Farimah Mafakheri was a sixth-grade student. She had memorized the thirtieth part of the Quran.
An interview was conducted with her father and mother. Her mother, Farasat Mohammadi, says:
“The wall of the school could be seen from our house. From far away, when I saw the smoke, I understood what had happened. My son was crying by the wall. I told him, ‘Do not cry. Come help me find the phone so I can call your father.’
At that moment, my older son came and kept saying, ‘Farimah, Farimah, where is Farimah?’ I said, ‘She has not come yet.’ He went to the school to look for Farimah, and in less than two minutes he came back, hitting himself and crying. He said, ‘Mom, nothing is left of the school. Everyone is dead.’
I left my younger son with a neighbor and went to the school with my older son. It was a very painful scene. Very painful. Whatever I say, you may not believe it. It was very hard for us to see our little children being pulled out from under the rubble.
Whenever I saw them putting our children into body bags, I begged them to open the bag so I could see whether it was my daughter or not. I searched so much. I shouted and cried, but I could not find her.
After the first attack, when people had come to remove the debris and bring out the bodies, they struck two more times. They told us to go home and come to the hospital at 11 pm. They said they would show us the photographs of the bodies on a monitor so we could identify them.
That night, when we went there and they showed the bodies one by one, number fifty was my daughter. I said, ‘Stop.’”
With grief, she says:
“I told her cousin and uncle to look more carefully. I had recognized her from her lips and teeth. I said, ‘This is Farimah.’
The next day, I told her father to go to the morgue and see number fifty closely. He looked at number fifty and came back and said, ‘Yes, it was Farimah.’
It is truly very hard for me.”
Her mother begins to cry.
“I begged them to open the body bag so I could caress her.”
She says Farimah was an extraordinarily polite girl, a hardworking student who followed her lessons on her own without needing her mother’s help, and even helped with the work at home.
We also asked about martyr Samira Basardeh, who was Farimah’s cousin.
Farimah’s mother said:
“Samira Basardeh was Farimah’s cousin. The two of them always went to school together and came back together. Mrs. Basardeh was an exemplary and caring teacher. Her students loved her, and families wished their children could be students of such a teacher. She was truly a devoted, committed, and kind teacher.”
Then Farasat remembers the bodies she had seen at the scene and says:
“There were pieces of flesh, hands, feet, and parts of bodies in every corner, thrown in every direction. I saw all of this, and it was very hard. Only a few bodies were intact, those who, for example, had died from suffocation.”
Farimah went to school as a child who had memorized part of the Quran, a daughter who helped her mother, and a student who carried her lessons with care. Samira went as a teacher loved by her students and trusted by families. In the ruins of that school, the child and the teacher, the student and the guide, were both taken from the same path they had walked together.