Editing Taliban (section)

===Early years===
The Taliban originated from Mujahideen fighters who fought against the Soviet Union during the Soviet. What is now the Taliban was founded by Mullah [[Mohammed Omar]] in Kandahar, Afghanistan in 1994. Within months, 15,000 students, often Afghan refugees from religious schools or madrasas in Pakistan, joined the group.

The US government covertly provided violent schoolbooks filled with militant Islamic teachings and jihad and images of weapons and soldiers in an effort to inculcate in children anti-Soviet insurgency and hate for foreigners.<ref>https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/12/08/the-taliban-indoctrinates-kids-with-jihadist-textbooks-paid-for-by-the-u-s/</ref> The Taliban used the American textbooks but scratched out human faces in keeping with strict fundamentalist interpretation. The United States Agency for International Development gave millions of dollars to the University of Nebraska at Omaha in the 1980s to develop and publish the textbooks in local languages.

Early Taliban were motivated by the suffering among the Afghan people, which they believed resulted from power struggles between Afghan groups not adhering to the moral code of Islam; in their religious schools they had been taught a belief in strict Islamic law.

On 3 November 1994, the Taliban, in a surprise attack, conquered Kandahar City. By 4 January 1995, they controlled 12 Afghan provinces.