Ahmed, 50, watched flames engulf his friends at a drug rehabilitation center in Kabul where he was being treated, unable to save them as they shouted for help after a Pakistani airstrike left a scene resembling “doomsday”.
The Afghan Taliban government said at least 400 people were killed and 250 wounded in Monday night’s attack. Islamabad denied targeting any such facility, saying it hit military installations and “terrorist support infrastructure”.
Ahmed, who volunteers as a guard at the hospital and gave only one name, said he and 25 of his roommates had gathered in their dormitory after prayers when the attack happened. He was the only survivor among them.
“The whole place was on fire. It was like a cataclysm,” he said.
Health officials said the clinic had about 3,000 patients from across Afghanistan at the time of the strike, which sparked panic in Kabul after residents broke their daily Ramadan fast.
People ran for cover as anti-aircraft guns were fired from 9pm (1630 GMT).
“I heard the sound of a jet patrolling,” Omid Stanikzai, 31, a security guard at a drug treatment center, told AFP.
“There were military units around us. When these military units fired at the jet, the jet dropped bombs and caught fire.”
Mohammad Mian, who works in the hospital’s radiology department, said many of the youth under treatment lived in large containers on campus and very few survived the strike.
Read morePakistani airstrikes hit Kabul and Afghanistan’s border provinces, killing scores.
“It was very scary,” he said. “The survivors were lucky that their rooms were not destroyed. But in the places where the bombs were dropped, everyone was killed.”
Blackened walls, bodies under rubble
Afghanistan’s vast poppy fields have long made it a major producer of opium, and millions of Afghans have battled the addiction over decades of war and economic hardship.
The Taliban government banned all narcotics, including opium poppy cultivation, in 2023, leading to an estimated 95 percent drop in opium production. Under the Taliban’s crackdown, thousands of people struggling with drug addiction have been sent to the country’s underfunded and overcrowded treatment centers.
When Reuters visited the site on Tuesday, blackened walls on the single-storey building bore witness to the fire that had raged inside just hours earlier.
Elsewhere, structures were reduced to piles of brick, metal and wood, with patients’ personal belongings, including pillows, shoes and items of clothing, scattered among the rubble.
In Ahmed’s dormitory, a few bunk beds still propped up against the wall intact, their beds undisturbed as the room threw off the ceiling and opened up to the blue sky.
Crowds gathered outside the center hoping to hear news of their loved ones.
AFP reporters counted at least 30 bodies removed from the wreckage of the facility and saw medics treating dozens of wounded in the chaotic and smoldering aftermath of the attack.
Baryalai Amiri, a 38-year-old mechanic, came to the place where his brother was admitted about 25 days ago.
“We haven’t been given the right information,” he told AFP, as rescuers picked through nearby debris. “Until now, we don’t know where he is.”
Dr Ahmed Wali Yousafzai, the hospital’s health officer, recalled the three blasts, which he said threw some of his colleagues from one wall to another.
As the fire raged, screams and cries for help were heard “from all directions,” he said.
“We were too few to save them all,” he said.
Ambulance driver Haji Fahim was among those who rushed the bodies to the Afghan-Japan hospital, moving at least eight bodies over five hours.
“Now we are back … there are still bodies under the rubble,” he said on Tuesday.
(With France 24 Reuters and AFP)
(Tags to be translated)Asia / Pacific(T)Afghanistan(T)Pakistan(T)Kabul(T)Drugs(T)Airstrikes
