He was prevented from taking further action by the local governor and a direct order of Mohammed Omar, although tyres were later burned on the head of the great Buddha.In July 1999, Mullah Mohammed Omar issued a decree in favor of the preservation of the Bamiyan Buddha statues.Monks at the monasteries lived as hermits in small caves carved into the side of the Bamiyan cliffs.Most of these monks embellished their caves with religious statuary and elaborate, brightly colored frescoes.Plans for the construction of the Spring Temple Buddha were announced soon after the blowing up of the Bamiyan Buddhas and China condemned the systematic destruction of the Buddhist heritage of Afghanistan.
They were perhaps the most famous cultural landmarks of the region, and the site was listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site along with the surrounding cultural landscape and archaeological remains of the Bamiyan Valley. and described Bamiyan in the Da Tang Xiyu Ji as a flourishing Buddhist center "with more than ten monasteries and more than a thousand monks".The Taliban supreme leader Mullah Omar explained why he ordered the statues to be destroyed in an interview: I did not want to destroy the Bamiyan Buddha. Had they come for humanitarian work, I would have never ordered the Buddha's destruction.In fact, some foreigners came to me and said they would like to conduct the repair work of the Bamiyan Buddha that had been slightly damaged due to rains. I thought, these callous people have no regard for thousands of living human beings - the Afghans who are dying of hunger, but they are so concerned about non-living objects like the Buddha. Information and Culture Minister Qadratullah Jamal told Associated Press of a decision by 400 religious clerics from across Afghanistan declaring the Buddhist statues against the tenets of Islam.Despite the fact that most Afghans are now Muslim, they too had embraced their past and many were appalled by the destruction. Later, the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, tried to use heavy artillery to destroy the statues.Another attempt to destroy the Bamiyan statues was made by the 18th century Persian king Nader Afshar, directing cannon fire at them.A monumental seated Buddha, similar in style to those at Bamiyan, still exists in the Bingling Temple caves in China's Gansu province.The destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas became a symbol of oppression and a rallying point for the freedom of religious expression.Because Afghanistan's Buddhist population no longer exists, and the statues were no longer worshipped, he added: "The government considers the Bamiyan statues as an example of a potential major source of income for Afghanistan from international visitors.The Taliban states that Bamiyan shall not be destroyed but protected." However, Afghanistan's radical clerics began a campaign to crack down on "un-Islamic" segments of Afghan society.The two most prominent statues were the giant standing sculptures of Buddhas Vairocana and Sakyamuni, identified by the different mudras performed.The Buddha popularly called "Solsol" measured 53 meters tall, and "Shahmama" 35 meters—the niches in which the figures stood are 58 and 38 meters respectively from bottom to top. Since then the Spring Temple Buddha has been built in China, and at 128 m (420 ft) it is the tallest statue in the world.