The National Museum of Afghanistan is open formerly again and the Taliban, whose members formerly smashed their way through the installation destroying irreplaceable pieces of the country’s public heritage, now guard the structure located in the capital Kabul.
Presently, about 50-100 people visit the gallery each day, some of them Taliban members.
The gallery, which hosts artefacts from the Paleolithic period to the 20th century, restarted just further than a week ago for the first time since the Taliban preemption of Afghanistan inmid-August amid the chaotic pullout of US and NATO colors.
Its director, Mohammad Fahim Rahimi, and his staff have so far been allowed to continue in their positions although they, like numerous of Afghanistan’s civil retainers, haven’t entered hires since August.
Afghanistan has been facing a banking extremity in the wake of the United States indurating billions of bones in Afghan means and transnational fiscal institutions cutting backing for Afghan systems.
Only the security guards have changed, Rahimi said, with Taliban now replacing the police contingent who used to guard the structure and furnishing womanish security guards to check visiting women.
Power cuts are frequent and the gallery’s creator has broken down, leaving numerous of the exhibition apartments plunged into darkness.
On Friday, several Taliban, some with assault rifles swinging from their shoulder, were among callers using the lights of their mobile phones to peer into display cases of ancient pottery and 18th-century munitions.
“ This is from our ancient history, so we came to see it,” said Taliban fighter Mansoor Zulfiqar, a 29- time-old firstly from Khost fiefdom in southeastern Afghanistan who has now been appointed a security guard at the Interior Ministry.
“ I ’m veritably happy,” he said of his first visit to the gallery, marvelling at his country’s public heritage.
Zulfiqar said he’d spent 12 times in Kabul’s notorious Pul-e-Charkhi captivity, Afghanistan’s largest. While there, he said, someone had told him about the gallery and he pictured of the day when the Taliban would rule Afghanistan again and he’d be suitable to visit the gallery.
During its first stint in power during the 1990s, the Taliban ransacked the gallery, smashing priceless statues, especially those it consideredun-Islamic. One of similar artefact, the remnants of a limestone statue believed to be of a king dating from the alternate century, stands at the entrance to the gallery structure, now restored by experts from France and the gallery’s own restoration department.
In 2001, the Taliban destroyed two giant sixth-century Buddha statues sculpted into a precipice- face in Bamiyan in central Afghanistan on orders from Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, a move that met transnational outrage.
So, as the Taliban swept through Afghanistan before this time, taking fiefdom after fiefdom, there were grave enterprises that a analogous fate awaited the country’s artistic heritage, especially anything frompre-Islamic times. So far at least, this has not appeared to be the case.
Saifullah, a 40- time-old Taliban member from Wardak fiefdom and schoolteacher in a religious academy said he believed the 2001 destruction of artefacts in the gallery had been carried out by lower- ranking Taliban members without orders from top- ranking officers.
Traveling the gallery for the first time, Saifullah, who goes by one name, said he’d encourage his scholars, some of whom were now guards at the gallery, to visit the National Museum of Afghanistan.
“ Generations can learn from this, and what we had in the history,” he said. “ We’ve a rich history.”
Maybe Afghanistan’s new government now agrees with the necrology engraved on a shrine outside the gallery structure’s entrance “ A nation stays alive when its culture stays alive.”
