Dreams of Hazara children lost in attack on school

Описание: (11 Jun 2021) LEAD IN:
Afghanistan’s minority Hazara community fear that the campaign of violence targeting them will only get worse after the final withdrawal of American and NATO troops this summer.

STORY-LINE:
For the past four years, since she was 14, the notebook was always within her reach.
Shukria Ahmadi titled it “Beautiful Sentences” and put everything in it.
Now the notebook is torn and scorched.
It was with Shukria the day that three bombings in quick succession hit her school in the Afghan capital Kabul.
The May 8 explosions killed nearly 100 people, all of them members of the Hazara ethnic minority and most of them young girls just leaving class.
Shukria has been missing since the blast.
"I don't think her (Shukria's) body was shredded to pieces, because her diary was brought to us from the incident," says her father, Abdullah Ahmadi.
"She is wounded or maybe even seriously wounded, but I am sure that she didn't vanish in the attack," he adds.
The attack on the Syed Al-Shahada School was gut-wrenching for Afghanistan’s Hazaras, even after so many attacks against them over the years.
It showed yet again how Islamic State group militants who hate them for their ethnicity or their religion - they are Shiite Muslim - were willing to kill the most vulnerable among them.
The school, which covers grades 1-12, has boys’ classes in the morning and girls in the afternoon.
The attackers waited until the girls were all crowding out the exits as their day ended.
Zahra Hassani, 13, recounted how she was thrown off her feet by the first explosion.
"I saw a girl who had lost her arm and was yelling for help," she says.
"When I wanted to go and help her, the second explosion happened," the teenager adds.
Speaking in the mostly empty school, Zahra choked back tears and clutched the hand of a friend, Maryam Ahmadi.
"Maybe, our sin is that we are Hazaras," says Maryam, who is not related to Shukria.
Dasht-e-Barchi, the Kabul neighborhood where the school is located, was built by Hazaras’ hopes.
It had long been the main Hazara district in the capital, and after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, impoverished Hazaras poured in from their strongholds in central Afghanistan in search of jobs.
Dasht-e-Barchi swelled into a giant sprawl.
Murals at Syed Al-Shahada school promise students that education and hard work will unlock the future.
“Your dreams are limited only by your imagination,” proclaims one slogan emblazoned large and bright across a wall.
But the explosions erased the dreams of dozens of Hazara children there. Here are a few of them:
Mohammad Amin Hussaini said his 16-year-old daughter Aquila loved him better than anyone.
She would read him poetry and hoped to become a doctor.
Hassina Haideri, 13, was forever in the kitchen helping her mother, says her father, Alidad.
She loved to cook, but she dreamed of becoming a doctor. She sold clothes that she made in a nearby shop to earn extra money for her family.
Hadisa Ahmadi, 16, was a math genius and dreamed of becoming a mathematician, her older sister Fatima said.
Hadisa wove carpets to earn money for her poor family and to pay for additional math tutoring.
At the Syed Al-Shahada School, students who survived cried and held each other. Some were angry.
Maryam says Hazaras have no hope in the government, which she says has done nothing to prevent attacks.
“Only God can have mercy on us," she says. "From others, we expect nothing.”

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