The Lost Wonder.

On the 11th of September,2001, the Taliban crashed two planes into the WTC, New York, sending tremors down the spine of the world....
The whole world described the event as one of the saddest, in the history of mankind...............
In the shadow of this event, however, the world also lost the memory of one of the greatest monuments in the history of mankind...the symbols of love and amity, serenity and reflections of our past.....THE BUDDHAS OF BAMIAN.
I'm sure most of you did'nt know that:
The Bamian region of Afghanistan was home to the tallest statues of Gautam Buddha in the whole world.......
These statues built by the Indo-European aryans were 180 and 121 ft. tall, and were collectively worshipped by the Indians, the Chinese, the Mongolians, and even the Greeks.....
Also, the Bamian region is home to the most peace loving tribe of Afghanistan. The Hazarat tribe.
It is compulsory in each Hazarat family to educate their children..
I'm not writing this blog to tell you the facts about The Bamian Buddhas...Even Wikipedia can do that...............
I'm writing this, to remind you of this wonderful monument and the beautiful people surrounding it........ALL OF WHOM WERE MERCILESSLY CRUSHED BY THE TALIBAN.

In March 2001, the taliban dynamited the Bamian buddhas for days,.....massacered thousands of innocent Hazarats............................. all because of the whims of a certain man called Mullah Omar, the de-facto head of the Taliban.
He did this, to uphold Islam...and to show that there is only one God.
He said that crushing other religions is the duty of the Islamists and they should be proud of the destruction of the statues.
Even today, the Hazarat people do not get jobs in the cities,cannot move freely, and are treated like dogs.........
I have pasted the Wikipedia pageto the Bamian Buddhas below....i urge you to read about these wonderful creations....

Bamyan lies on the Silk Road, a caravan route linking the markets of China & India with those of Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Until the twelfth century AD, Bamiyan was part of the Indian kingdom of Gandhara. It was the site of several Buddhist and Hindu monasteries, and a thriving center for religion, philosophy, and Indo-Greek art. It was a Buddhist religious site from the second century up to the time of the Islamic invasion in the ninth century.

Monks at the monasteries lived as hermits in small caves carved into the side of the Bamyan cliffs. Many of these monks embellished their caves with religious statuary and elaborate, brightly-colored frescoes.

The two most prominent statues were the giant, standing Buddhas, measuring 55 and 37 metres (180 and 121 feet) high respectively, the largest examples of standing Buddha carvings in the world. They were perhaps the most famous cultural landmarks of the region and the site was listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site along with the surrounding cultural landscape and archaeological remains of the Bamyan Valley. The statues were represented wearing Hellenic tunics, an echo of Alexander the Great's contribution to the Central Asian mix almost a millennium earlier.

The smaller of the two statues was built in AD 507, the larger in 554.^[2] The statues are believed to have been built by the Kushans and Indo-Hephthalites (both eastern Indo-European peoples) at the heyday of their empires. The above mentioned groups were the ancestors of the Hazaras, the most persecuted ethnic group in Afghanistan.^[3] Physical and facial features of the Hazaras are greatly similar to those in the frescoes found in the ancient relics and caves. Furthermore, considering the historical importance of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, unsuccessful claims over the Buddha's heritage have been made by all the ethnic groups in Afghanistan.

A monumental sitting Buddha similar in style to those at Bamiyan still exists in the Bingling Temple caves in China's Gansu province

In March 2001, according to Agence France Presse in Kabul, a decree declared, "Based on the verdict of the clerics and the decision of the Supreme Court of the Islamic Emirate (of Afghanistan) all the statues around Afghanistan must be destroyed. All the statues in the country should be destroyed because these statues have been used as idols and worshipped by people. Only God, the Almighty, deserves to be worshipped, not anyone or anything else."

Information and Culture Minister Qadratullah Jamal told Associated Press of a decision by 400 religious clerics from across Afghanistan declaring the Buddhist statues against the tenets of Islam. "They came out with a consensus that the statues were against Islam," said Jamal.

Dynamiting and destruction, March 2001

Photograph of a statue being dynamited on March 21, 2001

The statues were destroyed by dynamite over several weeks, starting in early March, carried out in different stages. Initially, the statues were fired at for several days using anti-aircraft guns and artillery. This damaged them but did not obliterate them. Then the Taliban placed anti-tank mines at the bottom of the niches, so that when chunks of rock broke off from artillery fire, the statues would fall and be blown up again. In the end, the Taliban tied ropes around some local Hazara men, lowered them down the cliff face, and forced them to place explosives into holes in the Buddhas.^[8]

On March 6, 2001 The Times quoted Mullah Mohammed Omar as stating, "Muslims should be proud of smashing idols. It has given praise to God that we have destroyed them." He had clearly changed his position from being in favor of the statues to being against them. During a March 13 interview for Japan's Mainichi Shimbun, Afghan Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Mutawakel stated that the destruction was anything but a retaliation against the international community for economic sanctions: "We are destroying the Buddha statues in accordance with Islamic law and it is purely a religious issue".
Then Taliban ambassador-at-large, Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, said that the destruction of the statues was carried out by the Head Council of Scholars after a single Swedish monuments expert proposed to restore the statues' heads. Hashimi is reported as saying: "When the Afghani head council asked them to provide the money to feed the children instead of fixing the statues, they refused and said, 'No, the money is just for the statues, not for the children'. Herein, they made the decision to destroy the statues".^[10]