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Taliban: Taliban Movement
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The Taliban is a fundamentalist Islamist movement which originated in the southern Pashtun region of Afghanistan. The most influential members, including Mullah Omar, were simple village ulema (Islamic religious scholars, whose education was extremely limited and did not include exposure to most modern thought in the Islamic community). Many of these figures rose to prominence in the chaos after the Afghan-Soviet War, and used local power bases to eventually bootstrap themselves to national prominence:
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The Taliban is a Sunni Islamic fundamentalist movement which effectively ruled most of Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001, when United States forces invaded Afghanistan and overthrew them. It started as the one of the armed Afghan factions funded by the CIA during the Afghan conflict against Soviet Union.[1] The Taliban allowed al-Qaeda (a militant Sunni Islamist organization) use of Afghan territory to plot, train, and conduct terrorist activities across sovereign international borders.
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It was against this background that the Taliban emerged. Former mujahidin who were disillusioned with the chaos that had followed the mujahidin victory became the nucleus of a movement that coalesced around Mullah Mohammad Omar, a former mujahid who had returned to his home village of Singesar in Qandahar province in 1992 where he became the village mullah and head of the local madrasa. The group, many of whom were madrasa students, called themselves taliban, meaning students or seekers of knowlege. Many others who became core members of the group were commanders in other predominantly Pashtun parties, and former Khalqi PDPA members. Their stated aims were to restore stability and enforce (their interpretation of) Islamic law. The Taliban's first military operation has acquired mythic status in Taliban ranks: In early 1994 the Taliban attacked the headquarters of a local commander who had been responsible for numerous rapes, murders and lootings.
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In the languages spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Taliban (... Taleban) means those who study the book (the Qur'an). Sometimes it is translated "God's Students". It is derived from the Arabic word for seeker or student, talib. The word is almost exclusively used to refer to a fundamentalist Islamist movement which ruled the southern, mainly Pashtun, region of Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001. The Taliban fell after the United States and Great Britain, with support from a large coalition of other governments, attacked Afghanistan with the stated intention of removing them from power.
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The Taliban movement was formed in southern Afghanistan in the early 1990s. It was largely comprised of radical Sunni Islamic students, many of who had attended 'madrassas' or religious schools in Pakistan. Members of the Taliban are still overwhelmingly Pashtun, the ethnic group that forms the majority of Afghanistan's diverse population. The pro-Pashtun nature of the movement meant that it attracted considerable support from Pashtun areas of neighboring Pakistan. At times the Taliban has ... included many non-Afghan volunteers from the Arab world, Eurasia, and southeast Asia.
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The Taliban movement was headed by Mullah Mohammed Omar. Beneath Mullah Omar were "a mixture of former small-unit military commanders and Madrasah teachers"[5] and then a rank and file most of whom had studied in Islamic religious schools in Pakistan. The overwhelming majority of Taliban movement were ethnic Pashtuns from southern Afghanistan and western Pakistan, along with a smaller number of volunteers from elsewhere, for example Europe or China. The Taliban received valuable training, supplies and arms from the Pakistani government, particularly the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)[2], and many recruits from Madrasahs for Afghan refugees in Pakistan, primarily ones established by the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam JUI.
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Taliban Movement