He goes to Bamiyan so as not to see the ancient Buddhas that the Taliban dynamited at the beginning of the century. And in Bamiyan, three Catalan tourists and three Afghans were shot dead on Friday in an attack against the Taliban regime. They were with a group of thirteen tourists of various nationalities, six were Spanish.
The fatalities are Susana Vilar Bühler, born in Figueres; her daughter, Elena Schröder Vilar -31 years old- from Barcelona, ??and Ramon Belmas Rimbau from Girona. Another Spaniard, María Celia Tamayo, remains seriously injured, although conscious, after having undergone surgery in Kabul.
The two deceased, mother and daughter, ran pharmacies, in the Sants station in Barcelona and in the Les Arenes-La Grípia-Can Montllor neighborhood in Terrassa, respectively. Both flew to Kabul last Wednesday and planned to return to Spain on May 25. The third victim, 63 years old, is an engineer who worked in the chemical industry of Tarragona, specifically, in the former Bayer, according to Diari de Tarragona.
The rest of the group, two women, were on a return plane on Saturday night, according to information from Aníbal Bueno, a regular guide at one of the two Barcelona agencies specialized in Afghanistan and other extreme destinations, Against the Compass and Last Places.
The attack has not discouraged other tourist groups. Today, Sunday, another group of Spaniards willing to pay close to 4,000 euros for the experience begins their tour of Afghanistan.
The Prosecutor’s Office of the Spanish National Court, from Madrid, has opened “pre-procedural investigation” proceedings for the aforementioned murders, in case “they could be considered a crime of terrorism.”
Around six in the afternoon on Friday, a gunman fired several shots at the aforementioned tourist group on the commercial street of Bamiyan. Among the injured, Afghan media have indicated that there are also citizens of Norway, Australia and Lithuania, in addition to four Afghans. Among the deceased, there are also three citizens of Afghan nationality, one of whom was a Taliban security guard.
The bodies of the three Catalans have been transferred to the Ministry of Justice, in Kabul, to begin repatriation. Exceptionally, Spanish diplomats based in Pakistan and Qatar have traveled to Kabul, such as the ambassador to Afghanistan himself.
Although no country has formally recognized the reestablishment of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, international tourism has rebounded strongly over the past twelve months. This leaves tourists from those countries – the vast majority – that have not maintained or reopened their diplomatic representation in a particularly vulnerable situation.
Those that have done so, such as Russia, China, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, Iran or Turkey, in reciprocity, have allowed the Taliban to take possession of the Afghan embassies and consulates in their countries, removing diplomats from the previous regime. . But these are not the only legations that issue visas recognized by the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Apparently, the Taliban also have unofficial headquarters in other capitals, such as Madrid, without a flag or sign, where they also issue all types of visas, while those issued by the official embassy of that Afghanistan that ceased to exist with the exit of the last marine are useless.
The truth is that, until this week, the travel agencies involved were not untrue when they said that tourism in Afghanistan had rarely been so peaceful, with the exception of the hippie routes of the sixties and seventies. Already a few months after the second takeover of Kabul by the Taliban, there was a boom in national tourism, when the Afghans themselves could afford to travel around their country, after more than forty years of war. Even the Taliban’s critics acknowledge the reduction in corruption and improved security. The big losers, once again, are those Afghan women who previously could study beyond primary school and are now effectively prohibited from doing so. As well as opium and heroin traffickers, after having eradicated poppy cultivation.
However, the misogyny of the ghostly Islamic State in Khorasan – jihadists who are behind almost all the attacks aimed at undermining the Taliban regime – is even worse than that of the Taliban. This same week, another mysterious poisoning in an Afghan school, with more than seventy students affected, sought to destabilize the emirate by once again hitting the weakest. This first blow to tourism and its currencies also comes hours before a crucial meeting between Russia and India to bring closer positions on Afghanistan.
