In the Afghanistan of the Taliban there are also girls who prepare the selectivity exams and much darker forces determined to prevent them. This Friday morning, a suicide attack at an academy in a Shiite neighborhood of Kabul has caused thirty-three deaths and dozens of injuries, according to sources from the Islamic Emirate.
Shortly before, a hospital had given the figure of twenty-three dead, while the first police report spoke of at least nineteen dead and twenty-seven injured. These are victims of both sexes, mostly women, with an average age of eighteen or nineteen.
All of them were carrying out an examination when a suicide bomber, of affiliation not yet claimed but probably of the self-styled Islamic State, blew up the explosive charge he was carrying.
A resident of Dasht-e-Barchi, a neighborhood in the west of the capital with a Hazara majority, said he had removed, along with others, "about fifteen wounded and nine bodies." "Although there were more," Ghulm Sadiq said, "under the tables and chairs in the classroom."
The crashed college preparatory academy was exceptionally open for exams, although schools are usually closed on Fridays in Afghanistan. The Taliban have condemned the attack on a civilian target, which according to them "shows the cruelty and immorality of the enemy."
The shadowy Islamic State in Khorasan, made up largely of non-Afghan mercenaries, is behind several of the bloodiest and particularly heartless attacks in Afghanistan in recent years, both before and after the fall of Kabul.
The Shia neighborhood itself and its schools, as well as hospitals, have proven to be one of their preferred targets. In fact, the Taliban forces have sent home many of the relatives who were milling around the neighborhood hospital, for fear of a second attack.
The Hazaras, who were among the Taliban's most rabid enemies, along with the Tajiks, now depend on their protection - as was seen during the last Muharram - against an enemy that is much more sectarian and totally incapable of challenging the Taliban in the battlefield, which is content to disembowel civilians.
