About the 1992 conflict:
Many thousands were killed as a direct result of factional fighting; hundreds or thousands of prisoners and civilians were executed by tribal, ethnic, or religious rivals; and a large number of combatants—and some noncombatants—were killed during the U.S. offensive.
Moreover, tens of thousands died of starvation or of a variety of diseases, many of which in less-troubled times could have been easily treated, and hundreds of thousands were killed or injured by the numerous land mines in the country.
Afghanistan was, by the end of the 20th century, one of the most heavily mined countries in the world, and vast quantities of unexploded ordnance littered the countryside.
The number of Afghan refugees living abroad fluctuated over the years with the fighting and reached a peak of some six million people in the late 1980s.
A transitional government, sponsored by various rebel factions, proclaimed an Islamic republic, but jubilation was short-lived.
President Burhanuddin Rabbani, leader of the Islamic Society, a major mujahideen group, refused to leave office in accordance with the power-sharing arrangement reached by the new government.
Other mujahideen groups, particularly the Islamic Party, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, surrounded Kabul and began to barrage the city with artillery and rockets.
These attacks continued intermittently over the next several years as the countryside outside Kabul slipped into chaos.
Partly as a response, the Taliban, a puritanical Islamic group led by a former mujahideen commander, Mohammad Omar, emerged in the fall of 1994 and systematically seized control of the country, occupying Kabul in 1996. The Taliban—augmented by volunteers from various Islamic extremist groups sheltering in Afghanistan, many of whom were Afghan-Arab holdovers from the earlier conflict—soon controlled all but a small portion of northern Afghanistan, which was held by a loose coalition of mujahideen forces known as the Northern Alliance.
Fighting continued at a stalemate until 2001, when the Taliban refused demands by the U.S. government to extradite Saudi Arabian exile Osama bin Laden, the leader of an Islamic extremist group, Al-Qaeda, which had close ties with the Taliban and was accused of having launched terrorist attacks against the United States, including the group of devastating strikes on September 11.
Subsequently, U.S. special operations forces, allied with Northern Alliance fighters, launched a series of military operations in Afghanistan that drove the Taliban from power by early December.
After a period of transitional interim government, a republic was established in 2004, but the new government struggled well into the 21st century to secure centralized authority over the country against a powerful Taliban insurgency.
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