A circle of childhood friends broken with a bomb in Kabul

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/11/circle-childhood-friends-bomb-kabul


Nawab (centre, striped shirt) with a group of the young boys who worked with him on the street. Photograph: Skateistan

Nawab had been crowned the best skateboarder in Afghanistan, a joker and unofficial leader of the unruly gang. Mohammad Esa was perhaps the cleverest of his friends, always studying or lost in dreams of the day he would become a doctor. Khorshid was an uncompromising teenager whose name meant sunshine but whose character was steel, always ready to show the boys she could do anything they could, despite growing up in a country that is not kind to women.


Khorshid. Photograph: Skateistan

They sold scarves and bracelets to the foreign soldiers, journalists, diplomats and aid workers who filtered in and out of Nato's heavily guarded Kabul headquarters.

Customers saw a group of scruffy children who should have been in school, racing to close a deal; but the competing hustlers were a close-knit group of friends who shared earnings as well as jokes, and often skateboarded or studied together when they were not chasing business.

The boys had helped Khorshid's family throw up their modest mud-walled home by night, to avoid police fines for building on public land. On a recent holiday they walked several miles to a reservoir out of town, to swim and picnic, before walking all the way back again to work in the afternoon. In a country splintered by bitter ethnic divisions, they were an unusual mix of Pashtuns and Tajiks.

But on Saturday a teenage boy in a white shalwar kameez walked onto their patch, and when some of the boys told him to leave, an argument broke out. It escalated into shouting, then blows, and then ended abruptly when the stranger pressed a hidden trigger and detonated a suicide bomb, according to 14-year-old Reza, who survived because he had wandered off to buy a snack, watching the dispute from a distance.