fellow veterans from the war in Afghanistan with the intention of opposing U.S. and
Western influence in the Middle East.
In 1994 Saudi Arabia revoked bin Laden’s citizenship because of his extremist con-
nections, and the next year Saudi authorities and the Clinton administration began
pressing the Sudanese government to expel him for the same reason. Bin Laden moved
to Jalalabad in May 1996 along with several dozen supporters and family members.
The following August he issued a fatwa,or decree, calling on Muslims to stage a holy
war, or jihad, against the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of
Islam. Bin Laden moved in 1997 to Kandahar, the home region of the Taliban, and
set up several camps for training and selecting al-Qaida recruits for jihad.
On August 7, 1998, near-simultaneous suicide bombings destroyed the U.S. embassies
in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, killing more than 250 people, most of
them Africans. The Clinton administration immediately accused bin Laden of sponsoring
the attacks, and on August 20 U.S. warships fired dozens of Cruise missiles that destroyed
al-Qaida training camps near the cities of Jalalabad and Khost. Several dozen people died
in the attacks, but bin Laden and his top aides were not at the camps at the time.
Having failed to kill bin Laden, the Clinton administration sought to apply the
same pressure on the Taliban that had worked in Sudan. In November 1999, the
United States sponsored, and the UN Security Council approved, Resolution 1267
freezing the international assets of the Taliban government and barring international
flights by Ariana, the Afghan national airline. A year later, in December 2000, the
Security Council adopted Resolution 1333, imposing additional sanctions against
Afghanistan, including an arms embargo, in an unsuccessful attempt to force the Tali-
ban to hand over bin Laden to the United States. By that time, planning already was
well under way for al-Qaida’s September 11, 2001, attacks, which would lead to the
U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and overthrow of the Taliban the following October
(U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, p. 598).
Following are the English-language texts of three decrees issued by the Taliban gov-
ernment in Kabul, Afghanistan, in November and December 1996, governing per-
sonal and social activities in that country.DOCUMENT
Taliban Decrees
1996[These translations were handed out to reporters in Kabul.]
- Decree announced by the General Presidency of Amr Bil Maruf and Nai Az Munkar
(Religious Police.) Kabul, November 1996.
Women you should not step outside your residence. If you go outside the house
you should not be like women who used to go with fashionable clothes wearing much
cosmetics and appearing in front of every men before the coming of Islam.
AFGHANISTAN 595