Taliban take Kabul

On September 27, 1996, Taliban fighters entered Kabul after the forces of the government of Burhanuddin Rabbani and his defense minister Ahmad Shah Massoud withdrew from the city. The Taliban seized the former president Mohammad Najibullah, who had been sheltering in a United Nations compound since 1992, and killed him in public. Within days they announced their rule, based on a strict reading of Islamic law, banned girls' schooling and most paid work for women, and imposed harsh punishments.¹²⁴

The Taliban, a movement of religious students, many educated in Pakistan's madrasas, formed around Mullah Mohammed Omar in Kandahar in 1994. They emerged from the chaos that followed the Soviet-Afghan War. After the Soviets left in 1989 and the communist government fell in 1992, Afghanistan's mujahideen groups fought each other for control of Kabul, killing tens of thousands and destroying much of the capital. Many Afghans were tired of warlords and their checkpoints, and the Taliban promised order. They also received support from Pakistan's intelligence service and money from donors in the Gulf.¹²³⁴

By 1998 the Taliban controlled about 90 percent of Afghanistan, although Massoud's Northern Alliance held out in the northeast. Only Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates recognized their Islamic Emirate. They gave shelter to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, which planned the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the US-led invasion that followed removed the Taliban from power that year. The group regrouped, fought a twenty-year insurgency, and retook Kabul on August 15, 2021, after the US withdrawal.¹³⁵