The Taliban formed in 1994 around Kandahar, in southern Afghanistan, among students, the literal meaning of the Pashto word taliban, of Deobandi religious seminaries on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border. The movement emerged out of the disorder that followed the Soviet withdrawal of 1989 and the subsequent civil war among mujahideen factions, presenting itself to a war weary population as a force that could end the banditry and factional fighting of the period by imposing a single, strict reading of Islamic law across the whole country. It expanded quickly, taking Kandahar in 1994 and Kabul in 1996, and by the late 1990s controlled most of Afghan territory outside the northeast, where the Northern Alliance held out.
This first period of rule, from 1996 to 2001, is remembered internationally for measures including severe restrictions on women's work and education, corporal and capital punishment carried out in public, and the demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001 as idolatrous. A United States led coalition removed the Taliban government from power in late 2001 following the September 11 attacks, after which the movement fought a two decade insurgency against the internationally recognized Afghan government and NATO forces. It returned to power in August 2021 as foreign forces completed their withdrawal, and now governs the country as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, a name that asserts religious rather than purely national legitimacy for its rule.