Taliban

The story opens in southern Afghanistan around 1994, a region already in turmoil. Soviet forces had withdrawn after occupying the country for most of the 1980s, but the mujahideen factions that had joined forces to drive them out had turned on one another. Life for villagers in Kandahar province was close to unbearable.

In October 1994, a modest band of religious students chose to act. Under the leadership of a village mullah who could neither read nor write and had only one eye, roughly 200 men encircled and seized Spin Boldak, a trading post on the Pakistani frontier. This minor border clash gave birth to a legend that would become the Taliban.