Afghan Students Run Underground Book Club to Keep Dreams Alive

Date: 09 May 2022 - 21:49

News ID: ۱۰۲۳۴۳

KABUL (Al Jazeera) – On May 8 last year, 17-year-old Tahira and her classmate were discussing their plans for the Eid holidays when a powerful bomb went off at their school in Kabul’s Dasht-e-Barchi neighbourhood. She was thrown to the other side of the street by the intensity of the explosion.
Two more explosions followed targeting Sayed ul-Shuhada High School for girls and leaving 90 people dead, most of them female students. “One moment I was talking to my friend. Next, I was lying in a hospital, and all wired up,” Tahira recalls.
Three pieces of shrapnel had struck her legs. “Two of them were removed and one became part of my body,” Tahira, who does not wish to reveal her full name, told Al Jazeera.
No group claimed responsibility for the series of blasts. The neighborhood in Kabul’s western suburb – home to the predominantly Shia Hazara community – had been the target of brutal attacks in recent years, particularly by the Daesh terrorist group. In 2020, 24 people were killed, including newborn babies and their mothers in an attack on a maternity ward. Daesh claimed responsibility for that attack.
Politicians and foreign missions in Afghanistan called it an attack on “education”, but to many of the students, it was an attack on their very identities as young women and Shias.
A year after the bombing the families still are mourning the death of their children, and the students who survived are yet to heal from the trauma.
Tahira, who was in the 11th grade, says the school lacked resources, but there was hope. “We had dreams, and that had made the situation bearable,” she says.
But in the months following the blasts, as United States troops started to withdraw after 20 years of occupation, the security situation worsened. The Taliban armed group retook power in August 2021 after the pullout of the U.S. troops triggered a collapse of the Afghan government led by President Ashraf Ghani.
The violent and chaotic collapse of the West-backed previous government brought an abrupt end to Tahira’s education.
Immediately after coming to power, the Taliban promised women’s rights and freedom of the press. But nine months since the takeover, high schools for girls remain closed and public spaces shrinking for Afghan women as the group has expanded curbs.
On Saturday, Taliban chief Haibatullah Akhunzada ordered women appearing in public to be covered from head to toe, bringing back the memory of the Taliban’s brutal rule between 1996 and 2001.
A series of blasts in recent weeks, particularly targeting Shia Hazaras, has increased the vulnerability of ethnic minorities.
But Tahira and 29 other students from Sayed ul-Shuhada High School remain unwilling to give up on their education despite the unrelenting attacks and renewed Taliban restrictions.
They have worked a way around the Taliban’s ban on girls’ education, by attending an underground book club where students gather to learn, read, and even write their own stories.
The book club, founded by a group of eight civil activists – some of them students, but not all of them – organizes reading sessions every Saturday. They are held in a discreet location in western Kabul to avoid Taliban retribution.
Tareq Qassemi, a co-founder of the club, says the global media focus shifted overnight due to the war in Ukraine.
“Afghanistan is a dead story, but we, the people of Afghanistan, must take ownership,” he said. Qassemi believes girls are the future of the country and must be the narrators of their own stories.