3Two giant Buddhas — Bamiyan, Afghanistan

The UNESCO World Heritage site of Bamiyan in Afghanistan was once home to two giant Buddha statues.

All that changed in March 2001, when the Taliban desecrated the site, demolishing the statues in a thunder of artillery fire and explosive charges. Such was the scale of the monolithic carvings that it took weeks for militants to reduce them to two huge piles of fragmented rock.

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