Word: bamiyan
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...foreigners crossing the border in the next few weeks, its foot-soldiers were pretty unusual hosts before Sept. 11, too. A few months ago, Canadian Gabriel Mandel, 25, and two companions decided to explore Afghanistan to try to view the ruins of the 5th century Buddha statues at Bamiyan that were blown up by the Taliban in a fit of iconoclastic fury in March. They got their wish?and a short but intense lesson in the strangeness of a country governed by the Taliban...
...hired a taxi to take us to Kabul. After two days of inquiries, we learned that fighting around Bamiyan had stopped a month before and we would be the first foreign visitors since the Buddhas were destroyed. Ten hours north in the back of a truck brought us to a stop where a group of Taliban fighters escorted us to a stone-and-mud compound. In each corner stood a militiaman armed with a locally made AK-47 assault rifle and guarding piles of ammunition and missiles loosely stacked against a wall. We sat on the ground and tensely drank...
...sound of morning prayers. Over tea, our hosts struck poses for our camera, demanding we take their picture despite Islam's injunction against representations of living things. Then we climbed into a Toyota pickup mounted with large-caliber machine guns for the ride to Bamiyan. All that remained of the 50-m and 36-m Buddhas, which for a millennium-and-a-half gazed out at armies, merchants and pilgrims, were faint outlines. Our escorts, delighted with their work, shot into the empty cavern where the smaller, supposedly female statue once stood. Then they presented us with the ultimate souvenir...
...never seen before, say Muslim scholars. In a country in which there is no television and only Islamic radio, Omar shows little knowledge of or concern for the outside world. When officials and clerics of the Taliban, under international pressure, debated whether to destroy the 1,500-year-old Bamiyan Buddha statues early this year, Omar is said to have issued the order: Go ahead; it's only breaking stones...
...Taliban's interpretation of Islamic law--which some Islamic scholars believe is a gross distortion--means that women cannot work or attend school and must be covered from head to toe when outside their homes. In March the ancient statues of the giant Buddhas in Bamiyan were blown up as icons of infidels...