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By 2004, most Taliban leaders in Afghanistan had fled back to Pakistan, where the remnants of the Taliban were hiding. Malkasian argues that the US provided significant momentum to the Taliban by its own missteps, especially by focusing on aggressive counter-terrorism and vengeance for 9/11.
Meanwhile, Taliban leader Mullah Omar reorganized the movement, and in 2003 launched an insurgency against the government and ISAF. Pamphlets by Taliban and other groups turned up strewn in towns and the countryside in early 2003, urging Islamic faithful to rise up against US forces and other foreign soldiers in holy war. [93]
On 25 February, the Taliban claimed responsibility for the deaths of four American military personnel. [20] Two of the other dead were high-ranking US military advisors working inside the Afghan Interior Ministry in Kabul. The Taliban asserted that one of its operatives was assisted by someone to get into the ministry and to the Americans. [21]
"That's one of the reasons why, possibly, he came in there." [274] The city was home to at least one al-Qaeda leader before bin Laden. Operational chief Abu Faraj al-Libi reportedly moved his family to Abbottabad in mid-2003. [275] Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) raided the house in December 2003 but did not find him. [276]
The US government rejected amnesty for Umar or any Taliban leaders. [203] On 7 December, Sherzai's forces seized Kandahar airport and moved into the city. [198] Umar departed Kandahar and disappeared; he may have gone to Zabul, Helmand, or Pakistan. [204] Other Taliban leaders fled to Pakistan through the remote passes of Paktia and Paktika. [204]
But it was a Taliban government that took in al-Qaida's leaders in the mid-1990s and allowed them to plot the 9/11 attacks there, sparking the 20-year U.S.-led war there.
The territorial control of the Taliban (red) and the Northern Alliance (blue) in Afghanistan in 1996. Ahmad Shah Massoud (for the United Front and the Islamic State of Afghanistan), Mullah Mohammad Omar (for the Taliban) and Osama bin Laden together with Ayman al-Zawahiri (for Al-Qaeda and different Arab interests) were the main leaders of the war residing in Afghanistan.
BAMIYAN, Afghanistan — The Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha statues in early 2001 shocked the world and highlighted their hard-line regime, toppled soon after in a U.S.-led invasion.