Editor in Chief: Moh. Reza Huwaida Friday, April 19th, 2024

Religious Fundamentalism the Origin of Violence for Taliban

Taliban have continuously been killing the innocent people indiscriminately in Afghanistan. They even have continued their attacks on the people during the Holy month of Ramadan. Religious scholars from their Islamic countries including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Kuwait and Palestine and ICC have condemned the war in Afghanistan and called as illegitimate. However, Taliban have continued violence and killing the innocent people against the call of the Islamic scholars and their commitment to the peace agreement with the US.
In order to understand this trend, we shall review the role of religious fundamentalism and how it justifies the insane acts of the Taliban.
In the 1970s and 1980s, it was commonly assumed that terrorist mass killing and genocide would be counterproductive because such an act would be widely condemned. It was assumed that terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead. This premise was based on the assumption that terrorist behavior is normative, and that if they exceeded certain constraints and employed mass killing and genocide they would completely alienate themselves from the public and possibly provoke swift and harsh retaliation. However, trends in terrorism over the past three decades, have contradicted the conventional thinking that terrorists are averse to mass killing and genocide. It has become increasingly evident that the assumption does not apply to religious terrorist groups. Indeed, since at least the early 1970s analysts have predicted that the first groups even to employ a weapon of mass destruction would be religious sects with a millenarian, messianic, or apocalyptic mindset.
When the conventional terrorist groups and individuals of the early 1970s are compared with terrorists of the early 1990s, a trend can be seen: the emergence of religious fundamentalist and new religious groups espousing the rhetoric of mass-destruction terrorism. In the 1990s, groups motivated by religious imperatives, such as al-Qaida, have grown and proliferated. These groups have a different attitude toward violence--one that is extra normative and seeks to maximize violence against the perceived enemy, essentially anyone who is not a fundamentalist Muslim. Their outlook is one that divides the world simplistically into “them” and “us.” 
Behavior of Taliban as a religious fundamentalist group and a close ally of al-Qaida reveals some general trends relating to the personal attributes of terrorist’s motive toward mass killings. According to some psychologists, the most dangerous terrorist is likely to be the religious terrorist. They explain that, unlike the average political or social terrorist, who has a defined mission that is somewhat measurable in terms of media attention or government reaction, the religious terrorist can justify the most heinous acts “in the name of Allah,” for example.
Increasingly, terrorist groups have been recruiting members with expertise in fields such as communications, computer programming, engineering, finance, and the sciences.
Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Taliban and other terrorist groups recruit highly skilled professionals in the fields of engineering, medicine, chemistry, physics, computer programming, communications, and so forth. Whereas the skills of the elite terrorist commandos of the 1960s and 1970s were often limited to what they learned in training camp, the terrorists of the 1990s and onwards who have carried out major operations have included biologists, chemists, computer specialists, engineers, and physicists.
The leaders of any of these groups could become paranoid, desperate, or simply vengeful enough to order their suicide devotees to employ the belt-bomb technique against the people who are not on their side. Taliban leader could order to attack the people anywhere including the mosques; Whether or not people including women and children would be a logical target of terrorist groups.
Contrary to the commonly assumed idea that terrorist mass killing and genocide would be counterproductive because such an act would be widely condemned. Islamic fundamentalist terrorist groups use mass killing as a tool to gain main support by their partisans. Taliban as a terrorist group has been increasingly using mass killing to achieve its terrorist goals. Taliban’s attacks on civilians including women and children show that they are not committed to peace and purse their terrorist goals by violence. Although, Afghans, the international community and neighboring countries have ruled out the revival of the Emirate in Afghanistan, Taliban have violence in the country to overrun Afghanistan again. Contrary to the US claims that they have achieved all their goals in Afghanistan, Taliban and al-Qaeda will strengthen their cooperation in the country to fight Afghanistan government and attack the US and its allies’ national interests.