In a brave gesture of defiance against suicide bombers, Afghanistan’s “girl-in-green” today revisited the scene of a Shiite Muslim holy-day massacre that made her image world famous.
Tarana Akbari, now 13, was pictured screaming in horror among piles of bodies moments after a suicide bomber killed 80 people at last year’s Ashura day ceremonies at a Shiite shrine in Kabul.
The image, taken by AFP photographer Massoud Hossaini, was splashed on front pages worldwide and won the Pulitzer
prize this year.
Today, dressed in an identical green satin tunic which she made herself after discarding the bloodstained one she
wore last year, Tarana attended Ashura day ceremonies at the same shrine.
The day before, police announced that they had arrested two Taliban insurgents with suicide vests who planned to
attack the Shiite worshippers.
“I’m not scared,” Tarana told AFP as she sat with her sisters in their spartan home in Old Kabul ahead of the
ceremony. “I know there will be danger but I will go back there anyway.
After the shrine I will go to the graveyard to pray for my brother who died and other members of the family.”
Tarana’s only brother — aged nine — was among many of her relatives killed in last year’s blast, and Tarana and her two sisters were wounded. She was the only one of the children who went back.
Despite her brave words, Tarana wrung her hands anxiously and the mood in her home was more one of preparing to go into battle than attend a religious ceremony.
But her spirits lifted and her shy smile returned with the excitement of dressing up in her new clothes before she
set out hand-in-hand with her father, Ahmad Shah, for the 10-minute walk to the shrine.
It is a place that haunts her nightmares.
“I go back to that place in my dreams. I see my brother and the man (the bomber). I always repeat that scene in my
dreams,” Tarana said.
Security was tight, with many streets blocked off and heavily armed police on rooftops and along the approach roads,and even Tarana was frisked before being allowed into the ceremonies.
Once among the throng of worshippers, including young men whipping their bare backs into a bloody mess in a traditional mourning ritual, Tarana’s step faltered and she and her father stopped in a small sheltered spot.
————————- (AFP)