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. slotxo xo Poetry that she liked — sometimes a single line, sometimes long verses. Her drawings, like one of a delicate pink rose. Her attempts at calligraphy in swooping Persian letters.
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. “She took this notebook everywhere with her,” her father Abdullah Ahmadi said. “I don't remember seeing her without it. She would even use it to shield her eyes from the sun. Everything she loved is in here.”
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 bodies burning, everyone was screaming,” she said. She saw another student raising her hand calling for help. “I was going to help her, and then the second explosion happened, and I ran and ran,” Zahra said.
Speaking in the mostly empty school, Zahra choked back tears and clutched the hand of a friend, Maryam Ahmadi. “What is our sin? That we are Hazara? That we are Shiites?” said Maryam, who is not related to Shukriya. “Is our sin that we are studying?”
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.