PARIS: Philippe Flandrin, a frequent visitor to Afghanistan during the last 25 years, and most recently French daily newspaper La Croix’s correspondent in that country, says in his book that Al Qaeda’s destruction of the Afghan past goes way beyond the destruction of two Buddha statues at Bamiyan.

Characterizing Al Qaeda’s action as a “massacre,” Flandrin says in his book “Afghanistan: the Satanic Treasures”, that the dynamiting of the two Bamiyan Buddhas was only the tip of the iceberg of a vast programme to completely rid Afghanistan of all of its cultural heritage.

In a major revelation, Flandrin, who is also a historian, having worked notably with the great French novelist and arts specialist Andre Malraux, says that “more than 2000 of the country’s foremost cultural and historical treasures were also destroyed,” and this, he says, “to cut off the Afghans from their Indo-European roots, and therefore eradicate all traces of their pre-Islamic past.”

“These iconoclastic measures,” which he says worsened over time, were undertaken, “by Al Qaeda with the support of a fringe of the Taliban, who considered the liberalization being undertaken by the regime in the late 1990s as much too timid, and that the opening up of the country might become fatal to the presence of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.”

It’s at that very moment, he notes, “that the decision was taken to systematically destroy all the images (of the Afghan past) and this in violation of the spirit of Holy Quran.”

Before attacking, in a much publicized gesture, the Bamiyan Buddha, Al Qaeda systematically destroyed, he says, a good many other traces of the country’s historical past, indeed virtually emptied the Afghan national museum in Kabul of many of its treasures.

“Luckily,” he notes, “that another 2000 important cultural objects were able to be removed from the museum,” and these apparently surreptitiously with the connivance of French archeologists who were working at the time on helping the country to revive its historical past.

French diplomatic sources say that the treasures — many of them restored by French experts — are being gradually returned to the country.