Telegraph

The Taliban chief is mad, says his doctor (Filed: 07/10/2001)

The one-eyed Taliban leader suffers fits and brain seizures that he claims are `visions', a physician who treats him tells Christina Lamb in Quetta. At other times he sits in one of his cars turning the wheel while he makes noises like an engine

MULLAH OMAR, the one-eyed leader of the Taliban currently defying the West, is mentally unstable and suffers fits during which he babbles incomprehensibly, according to one of his personal physicians.

"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," said the doctor who works at a hospital in the mullah's home town of Kandahar.

According to the doctor, who cannot be named for fear that he will be killed, this mental instability is the real reason why the 43-year-old cleric is so reclusive.

Only one photograph exists of the mullah and he is so rarely seen outside the bomb-proof house built for him in Kandahar by Osama bin Laden that most Afghans have no idea what he looks like.

He makes no public speeches and has always refused to meet foreigners. He has never travelled abroad apart from to Pakistan, and has seen little of his own country, only visiting the capital, Kabul, twice. When he does venture out, it is in a convoy of Japanese off-road vehicles with darkened windows and gun-toting bodyguards.

Such a mythical status has grown around the man who holds the fate of Afghanistan in his hands, that he is able to pass off his fits as visions during which he receives instructions for creating a pure Islamic state.

It is after such seizures that he has issued edicts prohibiting kite-flying, football and music, in addition to banning women from working and wearing high heels or shoes that click under their burkhas, the tent-like garments that all Afghan women must wear.

Apart from these fits, the Taliban leader suffers from serious depression, alternating with bouts of childlike behaviour where he sits in the driving seat of one of his cars, turning the wheel while making the noise of an engine.

The disclosures suggests that there is little prospect of the American-led coalition against terrorism being able to enter into any rational negotiation with the man who holds the fate of Afghanistan in his hands.

Mullah Omar has refused to undergo a brain scan. His doctors believe that these mood swings may be a result of shrapnel lodged in his brain when he lost his eye in 1989 during a Russian rocket attack on his mosque in a village just north of Kandahar. According to one of the many legends that surround him, he pulled out the useless eye and threw it on to the floor.

Little else is known about the preacher, the son of landless peasants, who has three wives and seems determined to drag a country, which was already one of the poorest in the world, back into the Middle Ages.

The first that most Afghans heard of Mullah Omar was in 1994 when he and a few other former mujahideen appalled by the way that Afghanistan had descended into chaos and banditry, formed an organisation of Taliban, or Islamic students, who portrayed themselves as a liberation movement.

Funded by businessmen and traders, they swept through southern Afghanistan to capture Kabul in 1995, denying that they wanted anything for themselves beyond re-establishing law and order and restoring rule to traditional leaders.

Once in power, they implemented the strictest interpretation of Sharia law that the world has ever seen, smashing television sets and videos, executing people for adultery, closing all girls' schools and banning all forms of entertainment.

A minimum length of beard was instituted, homosexuals were crushed to death under walls and women were beaten for such offences as wearing white socks.

"These are not visions at all," insisted the cleric's doctor. "They are the product of an unstable but manipulative mind cynically exploiting the fact that the majority of Afghans are illiterate and almost none of them can read the Koran or understand the prayers they are reciting."

Few dare question the man declared Amir-ul-Momnein or Ruler of all Muslims in 1998, only the third person ever to receive such a title. Nothing happens in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan without his approval, and last week he issued orders to shoot anyone suspicious or anti-Taliban.

-- Anonymous, October 07, 2001