Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
Bibi Hawa with daughters Behishta, 5, left, and Mursal, 7, and a son, Faisal, 6, at home in Kabul. Ms. Hawa lost two daughters, Khorshid, 15, and Parwana, 11, in a suicide bombing on Sept. 8.
KABUL, Afghanistan — These days, Abdul Farhad tries to sleep with the lights on in his bedroom and his eyes wide open, because as soon as he closes them he is back in his shop in central Kabul and it is 11:30 a.m. on the eighth of September.
He is sitting behind the desk in his office, a small room with a floor-to-ceiling plate-glass front wall, with a view he says he will never forget.
The usual street children are clustered in front of his car rental shop, in the heart of the capital's military and diplomatic quarter. Khorshid, 15, dressed, as always, in a brightly colored tunic over prim trousers, is a skateboarding sensation who dreams of winning the girls' world championship one day.
Her younger sister, Parwana, 11, has even bigger dreams, to become a doctor. Somewhere nearby is their big-eyed little sister Mursal, who is 7 and already speaks English well enough to soften the hearts of passing G.I.'s, and separate them from "just one dollar, mister."
With them are their friends Nawab, 17; Mohammad Eesa, 16; Elyas, 15; and Nawal, 17 — all skateboarders and fellow pavement hustlers. This is their territory, and they come here every day after school and on public holidays like the one on Sept. 8, which honored an assassinated anti-Taliban leader. They sell scarves, or stale chewing gum, from sacks that double as school bags, but mostly they beg.
As Mr. Farhad watches idly, a stranger enters the frame with a knapsack on his back. Mr. Farhad reckons he is 15 or 16. The children swarm the stranger, worried he is competition and trying to see what he is carrying.
The knapsack explodes.
Mr. Farhad found himself on the floor behind his desk, his ears ringing. He was bleeding in several places, but not seriously wounded. He gave a prayer of thanks that a salesman had persuaded him to cover the inside of the windows with Mylar, a film that prevents glass from shattering into lethal shards. "Otherwise," he said, "I would have been a dead man for sure."
The children were not as lucky. The suicide bombing, the 55th in Afghanistan this year — there have been two more since — killed four of them, as well as three adults.
Elyas, who had wandered far enough away to save his life, lay in the street, wounded. Looking around at a landscape of blood and bodies, he had a sudden, terrible realization. "None of my friends my age are alive," the boy said. "I'm all alone."
Once again, innocent children were among the victims of the most indiscriminate of weapons. As police and military targets have hardened their defenses since the insurgents first began using large numbers of suicide bombers in 2006, more and more of the victims have been civilian bystanders, almost always including children. Afghanistan has one of the world's highest population growth rates, and children are thick on the ground in any public place. According to human rights researchers, 865 civilians were killed or wounded in suicide or other bombings in the first eight months of this year, 38 percent of them children.
Mr. Farhad, 24, does not remember the moment of the explosion.
On the floor of his shop on Ariana Road, he marveled that he was not dead. The bomber had been just 10 yards away. "All over the floor in here, there were hands and feet and pieces of flesh," he recalled several days later.
He walked outside to see so many body parts in a scene of such carnage that it was impossible to tell who was who.
His landlord, Latifullah, had been next door, fixing the metal gate in the wall around his home. Now he was dead. Latifullah's widow, who has three young children to support in a society where it is hard for women to find work, was wailing.
"In our society, a woman without a husband or brothers is a dead woman," Mr. Farhad said. "Now she has no one."
Mohammad Sardar, who runs a carpet shop down the street, was on the sidewalk, an arm blown nearly completely off, but Mr. Farhad was able to bandage it crudely and stanch the flow of blood. "He was conscious and I felt he was strong, and if only an ambulance came he might have survived," Mr. Farhad said.
But no ambulance came. Mr. Sardar died in the back of a police car that had been pressed into service to take him to a hospital.
By ROD NORDLAND 17 Sep, 2012
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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/16/world/asia/young-afghan-lives-lost-in-the-fog-of-war.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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