the active role of women in Hazara society and the waythey dressed, provocatively as the Taliban saw it, wearing bright fullskirts and boots as well as lots of silver bangles and earrings and notcovering their faces.

In August 1997, having captured Kabul but failed to take Mazar-i-Sharif, Taliban forces blockaded Hazarajat, cutting off all four accessroads in an attempt to starve the one million Hazaras living justbelow the peaks of the Hindu Kush. No notice was taken of outragedprotests from foreign aid organizations such as Oxfam that thesepeople in the provinces of Bamiyan, Ghor, Wardak and Ghazni woulddie because their crops had failed in the continuing drought and theyhad already slaughtered all their animals and eaten all the grass.

Then, after finally capturing Mazar-i-Sharif in August 1998 whenGeneral Dostum fled to Uzbekhistan and several of his commandersswitched sides, the Taliban launched what witnesses described as 'akilling frenzy' in retaliation for the heavy casualties suffered whenthey had tried to take the city the previous year. Driving through thestreets with white Taliban flags flying from their Datsun jeeps andmachine guns mounted on the roofs, they peppered the streets with bullets. One witness described seeing them mow down a group ofwomen on their way to a wedding, a small boy pushing a cart ofbread and an old man grinding wheat. After one day of indiscriminatekilling, they focused on the Hazaras, carrying out a house-to-housesearch for anyone of fighting age in the Hazara areas and shootingthem on the spot, usually in the face or testicles.

The new Governor of Mazar-i-Sharif, Mullah Manon Niazi, whohad distinguished himself as Governor of Kabul by stepping up thenumber of public executions, announced: 'Hazaras are not Muslim,they are Shia. They are kofr (infidel)'. This was taken as official licenceboth to rape and kill. Shia patients were dragged from hospitals andshot and Mullah Niazi forbade their relatives from removing thebodies from the street for five days until wild dogs had eaten them,as Dostum's men had done the same to the Taliban the previousyear. Thousands more were imprisoned in metal shipping containerstwenty to forty feet long that had been used to bring in Cold Wararms supplies, and then were either left to asphyxiate or shifted toprisons in the south.

Some of these containers arrived in Herat where they came underthe guard of Khalil Hassani and his men. Describing what happenedas 'among the worst of so many bad things', he recalled: 'One daywhen I was in Herat several old Russian trucks were brought fromMazar-i-Sharif on the way to Kandahar. They were carrying metalshipping containers inside which were Hazara prisoners. There wereabout 450 of them and they were all women and children--I supposethe men had been killed. It was still summer and the trucks were leftin the square for two days in the baking heat and the children werecrying for food and water but our instructions were to give themnothing and we refused to let them out of the containers for toiletor anything. I can still hear the noise, the desperate banging on the metal and the muffled cries that gradually grew softer. It was morethan 40°C outside and must have been like a furnace inside. The oldand the babies must have been dead.'

Coincidentally, that afternoon before meeting Khalil, I had wanderedaround the suburb of Kirani on the outskirts of Quetta, a labyrinthof mud-walled houses and tiny stores, which is mostly home toHazara refugees. In a small dirt-floored mosque with no roof I cameacross a huddle of about thirty hungry and frightened Hazara womenand children in vividly coloured but very dirty clothes, and a few oldmen. They told me they had travelled twenty days to come to Pakistanby truck then foot, from a village near Bamiyan, the town famousfor the giant Buddhas carved into its mountains, which the Talibanhad blown up earlier in the year in defiance of worldwide protest.Having got all the way to Pakistan, they had discovered they couldnot enter the refugee camps as the borders were officially closed sothey could get no aid and would have to keep moving around or riskbeing picked up by police and dumped back at the border.

'We left because we had nothing to eat,' explained Asma Rosaman,a woman in a bright cerise dress with a red-rose patterned shawl,her three sons and three daughters clutching at her wide skirts. Usuallyrefugees at least manage to bring out a quilt to sleep under anda kettle and pot. These had absolutely nothing with them beyond theclothes on their backs and stories of being forced to watch theirmen-folk burnt alive as the Taliban rampaged through their villages,demolishing their houses, raping women and killing the men.

'My husband was killed when we escaped,' said Asma in a voicetoo tired of tragedy to be emotional. 'The Taliban followed us onhorses. He was carrying our household goods so he was behind andthey shot him. He was a wheat farmer but we had not had wheat fora long time because there was no rain. One lady in the village waspregnant and they locked her in her house and set fire to it with her children screaming. They killed children with steel rods and pluckedout eyes. I saw them dynamite a cave where 200 people had takenshelter. I closed my childrens' mouths so that no one would hearthem. They killed 3000 people in one month.'

This was probably not an exaggeration. The details took a longwhile to come out in the world, only when the first refugees startedto arrive in Pakistan, but testimony collected by human rights organizationssuggests that between four thousand and six thousand peoplewere massacred in Bamiyan after its surrender that August of 1998.

Another woman called Peri Gul with eyes like black olive pitstugged at my arm. 'There were 300 killed in my village,' she said.'They locked my husband in our house and set fire to it and beatme when I tried to run inside. Afterwards I had to beg bread for mythree sons and daughters. Every house was burnt and they sprayedthe fields with chemicals and set fire to them so no one had food.Mostly we just scraped moss from rocks. I even thought about sellingone of my children but who would buy? Nobody had anything.' Iguessed she was in her mid-20s, ten years younger than me, but shelooked old enough to be my mother. Clutching my hand with hercalloused dirt-encrusted fingers, she sobbed, 'We were innocentpeople just trying to survive. First they starved us then they murderedus. Why didn't anyone do anything?'

uch stories were so inhuman sometimes I would just want to snapshut my notebook and run away. There were more than three millionAfghan refugees in Pakistan and it wasn't as if it was just the occasionalindividual with a sad story, it was everyone. I felt like a parasite, suckingup all these tales of tragedy to regurgitate in newsprint for peoplethousands of miles away, and with no tangible advantage for those Iinterviewed. I had no answer to why the world had done nothing.

Back in the 1980s when I had lived in Pakistan before, I hadinterviewed lots of refugees, sometimes spending the night in thecamps. But then the Afghans had only suffered eleven years of war,their men were defeating the Russians, and there was still hope in their eyes. Now they had been through twenty-three years of war;their men were killing each other and their eyes were blank. As Iwatched these Hazara mothers unable to feed their babies, I thoughtof my own well-fed son back home, dressed in a different outfit everyday, a wooden train set taking over the living room, parties with cakeand balloons, holidays in the sun. I couldn't imagine looking intothose trusting blue eyes knowing I had no food for him and no placefor him to sleep. At a store nearby, I bought them a sack of rice,some bread and apples and some blankets, and their gratitude onlyincreased my guilt. It was not enough, it never would be.

In the orchard that evening, we took a break to go and help ourselvesto the barbecue, steaming slices of saji, leg of lamb rotating on anenormous skewer, and for a while we talked of other things. I showedthem the photograph I carry of my husband who has the dark eyesand olive skin of the Moors who once ruled Portugal. 'He looks likean Afghan,' said Khalil approvingly.

By the time the inevitable pot of green tea arrived, there was abitter chill and the orchard had emptied of diners. But Khalil hadmore to tell. Between postings for the secret police, he had spentsome months as a bodyguard for Mullah Omar, the spiritual leaderof the Taliban. He came from the same branch of the Ghilzai tribeand so was trusted.

Holding my teacup in both hands to keep them warm, I askedhim to describe Mullah Omar. One of the most enigmatic thingsabout the Taliban was the reclusiveness of their one-eyed leader. Notonly had he never travelled outside Afghanistan, Mullah Omar hadbarely visited his own country. He had only twice gone to Kabul,preferring to rule from his adopted home of Kandahar though hewas actually born in Tarin Kot in Uruzgan, the mountainous provincenorth of the city. He had never given interviews to western journalists,and he had refused to meet with western diplomats.

No pictures of him hung in government offices. Newspaper articlesabout him were always illustrated by the same blurred photographtaken from television footage of him in Kandahar holding up theSacred Cloak of Prophet Mohammed at a special gathering of Talibanin 1996. At this ceremony, he had himself declared as Amir ul Momineen,Commander of all Islam; it was also the first time the cloakhad been taken out for more than sixty years.

All that was known about Mullah Omar was that until 1994 hehad been a simple village mullah in Sanghisar, a small communityof mud-walled houses an hour's drive north of Kandahar. He wasabout forty, bearded, wore a black turban and had only one eye,having lost the other in a Soviet rocket attack during the jihad in the1980s, supposedly clawing it out of the socket when he realised thathe had been blinded. Even the one eye was sometimes disputed. Afew days earlier a friend of a friend had come to my hotel, whisperingbecause of all the ISI officers in the lobby, that he had a picture ofthe real Mullah Omar. I opened the envelope to see a small blackand white passport photograph of a man with a turban and two eyes.

Khalil was not very enlightening on his appearance. 'He looksnormal, medium height, a bit fat and has an artificial eye which isgreen.' He had more to say on his personality. According to Khalil,Mullah Omar modelled himself on Caliph Umar, a seventh-centuryleader of Islam who had been declared Amir ul Momineen of thepeoples of Arabia and was the second Caliph after the death of theProphet Mohammed. A simple man who owned just one shirt andone mantle, and who ordered his own son killed for immorality,Caliph Umar used to disguise himself in ragged clothes to mingleincognito amongst the common people. In the same way, MullahOmar would go out of his compound at night on his battered oldmotorcycle to find out what his people were saying about him in thebazaars and chai-khanas or tea-houses.

Khalil said that Mullah Omar presented himself as a man of simpletastes but though he berated his cook every day for serving meat when his soldiers in the field had none, he ate it anyway, and heliked listening to war-chants and riding his Arabian horse around hiscompound. In fact Khalil had quickly come to the conclusion thatthe great enigmatic mastermind behind the Taliban was just simpleminded.'Mullah Omar knows only how to write Omar and to signhis

Continues...

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Excerpted from Sewing Circles of Herat by Christina Lamb Copyright © 2004 by Christina Lamb. Excerpted by permission.
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