Sectarian violence surges as Western troops leave
Dead friends visit the schoolgirl at night. They return to her dreams as she last saw them: their bodies blasted down the street by the school gates, some with their satchels and clothes aflame.
‘‘They come every night,’’ Rokiya Ahmedi said. ‘‘I see my classmates dead. I see them on fire. I hear the screaming. I wake up screaming, too. I scream for what I see, and I scream because of the fear that men will come to kill me also.’’
No-one can tell the 15-year-old survivor of last month’s bomb attack at the Sayed al-Shuhada high school in west Kabul that it will never be repeated. At least 85 students, most of them girls aged 15 or 16 from the Hazara ethnic minority, died in the atrocity.
As the last few thousand American and Nato troops prepare to leave Afghanistan, attacks on the Hazara community in the Dasht-e-Barchi quarter of Kabul have continued apace as part of a campaign of terror involving femicide as well as sectarian violence.
Since mid-May, at least five bomb attacks have killed scores
of Hazara in the Afghan capital. Most of the victims were young, educated females, including teachers and students, two employees from the Afghan Film Organisation, and a TV anchorwoman.
‘‘We feel as if the Hazara community are under specific attack,’’ said Abul Fazl Rezayee,
27, whose fiancee was murdered on June 12 when the minibus carrying her home from work at the Ministry of Culture and Information was turned into a fireball by a limpet mine that killed four others.
‘‘Our wedding halls are bombed – our schools, civilian vehicles, hospitals.’’
The Hazara are the country’s third-largest ethnic group and are mostly Shia Muslims. They have historically suffered at the hands of larger ethnic groups – thousands died in a series of massacres by the Taliban in 1998.
Earlier this month, Shaharzad Akbar, head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, called on the United Nations to begin an international investigation into the murders of Hazaras, suggesting that the campaign against them may constitute genocide.
Nevertheless, even by Afghan standards, at this critical juncture of the war the fear and trauma of Kabul’s Shia community haunts every conversation.
As much as the sectarian nature of the killings, the terror attacks have targeted educated young women.
Most bereaved mothers were illiterate but had relished the chance to educate their daughters in the two decades that followed the Taliban’s downfall, hoping it would allow them a better future.
Now, with the Taliban on the ascent amid growing chaos in Afghanistan, many fear that the era of girls’ schooling may end.