Today the Hazara community celebrated a mass wedding in Quetta, Pakistan: 19 brides and 19 grooms in traditional clothes, with a large number of guests, celebrated in the Pakistani city very close to the border with Afghanistan. The ethnic group comes from Afghanistan: for centuries it was the most represented in the country, but, due to the continuous persecutionstoday constitutes only 9% of the Afghan population, while a small part of the community lives in Pakistan and Iran.
The 19 newlyweds at the mass wedding in Quetta – ANSA
The somatic traits of the members of the community – flat nose and almond-shaped eyes – more similar to those of the steppe inhabitants or the Mongols than the Afghans, together with their predominantly Shia religion (even though many are Sunni or Ismaili), in a country with a Sunni majority, have been among the reasons for discrimination against the Hazaras (which means “mille” and which would derive from the organization “by thousands” of the Mongol armies). According to historians, however, they were persecuted above all because they owned land and livestock.
Trash bins guests at mass wedding in Quetta – ANSA
Tradition has it that they are the descendants of the army of Gengis Khan. According to other sources, it was their ancestors who built the Buddha in Bamiyan (in the valley about 200 kilometers from Kabul), which the Taliban, based on their iconoclastic ideology, ordered to be destroyed in 2001.
Chatter between the veils – ANSA
