Last week, a large clinic for the treatment of addiction in Kabul was hit by what appears to have been a Pakistani airstrike, killing hundreds of patients, according to the Taliban. One of our reporters went to the scene of the strike, and here, he describes what he saw. We are not using his name for his protection.
On the gate to the Omid addiction treatment centre, there was a long list of survivors’ names. Everyone in the crowd was furiously searching through them, desperate to see whether their loved one was among them.
Immediately after the attack, the Taliban began restricting the flow of information, allowing only a small number of journalists access to report the story. I tried to go in by pretending to have a relative there, but a Taliban soldier asked me for ID and a photograph of the patient, which I didn’t have.
I found it strange that the Taliban were watching everyone so closely. It was unusual. No one was allowed to use their mobile phone, and I barely dared to sneak a photograph of the lists hanging on both sides of the gate.
As I did, an older woman came up to me and asked me about the lists. She was illiterate and asked for my help finding her brother, who was being treated at the centre.
I searched the names, but I couldn’t find her brother. I asked when she brought her brother here and she said the Taliban had arrested him and brought him here.
I asked one young man standing beside me whether he was missing someone. He told me he’d been a patient there for six months, but fled after the bombing.
“It was around nine in the evening when I heard the sound of jet planes, and then they dropped bombs on our centre. Three blocks caught fire,” he said. “Those of us who were in another block managed to escape.”
He gave no further information, but several other people there also confirmed that a number of patients had fled after the attack, and that the Taliban had later returned some of them.
Pakistan has said it targeted a military facility, and the United Nations secretary-general has called for an independent and impartial investigation.
One local worker told me three blocks were completely burned out and there were many casualties.
I accompanied one man who was searching for a loved-one to the Wazir Mohammad Akbar Khan Hospital, where some victims had been taken. When we got to the ward, we found four lists of the injured had been posted on the walls, around 200 names in total. The man who was with me couldn’t find the person he was looking for so we went to the morgue. There, we saw around 90 bodies, charred beyond recognition. In another room, bodies without coffins had been laid on the floor, burn marks visible.
Outside, workers were loading wrapped bodies into ambulances. One of the workers told me the bodies couldn’t be identified, they were so badly burned, and were being taken to be buried. I later learned that the bodies of 50 unidentified victims had been buried in a mass grave on a hill on March 17.
As I went to leave, a small group of men and women was waiting to see the bodies, but the soldiers weren’t letting them in. “Come tomorrow,” they said.
The Taliban say more than 400 patients at the Omid centre were killed in the attack, around 500 people were unharmed and more than 250 others were injured. Information I obtained suggests there were around 1,800 patients at the centre. The counting doesn’t seem consistent or clear though, and the Taliban have shut down the flow of accurate reporting, or at least given access only to a limited number of media outlets. I really can’t understand why. What happened at Omid is a full-scale human catastrophe. Some of the bodies I saw at the hospital were so badly burned you couldn’t bear to look at them. It was horror beyond imagining.
