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Destruction of Bamiyan Buddhas: “The Taliban were the executors, but the masterminds were the Arabs and the Pakistanis”

Oct 30, 2006 2:03 pm By Robert Spencer

Now it looks as if the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 in Afghanistan was an act of jihadists from all over. “Bin Laden’s prints seen on ruins of Bamiyan Buddhas,” by Selim Saheb Ettaba for AFP, with thanks to Fjordman:

BAMIYAN, Afghanistan — In a huge cavity dug into the side of a cliff, workers search through the rubble to exhume the remains of the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan.

At the scene of the crime carried out in 2001 all evidence points to Osama Bin Laden as the mastermind. “This is the terrorism of the Taliban,” says Rahim, an official at the work site in front of the empty niche of the biggest of the two statues, one of which stood 55 meters (182 feet) tall and the other 38 meters.

Wearing a hard hat and a mask over his mouth, one of the workers, Rajab, is trying to save the remains of the destruction in which one of his family members played a part. “The Taliban took Ali Reza, one of my relatives, and they suspended him from a cable at the side of the Buddhas. Then they forced him to beat at the statues with an axe and an iron rod,” he says. “They took four or five like him, to punish them for having fought against them.”

He says that there were Arabs, Pakistanis, and Chechens among the Taliban fanatics who oversaw the demolition of the ancient relics – until then the largest standing Buddhist statues in the world – carried out on the orders of the head of the Taliban regime because they were deemed idolatrous.

One of his colleagues, Abdul Ali, adds: “The Taliban were the executors, but the masterminds were the Arabs and the Pakistanis.”

At the nearby village of Sangchaspon, where the government has sent people who once lived in caves dug into the cliff around the Buddhas, two more witnesses give a similar account. “They started with tanks but that did not do much damage so they brought in explosives,” says Mirza Hussein, another of the prisoners that the Taliban brought in to destroy the Buddhas.

“There were Arabs and Pakistanis,” says Hussein, who was present for all 25 days it took to demolish the statues. As he recalls it, the foreigners “came by helicopter.”…

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