What Is The Taliban?

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The Taliban is a political and religious movement that first began in Afghanistan in the early 1990s. It initially emerged in 1994 when an Afghan commander, Mullah Mohammad Omar, began leading a small group of fighters newly freed from their warlords. When Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan in 1979, many young Afghan boys fled to refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan. During the ten year Soviet-Afghan War, more than two million refugees, mainly those from Afghanistan and Pakistan, found sanctuary in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province. Pakistan, which hoped to establish profitable trade routes with Central Asia, sought a strong Pashtun-dominated government to provide stability. By the mid-1990s, many refugee children were old enough to fight