I am from Bamyan province. I am illiterate. And I am 60 years old. It has been ten years that I have lost my son. Ten years ago. That was in 1379. My son was an ordinary labourer. My life was ok and I was not as needy a person as I am today. He was working. And life was moving on. I married him off. I thought it was better to get him a wife while I was still alive. Twenty days after he got married the Taliban came to this area. In front of my own eyes, while my hand and his hands were tied up, he just said “Oh father. I got a bullet”.

Later I found my son’s dead body lying on the snow. His mother came and asked what happened to him. I told her to come and take a look. His mother came, his sister came, his wife came and they all asked me what had happened to Anwar. I said: “Look what happened to Anwar. Look what they did to Anwar.” They thought that the Taliban had beaten him and that perhaps he was unconscious. I told them that he wasn’t unconscious. He was dead. “Please don’t cry!”

It was around 9am and it was winter. I said “Let’s take him home”. When my wife and I took him home we saw other people were standing in a line, outside a fort. Thirty to forty people were standing there. After each shot, one person was falling onto the snow. I told my wife “Your son is now at home while he was also on the snow for one or two hours. Please don’t cry”. They killed all of them. In front of my own eyes. They killed my son and another forty people, 41 altogether. And I told my family that he was killed like these other people.

That night, the whole night, his mother and wife cried. I told them not to cry but that night only God understood my situation. The God, who created us, can also kill us. I repeatedly asked them not to remove the cloth covering his body but they were doing it anyway. The next day, we took and buried him. His mother, his sister and I dug the grave for him. The three of us went and buried him. Later, a truck full of corpses were brought and buried on the backside of the fort. The massacre continued for three days. When they brought the bodies, they just dumped them. The massacre finished after three days. And then the people had the chance to go, identify and claim their beloved. Some were identified by their faces. Some were identified by their clothes. They were difficult to identify because they were frozen and the bodies were stuck together. Their blood mixed with one another. When they were trying to separate them, the clothes stuck to other people’s bodies. They were stuck together and frozen. They were frozen in different positions. Everyone went and found their beloved and finally buried them.

When all the martyrs were buried, the people fled the area. We spent two months in the mountains. Some time later, my wife died of a heart attack because she was remembering Anwar every single day. Then, my daughter-in-law also left, because I didn’t have any other son to give her. My daughter-in-law went to her father’s house. They left me alone. Today I have eye problems and only during the day can I still recognize people that are close to me. At night I cannot leave the house anymore.