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"Stranger" <info@mos.uk> wrote in message
news:QvKdnaUg2a5VzIzcRVn-qQ@comcast.com...
Bin Ladin probably called his friend Bush to thank him for
all the help in growing the movement.
In September 1994 in Afghanistan, a new Islamist faction, the Taliban (Arabic for
"students") led by a 35 year old veteran of the war against the Soviet Union,
"Mullah" Muhammad Omar, rose up to protest the abduction and rape of Afghan women
and female adolescents by warlords who had grown powerful during the war against
Soviet occupation. Within four months the Taliban controlled one third of the
country.
The core of the Taliban was made up of students from madrassas ("religious
schools") in Pakistan many of which were affiliated with the Deobandi sect, a
reformist movement which had sprung up in British ruled India (in the city of
Deoband) and had become known for its anti-British and anti-modernist sentiments.
The Deobandis continue to flourish in Pakistan today. They share some
puritanical leanings with Arabian Wahhabism, and many Deobandi madrassas have
received funding from the Saudi Arabian government helping us understand how an
alliance between the Taliban and the Wahhabist bin Laden group could form. When
Usama bin Laden returned to Afghanistan in 1996, he and his organization al-Qaeda
("The Base") were introduced to the Taliban by Pakistan's intelligence service
(Interservices Intelligence, or ISI) and they began living under Taliban
protection.
On April 4, 1996, Mullah Omar appeared on a rooftop in Kandahar dressed in a
relic known as the "Cloak of the Prophet Muhammad." He was proclaimed Amir
ul-Momineen ("Commander of the Faithful") by the Kandaharis. This marked the
first time the relic had been removed from its shrine in Kandahar in sixty years.
Omar was deliberately imitating the ceremony in which the Caliph Umar had
legitimated his own right to rule Muslims following the death of the Prophet in
the seventh century. Mullah Omar was declaring his claim to rule not just Afghan
Muslims but all Muslims. The gathering ended with a proclamation of jihad against
the rule of Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who had taken over in 1993
following the overthrow of President Najibullah.
On September 26, 1996, Kabul fell to the Taliban. The following day, they lynched
former President Najibullah who had been deposed in 1992 when Kabul had fallen to
the Mujaheddin.
In 1998, the Taliban banned kite flying and television. Home schooling for girls
older than eight years old was also decreed illegal. Women and girls were
forbidden to study, work, receive medical care, or leave their homes (see U.N.
criticism, 1997). Strict application of Islamic law, including amputations and
executions, became the norm.
In August, 1998, the Taliban carried out a massacre of Hazara Shiites in the
region of Mazar e-Sharif. The United Nations estimates that between five and six
thousand people were killed.
In March, 2001, the Taliban, in an expression of their radical iconoclasm,
destroyed two giant statues of the Buddha more than 1,500 years old that had been
carved into cliffs along the old Silk Route in the Bamiyan Valley. Some (i.e.
Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press,
2002), 235) saw this event, along with the arrest of foreign NGOs charged with
Christian proselytizing as signs that Usama bin Laden's influence over the
Taliban had grown to the point where he was dictating policy.
In December, 2001, the Taliban government collapsed in the wake of an American
led campaign to retaliate for the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks on the United States
of September 11.
http://www.nmhschool.org/tthornton/afghanistan.htm
http://www.nmhschool.org/tthornton/gilles_kepel.htm
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