Dreams of Hazara children snuffed out in attack on school

Last month's triple bombing of a school by Islamic State militants was gut-wrenching for Afghanistan’s Hazaras, even after so many attacks against them over the years

KABUL, Afghanistan -- 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. 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.