NP - Mullah Omar Mentally Unstable, Says Doctor

[David Morris]

http://www.paktoday.com/omar7.htm

Monday, October 8, 2001
Mullah Omar Mentally Unstable, Says Doctor

By: Rashmee Z. Ahmed
LONDON: (Times News Network ) 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". But Omar is the main arbiter of Afghanistan's 
destiny, says the paper, quoting his defiant orders last week to shoot 
anyone suspicious or anti-Taliban.




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