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From life's tapestry, 247 threads cut short by global terrorism

 
In two weeks, we counted 247 cut down by Islamist extremists in killings in six countries; 151 of the victims — 61 percent — were Muslims, like their killers. (Photos for 77 victims were unavailable.)
In two weeks, we counted 247 cut down by Islamist extremists in killings in six countries; 151 of the victims — 61 percent — were Muslims, like their killers. (Photos for 77 victims were unavailable.)
Published July 29, 2016

The pace and scope of the killing are dizzying. Some 300 members of families blown apart by bombs as they celebrated the end of Ramadan in Baghdad. Forty-nine dead at the Istanbul airport, 40 more in Afghanistan. Nine Italians, seven Japanese, three students at American universities and one local woman brutalized in the diplomatic quarter of Dhaka, Bangladesh. The bodies piled up on a bus in Somalia, at a mosque and video club in Cameroon, at a shrine in Saudi Arabia.

All that carnage was in a single week — a single week of summer in what feels like an endless stream of terrorist attacks. Orlando and Beirut. Paris and Nice and St.-Etienne-du-Rouvray, France. Germany and Japan and Egypt. Each bomb or bullet tearing holes in homes and communities.

We stopped the clock on two weeks in March when there were high-profile attacks that commanded headlines — and attacks in places where they have become almost routine. In that period, we counted 247 men, women and children cut down by Islamist extremists in mass killings carried out at soft targets in six countries. There were Jews and Christians and atheists, and at least one Hindu, but 151 of the victims — 61 percent — were Muslims, like their killers.

Eight couples were slain together, doing the things couples do.

Muhammad and Shawana Naveed, wed three months earlier, went for a Sunday stroll in a Pakistan park.

Stephanie and Justin Shults, accountants who met at Vanderbilt University and were living in Brussels, had just dropped her mother off at the airport.

Zeynep Basak Gulsoy and Nusrettin Can Calkinsin, 19-year-old law students, were on their way home from the movies — a Turkish film called My Mother's Wound, about the aftermath of war.

The pair got together in high school. "I will never leave you alone," she wrote in his yearbook. "I am always beside you and will stay with you."

Now they are buried side by side.

They were two of the 36 killed in a public square in Ankara, Turkey's capital, on March 13. That was the opening day of the two weeks — a day in which 19 others fell in attacks on three beachside hotels in Grand Bassam, Ivory Coast. By March 27, extremists affiliated with al-Qaida, Boko Haram, the Islamic State and the Taliban would hit a mosque in Nigeria; an Istanbul street popular with tourists; a soccer stadium in Iraq; a bus in Peshawar, Pakistan; the park in Lahore, Pakistan, where the Naveeds were strolling that Sunday; and Brussels Airport and a subway station.

We went back to all these places to track each individual, to reveal the humanity lost and to address reader concerns that not all victims of terrorism are treated equally. A life is a life, wherever and whenever it is cut short.

Losing a loved one

We wanted to see what connections or distinctions we might find among the victims, but also to deepen understanding of the ripple effects of the terrorism that has come to define our days. We counted 1,168 immediate surviving relatives: 211 people who had lost a parent, 78 without a spouse.

More than 100 victims, young and old, left behind parents, whose language of mourning translates across borders.

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"This is pain, I think, that we cannot describe," said Michel Visart, whose daughter Lauriane was killed in the explosion at the Brussels subway station.

"My son was like a candle in the house," said Khaleel Kadhum, a father in Iraq who had moved his family from Baghdad to the relatively safer south only to have his son, Ahmed, encounter terrorism there. "This candle was snuffed out, and the happiness of the family is gone."

The oldest victim was Sevinc Gokay, an 84-year-old retired civil servant who was killed in Ankara. The youngest were not even born: Two pregnant women were killed along with the babies they carried; a third, Songul Bektas, survived but lost her pregnancy in its third trimester.

A Taliban splinter group claimed to be targeting Christians at the Lahore park. But most of those killed there were Muslim — like Zubaida Amjad, 40, who knew the Koran by heart and was teaching her 12-year-old daughter, Momina Amjad, to recite the verses. The girl was killed, too.

And in Brussels, the subway victims included Loubna Lafquiri, 34, a gym teacher and mother of three from Molenbeek, the same hardscrabble area where Saleh Abdeslam, a suspect in the Paris attacks in November, lived.

"Molenbeek is not only Saleh Abdeslam," said Mohamed el-Bachiri, Lafquiri's husband. "Molenbeek is also Loubna Lafquiri."

Global citizens

The 247 victims included Americans, Chinese, Congolese, French, Germans, Israelis, Lebanese, Macedonians, Peruvians, Poles — 26 nationalities in all. Most died less than 10 miles from where they lived.

But a Chinese medicine salesman named Deng Jingquan was more than 7,000 miles from home, at the Brussels Airport, when it came under attack. In messages to friends during his travels, he hinted at his homesickness.

The victims over these two weeks were musicians, scholars, teachers, waitresses, police officers, housewives, farmers, students.

There were those whose lives had been long and filled with accomplishments, like André Adam, a former Belgian ambassador to the United Nations who had also seen the effects of political violence during diplomatic duty in Algeria and Congo.

His relatives said that Adam's last act was to shield his wife, Danielle, from the blast at Brussels Airport. She was seriously injured but survived.

And there were those whose lives were short and plagued by hardship, like Ousmane Sangare, 16, who was born mute and hard of hearing in Ivory Coast. His parents had abandoned him and moved to Mali, according to a social worker. Ousmane slept at a train station but liked to go to the Grand Bassam beach on weekends to beg — and to swim. That's where the terrorists caught him.

Families torn apart

About half of the 247 victims from those two weeks were killed alongside someone they knew. Jean Edouard Charpentier, 78, a retired forest ranger from France, had just finished a bike ride in Grand Bassam with his friend Jean-Pierre Arnaud, 75, a salesman who played the guitar. At the soccer stadium, most of the victims had gone to see the game with friends, brothers, cousins.

Families were decimated. In Nigeria, a mother was killed along with her son and two daughters; another woman died alongside her husband, son, mother, niece and nephew. At the Lahore park, 10 relatives, all gone, including Faiz Ahmed Chandio, a clerk in the government's irrigation department who loved to cook rice with chicken gravy, and three of his six children: Shiraz, 6; Samina, 5; and Sadaf, 5 months.

They were one of at least nine sets of siblings killed.

In Brussels, Ankara and Istanbul, the attacks ended lives that had been lived in relative security. In Nigeria, Iraq and Pakistan, where terrorism and violence lurk around every corner, some families found themselves in familiar postures of mourning.

Ahmed Ibrahim, one of several victims at the Iraqi soccer stadium who were soldiers in the fight against the Islamic State, died 13 years after his brother was felled by U.S. forces in 2003.

Two brothers, Sabah and Mohammed Durayib, were buried in the Shiite holy city of Najaf — next to their father, killed by al-Qaida five years before.

Surviving relatives and friends held close the last moments with loved ones, parsing them for deeper meanings.

A mother in Iraq bathed her 11-year-old son, put him in fresh clothes and sent him off to the soccer game. She didn't feel right about it, and wished he wouldn't go.

The snapshots we collected show the moments that make up a life. A bride in her gown, sitting on the floor and eating a snack. A soldier, dapper in his dress uniform. Graduates in cap and gown on their big day.

A man on horseback, a man strumming a guitar, a man walking a lonely country road surrounded by wildflowers. Reading a book or drinking beer, celebrating a major life event or enjoying a typical family dinner.

They were killed in the moments that might have made the next set of snapshots.

Waiting for a bus, or a subway or a plane. Chilling out at the beach. Lining up for trophies after a soccer match. Praying, riding a bicycle, taking that Sunday stroll in a park.

What emerges is a tapestry of lives interrupted, splayed out gradually in those photographs, in anecdotal shards or bits of memory shared by those left behind, in the details of their dreams and the things left undone.

© 2016 New York Times