Historic chronology
Afghanistan:
In 1978 a modernist government, led by the Peoples Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, seized power in Afghanistan. This government began a modernization of the country. This included equality for the sexes and the secularization of society. Fierce opposition, by many conservative and fundamentalist Muslims in the country, led to civil war. In the Soviet Union they were afraid it would escalate into a fundamentalist Muslim revolution like the one in Iran January 1979. If this were to happen it could start a conflict with the millions of Muslim Soviet citizens and as a result destabilize republics with big proportions of Muslims. In 1979 Soviet troops were therefore sent in to support the government. The operation was however not over…show more content… The USA treated it as part of the cold war and started sending extensive aid to the Muslim opposition. The opposition consisted of various rivaling Muslim groups under the common name “Mujahideen ”. Operating under this group was among others al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. By 1986 the Mujahideen received large amounts of weapons, including ground-to-air missiles, and money from USA and China with Pakistan as intermediary. This had a devastating effect on the Soviet troops and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev realized that the war could not be won. In February 1979 all Soviet troops had been withdrawn. The Socialist government was overthrown in 1992 and replacing it was a coalition government formed my Mujahideen leading to chaos and rivalry among the subdivisions of Mujahideen. In the late 1990’s one of the subgroups “the Taliban ” seized almost full control of the country. Internationally the Taliban were very