{"id":11720,"date":"2018-08-16T15:24:51","date_gmt":"2018-08-16T15:24:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=11720"},"modified":"2018-08-16T15:24:51","modified_gmt":"2018-08-16T15:24:51","slug":"she-went-to-school-to-learn-but-left-in-blood-soaked-clothes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=11720","title":{"rendered":"‘She went to school to learn but left in blood-soaked clothes’"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Ahmad Sharifi stepped out of his class on Wednesday to buy a bottle of water when he heard a loud explosion that “shook the walls” of his school west of the Afghan capital, Kabul.<\/p>\n

The 15-year-old could hear the screams of\u00a0students inside the classrooms.<\/span><\/p>\n

He quickly realised it was an attack.<\/p>\n

“I ran away as fast as I could out of the school when I heard the explosion. I stood outside a few feet away from the school and saw many wounded students running out,” he told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

“I waited outside for my friends but could not find them anywhere.”\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sharifi went back to his classroom after the attack and saw the dead bodies of his fellow students.<\/p>\n

The suicide bomb blast was later claimed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS).<\/p>\n

At least 34 people were killed.<\/p>\n

The attack in the\u00a0<\/span>Shia<\/a>\u00a0Dasht-e-Barchi neighbourhood left dozens more injured, according to Waheed Majrooh, a spokesman for\u00a0<\/span>Afghanistan<\/a>‘s ministry of public health.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was not clear how many students were at the Mawoud Academy\u00a0– which specialises in preparing students for university exams – at the time.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Although Sharifi escaped unhurt, he was taken to hospital after he fainted at the site.<\/p>\n

“Many students died, I could have been one of them,” Sharifi said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Relatives bury victims<\/h2>\n

On Thursday, hundreds of people gathered to bury their loved ones at cemeteries in Kabul, among them Mohammad Yousuf, who laid his sister, 16-year-old Shaziya, to rest.<\/p>\n

“My friends called me yesterday saying there was an attack on the school my sister used to go to. I ran to the site and found my sister in a bad condition. She was soaked in blood,<\/span>” he said.<\/p>\n

“She was rushed to the hospital but did not survive.”<\/p>\n

The Dasht-e-Barchi area is\u00a0densely populated by Afghanistan ethnic minority, Hazaras, a Shia community that has been targeted in the past by similar attacks.<\/p>\n

In one of the biggest episodes of violence against the community, in 2016,\u00a0ISIL’s twin explosions<\/a>\u00a0ripped through a protest by the Shia Hazara minority in Kabul killing at least 80 people and wounding more than 230.<\/span><\/p>\n

“We are directly targeted by fighters because of our ethnicity. This is our only fault,” Yousuf said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Afghanistan has been reeling from a series of attacks in the past week that has left scores of Afghan troops and civilians dead, highlighting Afghanistan’s vulnerability to armed groups which remain capable of carrying out large-scale assaults.<\/p>\n

While Wednesday’s blast was claimed by ISIL, the Taliban has been conducting attacks on security forces across the country, including a five-day assault in a bid to capture the eastern city of Ghazni that left 150 civilians dead.<\/p>\n

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said in March that 3.5 million children are deprived of education and at least 1,000 schools have remained closed across the country.<\/span><\/p>\n

At least 86 have been destroyed by attacks this year alone, according to UN figures.<\/span><\/p>\n

In latest figures released in July, UN Assistance Mission of Afghanistan (UNAMA) reported 1,692 civilians were killed during the first six months of 2018 – the most recorded in the period over the last decade since the agency began documentation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Back at the victims’ funerals, Yusuf said he will not be able to forget the state he found his sister in the school after the attack.<\/p>\n

“She went to school to learn but left in blood-soaked clothes.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ahmad Sharifi stepped out of his class on Wednesday to buy a bottle of water when he heard a loud explosion that “shook the walls” of his school west of the Afghan capital, Kabul. The 15-year-old could hear the screams of\u00a0students inside the classrooms. He quickly realised it was an attack. “I ran away as…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":11721,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11720\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}