of Mullah Muhammad Umar (b. ca. 1959), the
Taliban government, known as the Islamic Emir-
ate of Afghanistan, became a brutal regime based
on an inflexible code of strict Islamic rulings. It
formed an alliance with al-qaida, the Arab terror-
ist organization led by Usama bin ladin (b. 1957)
and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri (b. 1951), and
it was suspected of complicity in the September
11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.
Taliban rule was effectively ended by a U.S.-led
invasion known as Operation Enduring Freedom
in November 2001.
The Taliban movement developed during the
10-year Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979–
89) and the chaotic civil war that broke out among
Afghan mujahidin warlords when the Soviets were
forced to withdraw. Some five million Afghans
had to flee their country during these troubled
times, most of them going to neighboring Pakistan.
There, a generation of Afghan refugee children
grew up knowing little of the world around them
but conflict and poverty. They were indoctrinated
with radical Islamic ideology in schools founded in
both Afghanistan and Pakistan by the JamiyaatUl
Ulama-i islam (JUI), a powerful Pakistani Islamist
organization with links to the reformist tradition
of deoband. JUI Ulama were Sunnis affiliated with
the hanaFi legal school, but the curriculum in
their madrasas promoted a combination of Wah-
habi conservatism and jihadism, a militant form of
Islam. Wahhabi influence became especially strong
in these schools because the Pakistani government
had allowed them to receive Saudi funding. The
Taliban also obtained military training and combat
experience by joining with older Afghan veterans
in their war against the Soviets.
The youthful, stUdent-based movement won
widespread support among Afghan Pushtuns liv-
ing in Kandahar by offering an Islamic alternative
to the corruption and wanton violence of rival
Afghan militias. Starting in 1994 the Taliban also
began to receive significant support in arms and
cash from the government of Pakistan through its
Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), that
country’s counterpart to the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) of the United States. Pakistan had
long been a major supporter of different Afghan
militias, and at that time it believed that its strate-
gic and commercial interests in the region would
be best served by backing this newly formed
Islamist movement. The Taliban would never have
been able to gain control over most of Afghanistan
without this support. Their regime, however, was
not recognized by most of the world’s nations.
Only Pakistan, saUdi arabia, and the United Arab
Emirates had done so by 1998.
The Taliban government quickly earned inter-
national condemnation for the harsh measures
it took to impose its narrow understanding of
Islam on the country. Allied with the JUI, which
operated madrasas and jihadist training camps,
it persecuted and killed thousands of Hazaras
(Afghan Shiis) and threatened other non-Pushtun
ethnic groups in the country. It prevented Afghan
girls from going to school and Women from work-
ing outside the home, and even required them
to wear burqas whenever they went out, or else
they could be publicly beaten. Women were also
denied adequate medical care. Meanwhile men
were obliged to grow long, untrimmed beards and
attend mosques for prayer. In its anti-Westernism
and antimodernism, it banned television, films,
music, and even kite flying. Violators and oppo-
nents of the regime were subject to harsh Islamic
punishments, including death by stoning. The
violence committed by the government against
its own people was effectively captured in The
Kite Runner, an award-winning novel by Khaled
Hosseini (a film version appeared in 2007), an
Afghan immigrant physician and writer living in
the United States. The world was also horrified
when in 2001 the Taliban destroyed two famed
colossal images of Buddha in Bamyan that had
survived for 15 centuries. The Taliban considered
them to be pagan idols.
When the Taliban came to power in 1996
they cautiously agreed to allow Usama bin Ladin
to establish new bases and training camps in theK (^658) Taliban