On September 30, 2022, a suicide bomber attacked the Kaaj Educational Center in the Dasht-e-Barchi area of western Kabul, where hundreds of students had gathered for a practice university entrance exam. More than 50 people were killed, most of them girls and young women, and many more were wounded. In this first-person account, one survivor describes the attack, her fight to recover, and her success in the national entrance exam, only to see the Taliban ban women from university months later.
Editor’s note: This story contains graphic descriptions of violence.
When I regained consciousness, the first thing I saw was blood. My clothes were soaked in it. My body was burning with pain, and for a few moments I didn’t know where I was. The air was thick with the smell of smoke and gunpowder, and faint moans could be heard all around me.
As I opened my eyes wider, I realized I was still in the classroom. Only minutes earlier, it had been full of the sounds of lessons and laughter. Now, it was a scene of devastation. The chairs were broken, the windows shattered, and dust covered everything. With trembling hands, I pulled myself out from under a chair and struggled to my feet. My legs had no strength to hold me, but I tried to keep my balance. When I looked around, my heart sank. Many of my classmates were lying on the floor; some motionless, others moaning in pain.
In the middle of that horrifying scene, my eyes suddenly fell on Zainab. She was lying on the floor a little way from me. I hurried to reach her. I called her name and shook her shoulder. I said, “Zainab … get up … please get up.” But she never got up. Her eyes remained open and her body was still.
The world began spinning around me. With great difficulty, I made my way through the bodies of the wounded and the dead to the classroom door. Then my vision went dark, and I didn’t know what happened after that.
When I opened my eyes again, I was lying on a hospital bed, and a nurse standing over me was giving me a sedative injection to ease some of the pain that was burning through my body to the marrow of my bones. All I knew was that I was alive; I had no news of my friends. Many of the wounded had been brought to Ali Jinnah Hospital. It wasn’t only my body that was wounded that day; our spirits, our minds, and our futures had been targeted, too.
My name is Fereshteh, and I am 22 years old. I was one of the students at the Kaaj Educational Center. As a girl who had worked for years to get into university, I studied late into the night and woke up earlier than everyone else in the morning. My family didn’t have much, but they believed education could change lives. I believed it, too. If I studied, if I became informed, I could change my own life and that of my family and perhaps one day do something for the women of this land.
My dream was to study political science and enter politics, not for power, but to be a voice for the women whose words go unheard in Afghanistan’s traditional, patriarchal society. I thought education was the only path that could bring me closer to my goal.
The suicide attack on the Kaaj Educational Center changed everything. More than 50 of my classmates lost their lives, and dozens more were wounded. I survived, but my life was never the same. For weeks, I was in shock. At night, I had nightmares. During the day, the memories of my classmates’ lifeless faces wouldn’t leave my mind. I asked myself again and again why I had survived while they were gone. With the support of my family and psychotherapy, I gradually returned to something like the days before the attack. I decided not to give up. I went back to my Kankor (university entrance exam) preparation classes, and amid fear and hope, I completed my preparation.
Finally, the day of the exam arrived. When I entered the exam hall, I thought of Zainab, who had wanted to become a doctor, but the suicide attacker had killed Zainab as well as her dreams. I was thinking about the days when we used to talk about our futures when the proctors handed me the exam paper, a paper whose result would determine my future. I finished the exam and counted the moments every day waiting for the result.
The results of the Kankor were announced by the government and I cried when upon hearing I had been accepted into the political science program at Kabul University. I felt that, after all that pain, life was smiling at me again. But that smile faded very quickly.
Soon after I received those results, the Taliban’s Ministry of Higher Education announced that girls were banned from studying at public and private universities until further notice. My dream was destroyed that day. I had been accepted, but I wasn’t allowed to enter the university. The university whose degree I had fought for years to earn had closed its doors to me.
The university gates have been closed for the last three years, not just to me, but to thousands of other girls. This situation has deeply affected my mind and spirit. I have fallen into depression. Sometimes I feel trapped in a dark room with no windows. Even so, I have tried not to lose myself. I have learned English in the hope of finding a way to continue my studies abroad. Every day, I go to a library reserved for girls at a religious school in western Kabul. For me, the library is the only place where I still feel calm, a place where I can forget the reality around me for a few hours.
But the future is still uncertain. The society I live in expects me to set my dreams aside and resign myself to marriage and housework, something I never imagined even in my worst nightmares. Still, I have not given up the fight. I still hope that one day I can sit in a university classroom again, put on a graduation gown, and prove that no explosion, no ban, and no regime can destroy a girl’s dreams forever.
Names have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewees and writer. Shabnam is the pseudonym of a female journalist in Afghanistan.
