- guardian.co.uk, Monday 7 February 2000 17.20 GMT
Hijackers seized the jet to demand the release of a dissident opposed to the Taliban regime, a stark reminder of a war that has raged for nearly quarter of a century in Afghanistan. The Ariana Afghan Airlines Boeing 727 was on an internal flight because it is the country's only surviving western jet aircraft after the USA imposed crippling sanctions in response to the Taliban's alleged harbouring of international terrorist Osama bin Laden.
Who are the Taliban?
The Taliban, or students of Islam, were a guerrilla group who sprang up in 1994 from the teeming and squalid refugee camps of Pakistan - around six million Afghans, a third of the population, fled the country after 1979. The movement was fostered by the government in Islamabad which wanted to restore the traditional domination of the powerful Pashtun ethnic group. Deeply committed to the establishment of a rigid theocracy, they claimed to oppose secularism and feudalism with equal passion. They seized power in the south-western city of Kandahar and swiftly attracted mass support among Afghans heartily sick of war. The Taliban swept into the remains of Kabul in 1996 and have since established their sway over some 90 per cent of the country.
So how stable is the state under the Taliban?
Rival groups control other strategic strongholds, while a swathe of land in the north, with an ethnically diverse population, remains under the sway of the Tajik coalition recognised by the UN as the government of Afghanistan. That dangerous deadlock persists, while all of Afghanistan suffers. There is some western outrage about the plight of Afghan women under the brutally mysogynistic Taliban regime, but little taste for providing reconstruction aid to a country destroyed by superpower rivalry.
How did things get this bad?
A landlocked Central Asian country, Afghanistan has an ancient and bloody history of conflict. But no era has been more bloodsoaked than the present one, which has seen the country disintegrate as a coherent entity. War erupted in the late 1970s, after the last Afghan king, Zahir Shah, was ousted by his cousin Daoud, who was in turn assassinated in 1978 by the deeply factionalised communist movement, which seized power in Kabul and the other main cities, but which was never able to pacify the intensely conservative rural majority.
An Islamic jihad, or holy war, erupted in 1979 following a brutal massacre of anti-communists in the western city of Herat. One of the early leaders of the mujahedin - the holy warriors - was Ismail Khan, who witnessed the horrors of Herat and whose release is reportedly being demanded by the Stansted hijackers.
When did Russia get involved?
The rapid spread of the mujahedin movement, and the savage struggle within the Afghan communist movement, led the Soviet Union to launch a disastrous invasion at the end of 1979. For much of the 1980s, tens of thousands of Russian forces waged an often barbaric war against the mujahedin, who were lavishly funded and equipped by the USA, Britain and others, providing military aid throughout the decade worth an estimated £400m a year. By the time the Russians acknowledged defeat in 1989, the Soviet Union itself was on its knees, one million Afghans were dead, and the country was reduced to rubble.
Who took over when the Russians left?
With the mujahedin chronically divided, there was no simple transfer of power. The main Pakistan-based alliance had seven bitterly competing main factions and a host of sub-factions. Another coalition of guerrillas was based in Iran, and there were still more inside Afghanistan. In spring of 1992, the communist regime in Kabul evaporated, when the mujahedin entered the city peacefully enough, held 24 hours of frenzied celebrations and started fighting each other.
For a time Kabul was terrorised by wild Uzbek warriors, before the more orderly Tajik forces led by Ahmed Shah Massoud restored some calm to the city. A fragile sort of administration was established by the leader of Massoud's Jamiat-i-Islami movement, Professor Burhannuddin Rabbani, but from the start it was embroiled in savage fighting with rival ethnic and religious factions.
Useful links
Afghan news
Afghanistan in a nutshell
History timeline
Amnesty International (on Afghan women)
Amnesty International (on human rights)
CIA factbook
