Kabul museum restores art shattered by Taliban
(20 Aug 2019) The Taliban fighters arrived at the National Museum of Afghanistan with hammers and hatred.
What they left behind is laid out on tables at the National Museum of Afghanistan 18 years later: shattered pieces of ancient Buddha figurines, smashed because they were judged to be against Islam.
Museum workers in Kabul have been trying to fit them together again as a nervous country waits for the Taliban and the US to reach a deal on ending America's longest war.
The agreement is expected to lead to intra-Afghan talks in which the extremist group would play a role in shaping Afghanistan's future.
As the workers pick with gloved hands through neatly arranged shards labeled ears, hands, foreheads, eyes, the uncertainty that grips Afghanistan feels especially fragile.
Few details have emerged from several rounds of US-Taliban negotiations held over the past year, and no one knows what a Taliban return to the capital, Kabul, might look like.
The country still sees near-daily attacks not only by the long-established Taliban, who now control about half of Afghanistan, but also from a brutal local affiliate of the Islamic State group.
The Taliban's five-year rule imposed a harsh form of Islamic law, denying girls education, banning music and banishing women to their homes.
It ended shortly after the US-led invasion following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, as the Taliban had harboured al-Qaida and its leader Osama bin Laden.
Sherazuddin Saifi remembers the day the Taliban arrived at the national museum in 2001, a period of cultural rampage in which the world's largest standing Buddha statues in Bamyan province were dynamited, to global horror.
For several days, the Taliban demanded access to the national museum's rich trove of artefacts from Afghanistan's millennia-old history as a crossroads of cultures: Greek, Persian, Chinese and more.
They set upon offending items that showed human forms, even early Islamic ones, with hammers or dashed them against the floor.
We couldn't do anything, they took all the museum staff out and they took all the items out of the box and smashed them into pieces, says Saifi, part of the restoration team.
More than 2,500 statues were shattered, parts of them ground into powder. Restoration work could take a decade, Saifi said, but we really feel happy after we put these pieces together again and revive their meaning.
Among the objects destroyed were the Hadda figurines, a notable collection of Buddhist sculptures discovered decades ago in eastern Afghanistan near today's city of Jalalabad.
Photographs that remain of the intact figurines, and the shards themselves, hint at delicate curls of hair or lip.
The Taliban smashed them in thousands of pieces, many the size of fists or even a coin. Now some of the shattered heads are held together with rubber bands in the workshop, part of a sprawling puzzle that can take days of patient effort to join a single piece to another.
The Hadda figurines are the museum's most visible sign these days of the years-long recovery from the turmoil in Afghanistan that began even before the Taliban, when warlords fought over Kabul in the wake of a Soviet retreat.
Much of the museum's holdings, thousands of pieces, were looted and the building was shelled, though some treasures were hidden in the presidential palace and elsewhere.
The roof of the room where the Hadda figurines are now being pieced together was destroyed.
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