Waste of a life

Every family has been damaged by the nearly continuous war in Afghanistan for decades. Mahbooba Farid Karimi writes about a young man killed in July by a suicide bomber in Kabul.
Years of war in Afghanistan have killed an estimated one and a half million people. There may be only a few families who have not lost a brother or father, sister or mother in the violence.
Ahmad Sayar was killed in Golayee Dawakhana in the west of Kabul in a suicide attack on a bus at 7 in the morning on July 24 this year. The bombing killed 30 people and injured 50, most of them civilians. The Taliban accepted responsibility.
Sayar who had recently graduated from university and was looking for a job, was among the dead.
Fawzia his 55-year-old aunt cannot stop crying when talking about Sayar’s death nearly six months after the incident. “He was 22 years old, simply standing at a bus stop waiting for a bus when the suicide bomber struck,” she says. She adds that her sister’s son had overcome many difficulties arising out of the family’s poverty to finish school and study in university.
She says her nephew had so many dreams that were cut short by his senseless death.
“It is not only Ahmad Sayar who is a victim of destructive wars in Afghanistan. There are tens of thousands of youth who are victims of the policies of politicians,” says Fawzia’s daughter Fatema. She believes politics – domestic and international – will not allow peace to be restored in the country. “How long will this tyranny continue? How long our youths like Ahmad should go under the earth? What is the fault of our youths? Why should we be killed every day? Our martyred compatriots were not members of any political party, they were just Afghans and they had the right to live in this country according to the laws of this land.”
Some of Sayar’s relatives have gathered in the family home to remember the young man, and rue the waste of a life and education that could have contributed to society. His cousin Fatema repeats a line from a poem that he often quoted. “Waters go and the stones remain.”