With their teacher absent, 10 students were allowed to leave school early. These were the girls the gunmen saw first, 10 easy targets walking hand-in-hand through the blue metal gate and on to the winding dirt road.
The staccato of machine-gun fire pelted through the stillness. A 13-year-old named Shukria was hit in the arm and the back, and then teetered into the soft brown of an adjacent wheat field. Zarmina, her 12-year-old sister, ran to her side, listening to the wounded girl’s precious breath and trying to help her stand.
But Shukria was too heavy to lift, and the two gunmen, sitting astride a single motorbike, sped closer.
As Zarmina scurried away, the men took a more studied aim at those they already had shot, killing Shukria with bullets to her stomach and heart.
I thought the US should have gone into Afghanistan BEFORE the 9-11 attacks to take out the Taliban. I remember sending a bitter email to the cartoonist Ted Rall, protesting a cartoon he had just published - maybe a week before 9-11 - suggesting that we leave Afghanistan alone to treat "their" women however they saw fit. For some reason I can't find any record of that cartoon anywhere now.
In any case, this is another example of the utter horror wrought by the Supreme Court - which is now EVEN WORSE - when they aided and abetted the Bush coup d'état in the 2000 election. Thanks to Bush, Afghanistan is reverting back to Taliban savagery while we are bogged down in Iraq.