KABUL: The Taliban has replaced the statue of a Hazara leader stating the national martyr by former government with the Qur’an replica, resident Bamiyan said Thursday – a movement warned they could trigger violence.
The original statue described Abdul Ali Mazari, a Shiite minority leader killed when he was a Taliban detention during their first task.
The statue was beheaded by a grenade driven by rocket immediately after the Taliban returned to power in August, in the incident of the city population in Afghanistan blamed the hardline Islamists.
The strict interpretation of Taliban Islam prohibits the form of human being described in painting and sculpture – and photos are printed in extreme cases.
Many businesses have removed or covered advertising board and posters featuring people since the group takeover.
“Yesterday, they truly released the statue and replaced it with a replica of the Koran,” said Abdul Danishyar, a civil society activist in Bamiyan.
“They tried to remove the history of Bamiyan, people would react hard for this,” he told AFP.
The Mazari statue stood in the Bamiyan Central Square, where the Taliban blew two Buddhist statues of 1,500 years old in 2001 – just before the US invasion that overthrew them.
The square, named after Mazari, has renamed “Military Street”, said Danyishyar.
Abdul Ali Shafaq, a member of the Bamiyan Provincial Board, told AFP that he would speak with Taliban officials and urged them to reverse the move.
“This is a very sensitive problem, it might trigger a reaction,” he said.
“People at Bamiyan Love Mazari, they make new statues to replace those destroyed partially.” Mazari, a malignant anti-Taliban militia leader, was killed in 1995 after being held by the Taliban.
They said they shot him after he tried to win the gun one of his bodyguards when transferred to the helicopter.
He was officially named “Martyr for Afghan National Association” by expelling the President of Ashraf Ghani in 2016.
The Shiite Hazara Community, which formed around 10 percent of Afghanistan nearly 38 million people, has long been persecuted by Sunni extremists, such as a group of countries Islam, in a country that is torn apart by the ethnic and religious division.