You go to Bamian not to see the thousand-year-old Buddhas that the Taliban dynamited at the beginning of the century. And in Bamian, three Catalan tourists were shot dead on Friday, in an attack against the Taliban regime.
The fatalities are Susana Vilar Bühler, born in Figueres; his daughter, Elena Schröder Vilar from Barcelona, ??and Ramon Belmas Rimbau from Girona. Another Spaniard, María Celia Tamayo, is seriously injured, although conscious, after having been operated on in Kabul.
The two dead, mother and daughter, ran a pharmacy in Barcelona and Terrassa, respectively. Both flew to Kabul on Wednesday and were scheduled to return to Spain on May 25. The rest of the Spanish tourists from the same group were on a return plane on Saturday night, according to the information of Aníbal Bueno, a regular guide at one of the two agencies in Barcelona specializing in Afghanistan and other extreme destinations, Against the Compass and Last places.
The attack has not discouraged other groups of tourists. Another group of Spaniards willing to pay nearly 4,000 euros for the experience begins their tour of Afghanistan today.
The Prosecutor’s Office of the Spanish National Court, from Madrid, has opened proceedings of “pretrial investigation” for these murders, in case “they could be considered a crime of terrorism”.
Around 6pm on Friday, a gunman fired several shots at the tour group on Bamian’s shopping street. Among the injured, Afghan media have indicated that there are also citizens of Norway, Australia and Lithuania, in addition to four Afghans. Among the dead, there are also three Afghan nationals, 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, as has the same ambassador to Afghanistan.
Although no country has formally recognized the re-establishment of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, international tourism has rebounded strongly over the past twelve months. This leaves tourists from countries – the vast majority – that have not maintained or reopened their diplomatic representation in a particularly vulnerable situation.
The countries 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 the diplomats of the previous regime. But these are not the only embassies 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 kinds of visas, while those issued by the official embassy of Afghanistan that stopped existing with the departure of the last marine are of no use.
The truth is that, until this week, the travel agencies involved were not missing the truth when they said that tourism in Afghanistan had rarely been so pleasant, with the exception of the hippie routes of the sixties and seventies. Just a few months after the second takeover of Kabul by the Taliban, there was a boom in national tourism, when Afghans themselves could afford to travel around their country, after more than forty years of war. Even detractors of the Taliban acknowledge the reduction in corruption and improved security. The big losers, once again, are the Afghan women who used to be able to study beyond primary school and are now practically prohibited from doing so. As well as the opium and heroin traffickers, after having eradicated the cultivation of the cassall.
However, the misogyny of the ghostly Islamic State in Khorassan – jihadists who are behind almost every attack 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 attacking the weakest. This first blow to tourism and its currencies comes hours before a crucial meeting between Russia and India to approximate positions on Afghanistan.
