https://gandhara.rferl.org/a/bamiyan-buddhas-taliban-target/31555276.html
A video recorded recently in Afghanistan shows Taliban gunmen using the remnants of the Bamiyan Buddhas for target practice.
The video is raising serious concerns about a pledge by the Taliban leadership to protect Afghanistan’s cultural and historical treasures.
Posted on social media, it shows members of the Taliban firing rocket-propelled grenades into one of the niches where giant Buddha statues had stood for more than 1,400 years until the Taliban reduced them to rubble in 2001.
At least seven Taliban gunmen can be seen grouped beside two vehicles during the incident.
From a distance, they can be heard reciting Taliban slogans and laughing as the hidden cameraman films them. Three rocket-propelled grenades are fired during the 37-second video clip.
As the camera pans from the shooters to their target, one rocket-propelled grenade can be seen exploding against the back wall of the niche where the head of a giant Buddha had once been — sending out a cloud of fresh debris.
The video is particularly disconcerting because militants under the command of the Taliban-appointed provincial governor in Bamiyan, Mullah Shireen Akhund, have been tasked with guarding the historic site.
Mullah Shireen Akhund was a member of the Taliban negotiating team in Doha that had promised to protect the site.
He also had been the Taliban insurgency’s intelligence chief under the group’s Kandahar-based Southern Command, led by Mullah Mohammad Yaqoob — the son of the late Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar.
Ahmadullah Wasiq, the deputy head of the Taliban-led government’s cultural commission, says the Taliban leadership in Kabul has ordered that there shall be no further destruction at the site of the Bamiyan Buddhas.
