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Omar’s spokesman said that decree was in response to reports that foreigners-some of whom could be part of international relief organizations based in Afghanistan-are trying to convert Muslims. The spokesman did not identify any individuals or groups allegedly doing this.

“All countrymen are seriously notified that any Muslim Afghan will be sentenced to death if he accepts Christianity and has converted to this nullified religion or is seen inviting people to Christianity and Judaism as well as propagating and distributing their books,” Omar said in his decree. He also decreed that promoting “wrong beliefs” was a crime punishable by five years in prison.

“As recently as five years ago, prior to the Taliban’s armed takeover of the country, there were reliable estimates of as many as 1,000 Christian converts from Islam in the country, mostly among the educated urban population, who had grown tired of shrill Islamic propaganda and internecine Muslim bloodletting during the prolonged civil war,” writes Mark Albrecht, moderator of the World Evangelical Fellowship’s Religious Liberty E-mail Conference. Non-Muslims, nevertheless, are permitted to practice their faiths. In Kabul are several Sikh and Hindu places of worship, and one Jew is known to live there.

The Taliban has ruled Afghanistan for four years. Its stated goal is building the world’s purist Islamic regime. They have banned women from working, and will not allow girls over age 8 to attend school. Men must wear beards, and women must be covered head to toe. Most entertainment and music, except for religious music, has been banned.

For a recent article titled, “Holy Warriors: Killing for the Glory of God, in a Land Far From Home,” a New York Times reporter interviewed Muham-mad Khaled Mihraban, a Pakistani who moved to Afghanistan. The 26-year-old Islamic zealot says he has killed around 100 people since deciding “to consecrate my life to jihad” while a student of Islamic law. “My goal was not to kill,” he tells the New York Times. “But I had a line to follow, an Islamic ideal. I knew that Muslims needed their own country, a real Islamic country.” He was trained in Afghanistan in the art of mine-planting, bomb-making, “and how to kill someone quietly.”

Anti-Taliban rebels captured Mihraban, who’s now in rebel custody. Were he freed, he tells the New York Times reporter, he would resume his call to jihad. If asked to go to London, Paris or New York and blow up women and children for Islam, without hesitation he says he would do it.

To radical Muslims, “Afghanistan is an inspiration, an essential base of operations, a reservoir of potential suicide bombers and a battle front where crucial ties are forged,” the paper reports. Meanwhile, the country of 24 million remains in the throes of a civil war, a measles epidemic and a three-year-long drought that Global Prayer Digest reports is threatening 3 million lives. To crush the rebel Sunni Muslim ethnic Hazaras, the Taliban is destroying their homes, crops, and irrigation systems and recruiting children under 14 to do it. Landmines leftover from the Soviet invasion still kill and maim them. There is little chance to go to school or earn a living wage.

On July 9, 1998, Radio Kabul announced that violations of the Koranic ban on converting from Islam to another religion would be punished under sharia, Compass Direct reports. Taliban authorities ordered radio listeners to report any conversions among their acquaintances.