Residents of the town of Bamiyan, in central Afghanistan, said the statue of Abdul Ali Mazari, a Hazara minority politician who was killed while a Taliban prisoner in the 1990s, was partially demolished. In 2001, the latter caused an international outcry by destroying the 1,500-year-old Bamiyan Buddha statues.
“The statue was destroyed last night. They used an explosive, ”a resident told AFP on condition of anonymity, without being able to say with certainty who had committed this act. The head of the statue was unbolted, but the rest was still standing.
A resident, who asked to be identified only as Zara, blamed the Taliban more directly, saying a group of their fighters used a rocket launcher to damage the statue. “The statue is destroyed and the people are sad, but also scared,” she said.
The Hazaras, a persecuted community
The predominantly Shiite Hazara community, which represents between 10 and 20 percent of the 38 million Afghans, has long been persecuted by Sunni extremists in a country torn by ethnic and religious divisions.
She has often been the target of attacks by the Taliban and the jihadist group Islamic State, who consider them to be heretics. In May, in Kabul, more than 80 people, mostly high school students, were killed in a bomb attack on a girls’ school in a neighborhood populated mostly by Hazara Shiites.