KABUL — The Taliban fighters arrived with hammers and hatred. What they left behind is laid out on tables at the National Museum of Afghanistan, 18 years later: shattered pieces of ancient Buddha figurines, smashed because they were judged to be against Islam. Museum workers in Kabul have been trying to fit them together again. The workers pick with gloved hands through hundreds of neatly arranged shards labeled “ears,” “hands,” “foreheads” and “eyes.” Sherazuddin Saifi remembers the day the Taliban arrived at the national museum in 2001, a period of cultural rampage in which the world’s largest standing Buddha statues in Bamyan province were dynamited, to global horror. For several days, the Taliban set upon the Kabul museum’s trove of artifacts from Afghanistan’s millennia-old history as a crossroads of cultures: Greek, Persian, Chinese and other. They selected offending items that showed human forms, even early Islamic ones, shattered them with hammers or smashed them against the floor. “We could not prevent them. They were breaking all the locks, entering each room and smashing all items into pieces,” said Saifi, who is part of the restoration team. “It was heartbreaking and horrific … they destroyed their own history.” More than 2,500 statues were shattered, parts of them ground into powder. Restoration work could take a decade, Saifi said, but “we really feel happy after we put these pieces together again” and revive their meaning. The Taliban smashed them into thousands of pieces, many the size of fists or even a coin. Now some of the shattered heads are held together with rubber bands in the workshop, part of a sprawling puzzle that can take days of patient effort to join a single piece to another. _ Cara Anna is an Associated Press writer. _
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