from around the world to spare the statues. Mullah Mohammad Omar, leader of the Taliban Islamic militia in Afghanistan, dismissed the international pleas of the art and historical preservation world community with regard to saving the world-renowned Buddhas from imminent destruction. Despite international condemnation, Mullah Omar ordered the ancient Buddhas to be destroyed per the judgment of the clergymen and the ruling of the supreme court of the Islamic Emirate (Taliban). On February 26, 2001, the Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, declared, "these idols have been gods of the infidels" and ordered them destroyed. Explosives, tanks, and anti-aircraft weapons blew apart two colossal images of the Buddha in Bamiyan Province, 230 kilometers (150 miles) from the capital of Kabul. Broken pieces of the statues and fragments of the beautiful paintings that decorated the niches were subsequently offered for sale in the Peshawar bazaar. By early March 2001, the colossi were rubble. Response and resurrection for the Bamiyan Buddhas After the demise of the two colossi in 2001, Dr. Zemaryalai Tarzi, an Afghan archeologist that fled to France upon the Soviet invasion, made the decision to return to Afghanistan and search out an elusive piece of Afghanistan's history, the Sleeping Buddha of Bamiyan. The last time the Sleeping Buddha was seen was approximately 630 CE when it was recorded in the journal of Xuanzang, a Chinese pilgrim who traveled to central Afghanistan in the seventh century CE. Prior to the Soviet invasion in 1979, Professor Tarzi had already spent three decades of study and completed extensive restoration on the standing Buddhas of Bamiyan's. Devastated by the Taliban's indiscriminate destruction of the two standing Buddhas, Dr. Tarzi used the ancient texts from the journal of Xuanzang to locate the suspected area of the ancient Buddhist monastery, housing the sleeping Buddha. Professor Tarzi sought to offer up the discovery and resurrection of the mythological sleeping Buddha of Bamiyan to the Taliban as a response to the terror exacted on the other colossals, affectionately known as the sleeping Buddha's "Brothers". Due to the intricate detail and accuracy of Xuanzang's immaculately preserved 1,400-year-old journal of the Bamiyan Buddhas, Professor Tarzi mapped out the locations for test sites in search for Xuanzang's descriptions of a giant reclining Buddha nearby. (3)(4) After three years of test sites, in the summer of 2008, Professor Tarzi discovered the remains of the 19-meter-long reclining Buddha statue within the foundations