Destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas

The Taliban government of Afghanistan dynamited the two monumental Buddhas of Bamiyan, carved into a cliff face in the 6th century CE and standing 55 and 38 meters tall, over several weeks in March 2001, following an edict from leader Mullah Omar ordering the destruction of all statues in the country as idolatrous despite international appeals, including offers from museums to remove and preserve them. The destruction of what had been the tallest standing Buddha statues in the world drew worldwide condemnation and became one of the most widely cited modern examples of deliberate cultural-heritage destruction for ideological reasons, a pattern later repeated by other groups against heritage sites in Iraq and Syria. UNESCO and international partners have since studied and partially conserved the site and its surviving niches, and debate continues over whether and how the statues might ever be reconstructed.