Kabul, Afghanistan — Despite pleas from an outraged world, Afghanistan's ruling Taliban have destroyed most of the ancient relics from their nation's pre-Islamic past, including parts of two towering statues of Buddha, Taliban officials said Saturday.
By Monday exactly one week after the Taliban's reclusive leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, ordered all statues destroyed the task will be complete, Information Minister Quatradullah Jamal told The Associated Press.
"Two-thirds of all the statues in Afghanistan have already been destroyed, the remaining will be destroyed in the next two days," he said.
Using explosives, rockets and heavy artillery, Taliban soldiers blasted away at the two ancient statues of Buddha hewn from a cliff face in central Bamiyan province in the third and fifth centuries.
"The head and legs of the Buddha statues in Bamiyan were destroyed yesterday," Jamal said. "Our soldiers are working hard to demolish their remaining parts. They will come down soon. We are using everything at our disposal to destroy them."
The two Buddhas, 175 and 120 feet tall, were damaged in fighting. Witnesses who have climbed to the top of the Buddha statues say that Russian soldiers carved their names in the statues following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which began in 1979.
Caves at the foot of the statues had become home to families of refugees and a place for soldiers to stash their weapons.
One of the statues is thought to be the world's tallest of a Buddha standing rather than sitting.
The destruction of statues began after Omar ruled that they were idolatrous and against the tenets of Islam. Others argue that Islam does not ban images, only the worship of them.
A special representative of UNESCO met with the Taliban's ambassador to neighboring Pakistan on Saturday to register the world's outrage.
Pierre Lafrance said the destruction of the statues only will worsen the Taliban's already troubled relations with the world community.
But the Taliban's Ambassador Abdul Salam Zaeef said the order could not be reversed. The Taliban say there is no place for statues in an Islamic country.
"It's a decree by ulema (clerics) and the government can't stop its implementation," Zaeef said.
The Taliban religious militia, which rules 95 percent of Afghanistan, including the capital Kabul, adheres to a strict brand of Islamic law. Their interpretation has been questioned by Islamic scholars in other Muslim countries and Islamic institutions.
But the Taliban have been unmoved by international appeals to save the statues even those from fellow Muslim nations, including their closest ally, Pakistan.
An estimated 6,000 statues were housed in the Kabul Museum. It's believed most have been destroyed, although the Taliban have refused to allow anyone inside the war-ravaged building.
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