FOR many, the targeted killing of four women in Quetta earlier this week was the worst sectarian tragedy even this blood-drenched province has seen. Women’s lot is far from satisfactory here; even so, that a banned organisation has turned its guns on such a target has come as a shock, notwithstanding the fact that militants of this group have earlier also targeted members of the Shia Hazara community.

The women, including one ethnically Baloch, were killed at point-blank range when assailants opened fire on their bus on Kirani Road in the Pud Gali Chowk area of the provincial capital on Tuesday evening. A fifth woman and a man belonging to the Hazara community also suffered bullet wounds. The 40-year-old Baloch woman happened to be sitting with her Hazara colleagues and bore resemblance to them. Responsibility for the atrocity has been claimed by the Lashkar-i-Jhangvi Al Alami, which says the attack was carried out in revenge for the violence inflicted by the Syrian government on its Muslim population.

In a similar, ethnically motivated incident, a female professor of the University of Balochistan, Nazima Talib, was gunned down in April 2010. Responsibility for that attack was claimed by the Baloch Liberation Army. On another occasion, Hazara women received bullet wounds in May 2015, when attackers killed the man accompanying them and his pregnant wife to a gynaecologist’s.

“I was sitting close to the door of the bus, next to my elder sister Mariam (16),” recounts 14-year-old Aziza Gul, who was injured in the recent attack. “She was playing something on her mobile phone. Suddenly there were gunshots, and the bus stopped. A man entered the women’s compartment and started firing at us. I don’t know what happened after that.”

Aziza has not been told by her family that her sister died. “I don’t know where she is, she must be in a hospital ward,” she tells me haltingly.

Mariam and her sister had been coming back home after buying medicines in the city for their father. He has been unable to speak or walk properly for five years after suffering a stroke. Before he became ill, he worked in a coal mine in Mach town, where most Hazara families migrated after they started being targeted by militants. Mariam, the third of five siblings, used to do embroidery work to help the family. Of her two brothers, one drives a taxi and the other is jobless.

Another family struck by the tragedy is that of 53-year-old Mariam, whose husband, Suleman Ali, himself went missing in Afghanistan some five years ago. She used to work as a maid in some of the Hazara town houses. She lived with her 16-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son in a room rented in a house where the family that owns it lives; the people of the neighbourhood would support her in small ways. “I don’t know what to do or what will become of us now that we are utterly alone,” her son Ali Agha tells me. A man named Mohammad Arif shows me a list of names of the people who collected money so that Mariam’s funeral could be held and to pay for the tea served to people paying condolence calls.

The third victim of the shooting was 37-year-old Khatima Zahra, who leaves behind two sons (14 and 4 years old) and a daughter (8 years old). She lived with her brother and his family, who has six children of his own. Her husband, Jan Mohammad, was a drug addict, who left for Iran three and a half years ago to work as a labourer. Since then he has had no contact with his family, and is presumed dead.

Her brother, Ali Jan, works in a bakery while her elder son, Abbas Ali, recently started working with a tailor; he earns Rs700 a week. Khatima used to live with her in-laws, but when her husband went to Iran, her life became miserable. So her brother shifted her with her children to his house in Hazara town. She initially started sewing women’s clothes, while additional support would come from the bakery’s owner who supports deserving families, particularly widows. Abbas was earlier studying in the 8th grade in a government school, but had to quit to learn tailoring out of the need to earn. On the day of her death, Khatima had gone to a hospital to visit a relative.

The Baloch woman presumably targeted erroneously was 40-year-old Totia, married. She lived in Lahri Chowk, adjacent to Hazara town. She had been coming from the bazaar and had been going to disembark at the next stop. Her body, with those of the three Hazara women, was handed over by the police to volunteers of the Noor Welfare Society. They were placed in the local Imambargah and the families took custody of the bodies on identification. The day after the killing, Totia’s 16-year-old son contacted the police about his mother’s body.

“The police handed over all the bodies to us,” volunteer Syed Mahdi tells me. “One of them looked different, because she was clad in clothes bearing traditional Baloch embroidery.”

Published in Dawn, October 9th, 2016