Experts trying to restore Afghanistan’s Buddhist treasures say it is like working on a 1,500-year-old puzzle. In 2001, the Taliban destroyed Buddhist artifacts, many of which were one thousand years old or more. The artifacts include two huge statues of Buddha in Bamyan province. Many smaller artifacts found at Buddhist religious centers and kept in the national museum of Kabul also faced destruction. After the Taliban government fell in 2001, the museum began repairing the artifacts from the country’s Buddhist history. The U.S.-supported project will try to reassemble thousands of pieces into statues within the next three years. “It is very important (work) because it is actually restoration of our…identity, our past,” said Mohammad Fahim Rahimi. He is the director of the 100-year-old National Museum of Afghanistan. “Buddhism was…here for more than 1,000 years. That’s a very large part of our history,” he added. But since the Soviet invasion of the 1980s, Afghanistan has had nearly 40 years of war and much of the country’s art, artifacts and architecture has been destroyed.