A powerful bomb blast killed at least 16 people on Friday in Pakistan and most of the victims belonged to a minority Hazara community. Here's how a Hazara family has been coping with pain caused by a similar attack in the past.
A Pakistani volunteer comforts a grief-stricken person from Shia community, mourns over a body of his family member at a mortuary in Quetta, Pakistan, Saturday, April 28, 2018. Gunmen attacked an electronics shop and fatally shot two shopkeepers, both of them minority Hazara Shia, said an area police officer.
As she lamented his loss, Quetta, already shaken by the impact of the suicide bombing, echoed with the cries of grieving Hazara families who had lost their loved ones in the blast. Hazaras, who follow the tenets of Shia Islam, have a longstanding history of being subjected to sectarian violence by the Taliban and other Sunni extremist groups in Balochistan. A report released by the National Commission for Human Rights last year stated that 509 members of the Hazara community were killed and 627 injured in various incidents of terrorism in Quetta from 2013 to 2017.
“Everyone who leaves for work, leaves under the fear that he or she might not return," Mariam says. "Scores of Hazara men and women have left Pakistan for good because employment opportunities [in Pakistan] were extremely limited and the available ones were never safe”. After Mujtaba's death, Mariam and her family changed drastically. Her parents are ageing fast and she struggles to find peace and happiness.
“Someone once told me how he was shot. I chose to forget that. Call it denial, but that’s how I have survived all these years,” she says.
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