Seven years ago Taliban militias in Afghanistan destroyed the two largest standing Buddha statues in the world. The shrine at Bamiyan was part of our world cultural heritage, and the international public outcry was enormous – but the loss was worst of all for the art and history of Afghanistan.
The Buddhas of Bamiyan: evidence of Afghanistan's pre-Islamic period. The Taliban weren't the first to attack the statues - they had already been ravaged in the 17th century
The Taliban are iconoclasts – the depiction of human forms is considered an act of presumption tantamount to humans placing themselves on equal standing with God, the Creator. The destruction of the statues was also a way of obliterating the insignia of the non-Islamic or pre-Islamic cultural tradition of Afghanistan.
Along with the statues, the Taliban also destroyed almost all of the exhibits in the National Museum in Kabul that stemmed from the country's Buddhist days.
The Bamiyan Valley in 1963
The biggest Buddha of all time
clipped from: www.qantara.de 
