Thread by @AfghanHistorian

(1/11) In was in this context of the 1992-1996 civil war between the mujahideen in #Afghanistan that the Taliban Taliban developed & began to take over parts of the country. Afghanistan by this point had been at war for a decade and a half, countless civilians had become refugees

(2/11) or had died, & those still in the country were suffering both because of continued warfare and because of abuses by the warlords. The #Taliban, then, initially positioned themselves as the saviors of Afghanistan, and they said they wanted to protect the Afghan people from

(3/11) the warlords. Their leader (about whom much is still unknown), the one-eyed Mullah Muhammed Omar, mobilized his followers in the early 1990s to “restore peace, disarm the population, enforce Sharia law and defend the integrity and Islamic character of Afghanistan.” They...

(4/11) contrasted themselves with the corruption and brutality of the mujahideen warlords, casting themselves as “a movement for cleansing society,” which appealed to young men who had been born in refugee camps and
educated in Pakistani madrassas (often funded by Saudis) about

(5/11) “the ideal Islamic society." Thus, while Mullah Omar and some of the group's other leaders were veterans of the Soviet-Afghan War, most of the group's rank-and-file were younger. Those who grew up in the refugee camps had little to no experience of life in their own...

(6/11) country prior to the Taliban's move back into Afghanistan from their base in Pakistan in about 1994. The overwhelming majority of these young men & their leaders were Pashtun, Afghanistan's largest ethnic group (who also live in western Pakistan). Ironically, the group’s

(7/11) first act was a response to a warlord kidnapping & raping two teenage girls in Kandahar in 1994 (some accounts state these were boys, or one girl; the accounts are inconsistent on this). The Taliban rescued the girls & hanged the commander from one of his tanks.

(8/11) Mullah Omar later explained, “We were fighting against Muslims who had gone wrong. How could we remain quiet when we could see crimes being committed against women and the poor?” The group gradually took territory from the mujahideen, starting with Kandahar in 1994,

(9/11) eventually seizing the capital city of Kabul - and control of Afghanistan's government - in fall 1996. Despite their claims to be acting to help civilians, it quickly became apparent that the Taliban's plans for women & Afghans in general were far more radical than...

(10/11) anything most people could have imagined at the time, and their regime & version of Islam was a great departure from Afghans' historical experiences.

More on the Taliban's treatment of women and other Afghan citizens tomorrow, and the Clinton Admin's response to that...

(11/11) but my last tweet thread later today will provide a few sources for further reading for those are who interested in this history. - KJS @TheGingerProf

Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons, worldatlas.com (Kabul map), & AP video on Youtube.