When 32-year-old Aliya reached the hospital closest to the site of a suicide bombing in Kabul’s Dasht-e-Barchi area on Sunday, all she saw was bodies upon bodies; people dead and dying. “No matter what door I opened, there were bodies lying everywhere, some as little as four years old,” she said, between sobs.
A suicide bomber, associated with the Islamic State terror group, detonated a vest armed with explosives in an area crowded with people from the Shia Hazara minority. The attack was close to a school that also serves as a center to register for national ID cards, a document that Afghans will need to vote in the upcoming parliamentary elections.
Around 63 citizens were killed in the attack, with over 120 injured, according to latest reports from the Afghan Ministry of Public Health.
Aliya’s 14-year-old son was at the school when the explosion occurred and she sifted through many dead bodies before she found him. “He was among the dead. The doctor kept saying he had died because they couldn’t find his pulse,” she told Asia Times. “But I touched his heart and I could feel it beating.”
Aliya, a widow, fought to get medics to help her son, but when she couldn’t she took him to a different hospital. “They weren’t doing anything to save him. I had to fight to prove he was alive,” she said, waiting in the hospital for news on his health. Next to her, parents and relatives of many other injured anxiously waited to hear about their loved ones.
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