Afghanistan’s Taleban movement and wars
KABUL: The Taleban governed Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001, imposing strict Islamic sharia law before being ousted and launching an insurgency. Here is some background:
Religious students
The Taleban originated among young Afghans who studied in Sunni Muslim schools called madrassas in Pakistan after fleeing Afghanistan during the 1979-1989 Soviet occupation. They are named from talib, the Arabic word for student. In the early 1990s, with Afghanistan in the chaos and corruption of civil war, Taleban grouped in the southern province of Kandahar under the leadership of one-eyed warrior-cleric Mullah Omar. Omar, who led them until his death in 2013, was from the area, a stronghold of the powerful Pashtun ethnic group from which come most Taleban fighters. Haibatullah Akhundzada is now the insurgents’ top leader, while Taleban co-founder Mullah Baradar heads the political wing.
Dramatic rise to power Promising to restore order and justice, the Taleban rose dramatically. They drew substantial support from Pakistan and initially had the tacit approval of the United States. In October 1994 they seized the southern capital of Kandahar, almost without a fight. Equipped with tanks, heavy weapons and the cash to buy the support of local commanders, they steadily moved north, before capturing the capital on September 27, 1996. President Burhanuddin Rabbani had already fled. Taleban dragged former communist president Mohammed Najibullah from the United Nations office where he had been sheltering and hanged him on a public street.
Regime of terror
The Taleban government imposed the strictest interpretations of sharia, establishing religious police for the suppression of “vice”. Music, television and pastimes such as kite-flying were banned. Girls schools were closed; women were prevented from working and forced to wear an all-covering burkha in public. Taleban courts handed out extreme punishments including chopping off the hands of thieves, public executions and stoning to death women accused of adultery. By 1998 they had control of 80 percent of the country but were only recognized as the legal government by Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. In March 2001 they blew up 1,500-year-old giant statues of the Buddha in the central Bamiyan valley, considered anti-Islamic. Mullah Omar was based mostly in Kandahar where he lived in a house reportedly built for him by the chief of the Al-Qaeda jihadist group, Saudi billionaire Osama bin Laden. The Taleban allowed Afghanistan to become a sanctuary for Al-Qaeda, which set up training camps.
Taleban toppled
The September 11, 2001 attacks that killed 3,000 people in New York and Washington were immediately blamed on Al-Qaeda. Accusing the Taleban of refusing to hand over Bin Laden, the United States and its allies launched air strikes on Afghanistan in October. By early December the Taleban government had fallen, its leaders fleeing to their strongholds in the south and east or back across the border into Pakistan’s tribal zone.
Bloody insurgency
At first written off as a spent force, the Taleban rebuilt and re-emerged to lead an insurgency against the new Western-backed government. Making heavy use of improvised bombings and suicide attacks, they labeled as “crusaders” the tens of thousands of foreign troops who deployed into the country as part of a US-dominated NATO force. But the NATO combat mission in December 2014 ended and the bulk of Western forces withdrew. In July 2015 Pakistan hosted the first direct talks between Afghan and Taleban leaders, with support from China and the US, but they collapsed after Mullah Omar’s death was revealed.
The rival Islamic State jihadist group emerged in Afghanistan in 2015, launching its own series of devastating attacks, mainly on Kabul. A UN tally found that 2018 was the deadliest year on record for Afghans, with at least 3,804 civilian deaths caused by the war - including 927 children. Direct talks between the US and the Taleban started last year, with the effort led since September by US special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, a previous ambassador to Afghanistan. — AFP