KABUL: The Taliban have replaced the statue of a Hazara leader declared a national martyr by the former government with a replica of the Qur'an, Bamiyan residents said Thursday — a move they warned could trigger violence.
The original statue depicted Abdul Ali Mazari, a leader of the mostly Shiite minority killed while he was a prisoner of the Taliban during their first stint in power.
The statue was decapitated by a rocket-propelled grenade soon after the Taliban returned to power in August, in an incident residents of the city in central Afghanistan blamed on the hard-line Islamists.
The Taliban’s strict interpretation of Islam forbids the human form to be depicted in paintings and sculpture — and printed photographs in extreme cases.
Many businesses have removed or covered up billboards and posters featuring people since the group’s takeover.
“Yesterday, they completely removed the statue and replaced it with a replica of the Qur'an,” said Abdul Danishyar, a civil society activist in Bamiyan.
“They are trying to wipe out the history from Bamiyan, the people are going to react violently to this,” he told AFP.
Mazari’s statue stood in Bamiyan’s central square, where the Taliban blew up two massive 1,500-year-old statues of Buddha in 2001 — just before the US invasion that ousted them.
The square, named after Mazari, has been renamed “military street,” Danishyar said.
Abdul Ali Shafaq, a Bamiyan provincial council member, told AFP he would talk to Taliban officials and urge them to reverse the move.
“This is a very sensitive issue, it might trigger reactions,” he said.
“People in Bamiyan love Mazari, they were making a new statue to replace the partially destroyed one.”
Mazari, a fiercely anti-Taliban militia leader, was killed in 1995 after being taken prisoner by the Taliban.
They said they shot him after he tried to seize the gun of one of his guards while being transferred aboard a helicopter.
He was officially named a “Martyr for National Unity of Afghanistan” by ousted president Ashraf Ghani in 2016.
The mainly Shiite Hazara community, which makes up about 10 percent of Afghanistan’s nearly 38 million people, has long been persecuted by Sunni extremists, such as the Daesh group, in a country torn by ethnic and religious divisions.
Taliban replace statue of Hazara leader in Bamiyan with Qur'an
https://arab.news/wq335
Taliban replace statue of Hazara leader in Bamiyan with Qur'an
- The original statue depicted Abdul Ali Mazari, a leader of the mostly Shiite minority killed while he was a prisoner of the Taliban during their first stint in power
- The Taliban’s strict interpretation of Islam forbids the human form to be depicted in paintings and sculpture
French court slashes jails term for trio over 2020 teacher beheading
- Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years
PARIS, France: A French court on Monday reduced on appeal the jail sentences of three men convicted over the 2020 terrorist beheading of a teacher who showed a class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by an 18-year-old radical Islamist of Chechen origin in an act that horrified France.
His attacker, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was killed in a shootout with police.
Two friends of Anzorov, French national Naim Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, a Russian of Chechen origin, had their sentences of 16 years in prison reduced to six and seven years respectively by a Paris court of appeal.
Both were accused of having driven Anzorov and helping him to procure weapons before the beheading.
Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years.
His daughter, then aged 13, was not actually in the classroom at the time and during the first trial apologized to the teacher’s family.
The court however left the 15-year term for French-Moroccan Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui untouched.
The quartet were among the seven men and one woman found guilty in 2024 of contributing to the climate of hatred that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.
Paty, who has become a free-speech icon, used the cartoons as part of an ethics class to discuss freedom of expression laws in France.
