February 2001, a motorcade of vehicles stopped in front of the museum where the minister of finance, the minister of culture and his adjunct, and the infamous Mollah Khari Faiz ur-Rahamn who slapped the Bodhisattva in the summer of 2001, ordered that the storeroom of the museum be opened. According to a staff member who witnessed the scene, "As they entered the storeroom, they snarled in excitement an started to smash everything while chanting 'Allahu Akbar'" In May 1993, The National Museum was destroyed by several rockets that penetrated the roof, top floor and most of the building doors and windows. Shortly thereafter it was looted where more than four thousand objects deposited in the storerooms of the museum for safe keeping were stolen. Nearby, the Institute of Archaeology was also severely damaged. Philippe Flandrin describes the looting process in which the storerooms of the museum were systematically emptied: Taliban insurgence/occupation Upon the resurgence of Taliban rule from 1996-2001 the ban on most forms of art and cultural expression was immediately implemented. The Taliban's war on art was inspired by the Koran. The Koran forbids the portrayal of living things, whereby drawing or sculpting living things is recognized as a direct affront to the Almighty. Among the initial acts of removal were dragging paintings out of homes, book burnings containing art work, public execution to TV sets and the discontinuation of music. In 1996, at the very beginning of the Taliban's rise to power, the entire card catalog archiving the art at the Afghan National Museum was burned in order to keep the rebels warm. The systematic destruction of museums and their collections, to include film archives were purged to cleanse them of the "unIslamic" depiction of the living and human form. In addition to the bans on tangible and visual art mediums, social and cultural expressions such as kite flying and owning pet birds were similarly forbidden. For women, an edict was issued banning make-up and high heels in the Afghan capital where the Department of Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice was installed to ensure strict compliance. The Ministry administrators regularly beat women who disobeyed these dress-code laws. Even a decade after the end of the Taliban's official regime ended, beauty parlors in Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, do their best to hide go unnoticed by Taliban sympathizers. Destruction of texts and artifacts Through 1992, Taliban attacks and