Syed Ali was playing on the roof of his mud-brick house when the killers came for Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai last week. Karzai survived the attack on Kabul’s broad parade ground. Ten-year-old Syed Ali, a kilometre away watching his mother cleaning almond shells to supplement the family’s winter fuel, died, with two others, when he was hit by a stray bullet.
Amid the furore of how a plot — apparently known of in advance — could have come so close to killing Karzai, the death of Syed Ali has all but been forgotten. An official from the president’s office came to see the family and said he would come again. When I met the family, they were still waiting for his return.
His mother can barely speak; two days of crying has reduced her voice to a croak. The boy’s uncle tells the story of yet another of the thousands of Afghanistan’s dead — as the sporadic conflict has worsened in the last two years — whose stories are never told. ”He was a clever little boy,” said Syed Jan Agha. ”He wanted to be a doctor when he grew up.”
The family leads us to the tiny flat roof. There are some spilled nutshells; a little stain in the mud. The uncle points to where the bullet flew from, near the small dome of a mosque just visible in the distance. Another uncle, Sadiq Kaka, shows us a video taken on his cellphone. It shows a child with thick dark hair. He seemed almost alive, lying on what looks like a slab. His wound is a little tear, by his right armpit.
When he was not at school, his uncle says, Syed Ali sold matches to support his family, whose staple diet is rice and water. ”We did not even have enough money to pay for the taxi to take him to be graveyard,” he says. ”So we had to borrow money for the funeral. You know, after the Taliban fell, we were promised a bright future. But those who had money benefited and the poor … we are still poor.”
Syed Ali’s father, Kamal, says: ”In the time of the civil war my elder son was also martyred. This was the second son to die.”
The attack on Karzai that killed the child and a follow-up gun battle on Wednesday with suspected Taliban has terrified Kabul. Since the suicide attack on the city’s Serena Hotel in January, in which six people died, ordinary Afghans in this city fear the violence of civil war that they know so well creeping up again. The suggestion by Western officials that the Taliban is crumbling seems premature.
Thousands crowded on to roofs to watch the public retribution that came on Wednesday to a neighbourhood not far from Syed Ali’s home, a steep, rocky slope above the ornate and freshly reconstructed gardens of the Barbur Bagh.
The Afghan government claims that hundreds of armed police and intelligence agents descended on a hideout of Taliban members linked to those who tried to kill Karzai. They faced rocket-propelled grenades fired from the secret tunnels by fighters who finally blew themselves up inside the house.
But the evidence at the scene and the accounts of neighbours of the group ”who came from somewhere else in Afghanistan” belies this version. There is a house but no tunnels, nor evidence of a suicide bombing.
Neighbours said that while those inside shot back at the police, they had no rockets. Indeed, all that can be seen is evidence of guns fired at close quarters at several targets inside a house: at someone hiding behind a large oil drum, and sprayed up against an inside wall. All that is clear is that a woman and a child as well as several ”militants” were shot dead.
None of this brings back Syed Ali. When his mother finally speaks, she has someone to blame — the men of violence who triggered the fighting: ”The people who killed my son were enemies of Afghanistan, and of the people of Afghanistan,” she says.
They sent a bullet for the heart of the president of Afghanistan. But it pierced my son instead. I pray to God to do the same to them.” – guardian.co.uk Â