At least 14 Hazaras (11 men, 3 women) passengers were singled out and executed by Taliban in Ghor province in Afghanistan. Four others...
18 passengers on two minibuses travelling from Ghor to Kabul late Thursday night when they were stopped by 10 masked gunmen in army uniform. Many of them were traveling to celebrate the Eid festival which marks the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
Gul Agha was one of four survivors – two of whom suffered bullet wounds to their chests and arms – who fell down with their fellow passengers and played dead while the killers checked the bodies for signs of life.
When they took us out of the cars, they body checked us and took all our belongings and money. Then they divided us in two groups and and one of them shouted ’fire,’ he told the Telegraph in a telephone interview.
I played dead, because people were standing very close to each other in the group, I fell near other people who were dead. I was laying beside the dead bodies until the light of the morning, my clothes are colored with blood of other people, he said.
In his statement to the police, he said he had to remain still and silent for several hours because the gunmen loitered at the scene after the killings and left shortly before the police arrived.
According to Washington Post:
Four members of the same family — including a newly engaged couple and two of their relatives — were killed in the attack. The assailants bound some of the victims’ hands and blindfolded others before they were shot, security officials told Afghanistan’s TOLO News agency.
Ghor (Ghor) is an isolated and mountainous region wedged between the Hazara-majority Bamian province in the east and Herat, near the Iranian border, in the west. Ethnic Hazaras, the majority of whom are Shiite Muslims, make up a sizable portion of Ghowr’s population of roughly 580,000, according to Afghan government statistics.
