Bamiyan, Afghanistan — Taliban soldiers on Monday showed off the yawning chasms where two soaring Buddha statues once stood, allowing foreigners a first glimpse of the sandstone rubble that is all that remains of the ancient wonders.
A 1,500-year-old statue that was taller than the Statue of Liberty was a blasted heap of stone. The other figure, once twice as tall as the faces on Mount Rushmore, was also gone except for a few stone folds of its robe.
A Buddha monument in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, is shown in a 1977 photo, left, and after it was destroyed by the Taliban. Foreign journalists got their first look at the site Monday.
Gazing down from a dusty plateau overlooking the mountain monuments of Bamiyan, the heavily armed soldiers seemed amused by their visitors' interest and starved for company after months of fighting in the remote province.
They said they were only following the orders of the Taliban's reclusive leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, who last month declared all statues idolatrous and ordered their destruction.
"Step by step, we blew them up," soldier Abdul Raouf said matter-of-factly. "First we blew off the leg of the big one and then we went to the smaller one and blew it up. It took us four days to finish the big statue. He was very strong."
Spent artillery shells, lined up like sentries, stood at the base of the mountain alcove where the tallest statue once stood 170 feet high 20 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty without its base. It was believed to be the world's tallest standing Buddha.
Stairs near the site of the other, a 120-foot Buddha, led to dusty rooms, their walls decorated with empty niches where smaller statues once stood. The mountain face was riddled with small caves, homes to Buddhist monks centuries earlier.
On Monday, the Taliban flew about 20 foreign journalists aboard an aging, Russian-made propeller plane from Kabul, the capital, to Bamiyan in central Afghanistan. It was the first flight by the national airline, Ariana, to the wartorn area in 20 years.
Taliban soldiers armed with rocket launchers and heavy machine guns then took the reporters the first foreigners known to have visited the area since the destruction to a plateau overlooking the statues.
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