Mullah Omar Killed Tonight?

Fox News Channel reports that it is trying to confirm news it has received from American military sources that Mullah Mohammed "Zoom Zoom" Omar may have pretended to be a car for the last time.

Omar is said to have been in one of two buildings destroyed by American air strikes tonight. The buildings command centers for the Taliban and AlQaeda, and housed offices of Wasa, the Saudi "reilef" agency funneling money to Osama and the Taliban.

The buildings were definitely hit; what is awaited is confirmation that Omar was among the fragmented.

From the Fox News web site:

KABUL, Afghanistan — After receiving information it was being used by senior leaders of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and another alleged terrorist group, the Pentagon ordered airstrikes Tuesday on an Afghan compound southeast of Kandahar, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said.
U.S. officials told Fox News that it was believed Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar may have been in the compound, but said there was no specific intelligence confirming that he was there right before the attack. The officials said in addition to comments made by Omar's associates, the U.S. has its own separate intelligence indicating that Omar has been in the area of Kandahar in recent days.
The information about the target came into U.S. Central Command in Tampa, Fla., while Rumsfeld was visiting Tuesday afternoon.
U.S. F-16 jets and B-1B bombers attacked two targets with precision-guided weapons, military officials said.
Pentagon officials didn't say who may have been in the compound and possibly killed, though Rumsfeld told reporters "It clearly was a leadership area" and he said those targeted were "non-trivial."
"Whoever was there is going to wish they weren't," he said.
Rumsfeld said the compound was thought to hold leaders of the ruling Taliban militia, Usama bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization and Wafa, a Saudi humanitarian aid organization that was among several groups named by the United States as alleged money conduits for bin Laden and his network.
(snip)

The following is from the November 23 edition of the National Post.
Mullah Omar has (had?) an unusual object of his affections, shall we say....

Omar picky about paint, pampered his herd of cows
Taliban leader's builder exposes his private life

Araminta Wordsworth
National Post, with files from The New York Times
Brennan Linsley, The Associated Press

A construction worker who spent two years working on building projects for Mullah Mohammed Omar says the Taliban's reclusive leader spent hours tending to the needs of his four pampered cows while ignoring his eight children, who were dressed in dirty clothes and ran about the compound barefoot.

"Mullah Omar would often go to admire and stroke the cows," which lived in a walled garden behind his house in Kandahar, Mohammed Charef, a native of Kabul, told the French newspaper Le Monde.

"Then he would spend hours watering the grass they would feed on.... He was a savage. It was really strange to see the dirty children and the cows."

During his time in Kandahar, Mr. Charef helped to build eight houses, including Mullah Omar's main residence, which also housed three of his wives, a mosque where the mullah would pray with his friends, and a network of subterranean galleries carved out of the hillside. The building specifications included walls 1.25 metres thick and reinforced roofs.

"The plans had been prepared by military engineers," he said. "The buildings had to be protected against missiles and rockets, and the secret shelters were very sophisticated."

They included offices, bedrooms, bathrooms and a ventilation system. There were three escape routes, each leading to a different exit.

On visits to the construction site, the Taliban leader paid little attention to security, something Mr. Charef found astonishing for a man who "was surrounded by a corps of 200 bodyguards and who only left his compound in a convoy of 10 identical jeeps so no one would know which one he was riding in."

The mullah was a picky client who could not decide what colour paint he wanted and insisted on chandeliers imported from Japan.

"His house had to be repainted five times because he changed his mind about the colour of the walls," said Mr. Charef.

Life in the compound was boring, rather than onerous. The food was bad -- "we were fed on blackened potatoes and the rice was poor" -- and the workers had trouble with Mullah Omar's bodyguard, who considered the Kabul imports "infidels."

The events of Sept. 11 put a sudden end to his work.

"I heard the news some time afterward on the radio, but during the day I noticed Mullah Omar suddenly sent off his family -- and his four cows in the back of a truck -- to a safe place," he said.

"The next day we were told our work was finished and we were given half an hour to pack up and leave. It was the end of my two years' imprisonment by the Taliban."

Most excellent! I'm sharing this with all Freepers thanx!

Figure 1. A feline subject reacts to a photograph of a man with a beard of Type #55G.

Abstract This is a new item in the continuing series of reports on the topic "Feline Reactions to Bearded Men." This report concerns experiments with feline reactions to photographs of men of Beard Type #55G

In the project, cats were exposed to photographs of bearded men. The beards were of various sizes, shapes, and styles. The cats' responses were recorded and analyzed. (For details, see the initial report in the series, "Feline Reactions to Bearded Men," by Maloney et al. and subsequent reports by the same and other teams.)

UPDATE: November 2001

We have begun a new series of experiments in which cats are exposed to bearded men with a beard type (International Beard Classification Type #5G) that was not previously included in the investigations.

Figure 1 is a photograph of the work as it was carried out in our laboratory.

In subsequent updates we will publish our full results and conclusions. This is a preliminary report.

Materials

Five photographs were used in the study. The photographs, reproduced here, display a range of different types of bearded men of Beard Type #55G.

The test subjects were female cats, all between the ages of four and six. 231 cats participated in the study. Six cats died during the study, due to causes unrelated to the bearded men. Twelve cats gave birth while viewing the photographs.

Methods

Each cat was exposed to the photographs. One photograph was shown at a time. Each photograph was visible for a span of twenty seconds. The photographs were presented in the same order to each cat.

While each cat was viewing the photographs, it was held by a laboratory assistant. To ensure that the cats were not influenced by stroking or other unconscious cues from the assistant, the assistant was anesthetized prior to each session. The cats' reactions were assessed for changes in pulse rate, respiration, eye dilation, fur shed rate, and qualitative behavior.

Results

The results are Table 1 are for Subject #4 (see photograph) of this phase of the study. The quantitative results are average values calculated over the entire feline subject population. The qualitative results are broken out by percentages of the subject population.

Table 1

BEARD TYPE #5G, SUBJECT #42

Pulse Rate: +84%

Respiration: +317%

Eye Dilation: +4%

Fur shed rate: 12%

Qualitative Behavior:

38% attacked photograph; hissing; spitting;generally agitated behavior.

29% fled.

33% had no visible response.

Interpretation

Cats do not like men with long beards, especially long dark beards.

Cats are indifferent to men with shorter beards.

Cats are confused and/or disturbed by men with beards that are incomplete (e.g., Bork -- see original report) and to a lesser degree by men whose beards have missing parts (e.g., Crafts -- see original report) or are of International Beard Classification Type #5G.

We caution that these results are still preliminary.

Posted on 11/27/01 6:27 PM Pacific by blam...The Times (UK)

WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 28 2001

Spies lead US bombers to strike

BY ROLAND WATSON AND MARTIN FLETCHER

AMERICAN bombers attacked a Taleban compound near Kandahar after being told that Mullah Muhammad Omar was there last night.

The intelligence was received and the strike ordered while Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, was visiting the military’s central command headquarters in Florida, from where the war is being run. He said: “It clearly was a leadership area. Whoever was there is going to wish they weren’t.”

General Tommy Franks, commander of the US military operation, had earlier disclosed the two areas of Afghanistan where the Pentagon believes Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda and Taleban leaders are hiding: the area around Kandahar where Mullah Omar, the Taleban supreme leader, heads a garrison of around 5,000, and a larger area of mountainous territory in a triangle between Kabul, Jalalabad and Tora Bora.

Mr Rumsfeld had also said that the military were receiving a lot of intelligence on the whereabouts of bin Laden and his cohorts. “There’s no question that people find that the reward money is an incentive and are busily engaged in trying to earn it.”

General Franks went on to say that bin Laden’s foreign supporters holed up in Kandahar were seeking a way out and that the mere presence of a US Marine base near by would add to the pressure on the city.

The general also said that the Pentagon had identified 40 sites in Afganistan where al-Qaeda terrorists may have been developing chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

He said that a “great deal” of chemical samples and laboratory paraphernalia had been found flown to the US for analysis: “If there’s anything there we will find it. We will not leave weapons of mass destruction in this country

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