Word: bamiyan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When the Taliban were done dynamiting the two colossal stone Buddhas of Bamiyan in central Afghanistan, they partied hard. They danced, hooted and slaughtered a cow. But Syed Mirza Hussain wasn't celebrating. A Hazara Afghan with Mongolian features and a rusty beard, Hussain had been forced by the Taliban to pack explosives around the statues. The Taliban warned that if he refused, he would be shot. It was a threat that Hussain, a Shi'ite Muslim hated by the Sunni Taliban, took seriously. Earlier, a Taliban fighter had gunned down Hussain's two boys like stray dogs crossing...
There are good reasons Nooruddin Turabi is on the U.S.'s list of most wanted Taliban. The one-eyed Justice Minister wrote the regime's oppressive religious edicts and led the destruction of the two giant Buddhas in Bamiyan. He was intimately familiar with al-Qaeda's leadership. So when word got out that this prize fugitive and six other top Taliban officials surrendered to Kandahar's governor last Monday and were promptly released, the Pentagon was angry and confused. But the tale proved to be as hard to nail down as those Taliban leaders...
...ruins of Shahr-i-Gholghola?variously known as the City of Silence, the City of Noise or the Cursed City?tower above the Bamiyan plains of central Afghanistan, a single watchtower left of what, until its destruction in 1222, was a flourishing city on the Silk Route between Europe and China. Antitank mines left by a Soviet garrison in the 1980s deter visitors from exploring the caves and tunnels where the Taliban sheltered from coalition bombing last fall. On the other side of the plateau are sandstone cliffs honeycombed with caves and the empty niches that held the two giant...
...Despite periodic vandalism, theft and iconoclasm, Bamiyan's Buddhas survived for nearly 18 centuries. Genghis Khan did not touch them?he was quite tolerant of other religions. The Shia Muslim Hazara who live in the valley protected them, and adherents of Sufi Islam, a mystical sect with a wide following in Afghanistan, see echoes of Buddhism in their own practices. But last March, Taliban commanders flew in by helicopter. A public meeting was called, and the main speaker, then-Defense Minister Obaidullah Akhund?who reportedly surrendered to the new government last week and was set free?read a decree...
...produces a severely diminishing effect--something like listening to the Nixon Oval Office tapes (though radically different orders of crime are under discussion). The grainy video brings down the image of bin Laden in something of the way that the Taliban blew up the giant statues of Buddha at Bamiyan...