Bodies of Kabul bomb victims pile up in hospital gardens as morgues overflow
In the wake of the attacks on Kabul airport, hospitals across the city are struggling to cope with the scale of injury and death
By Suddaf Chaudry KABUL | Telegraph
The fly-struck bodies lay in the garden of the Kabul hospital, quickly bloating in the summer heat on Friday.
They had been left outside after the morgue filled up at Wazir Akbar Hospital, three miles from the scene of the suicide attacks at Kabul airport the night before.
While Afghan and US officials said the bombings had killed 92 Afghans and 13 US troops, the manager at Wazir Akbar Hospital claimed that his facility alone had received 146 bodies.
Hospital manager Shir Shah told The Telegraph that said six women were among the dead brought to his hospital.
Some of the bodies were zipped into body bags while others were left to the flies, their identity cards placed next to their heads.
Despite Islamic tradition decreeing that bodies be buried within 24 hours, many of the dead remained unclaimed, with family members needing to travel from distant provinces.
A traumatised morgue worker said he had wrapped over a hundred bodies himself.
The mask the worker had been wearing all night had left a deep red imprint on his face and his eyes were bloodshot from fatigue and trauma.
Without speaking he pointed to where the black body bags lay among the flower beds to explain how they responded after the morgue had reached capacity.
One elderly man bent over a corpse. “He was only 21, I wish he never went to the airport,” the crying man said, arranging his grandson’s identity cards around the young man’s face.
Inside the hospital’s entrance, a woman clad in a black burqa sat on the ground crying, clutching a wailing baby in her lap.
Next to them a coffin draped in a black and white scarf was placed against a wall.
“This was my uncle’s son Abdul Rahim,” said a man named Ibrahim. “He was 32 years old, ready to leave for Germany, we never thought we would be burying our boy.”
The manager at Wazir Akbar Hospital claimed that his facility alone had received 146 bodies following the bombings | CREDIT: AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images
Many of those killed and wounded in the attacks were Afghan civilians searching for a seat on an evacuation flight, desperate to avoid life under Taliban rule.
Ibrahim recounted how he had received an optimistic phone call from his cousin from the airport after receiving travel documents from the German embassy.
“He called me from the Baron Hotel, telling me it was very chaotic but that he had got in, he told me that he would call back soon,” Ibrahim said.
Baron Hotel, where British and American forces were processing Afghans before admitting them inside the airport, was the scene of one of the explosions.
“At 6pm I received a call from my brother telling me that there had been an explosion at the airport… shortly after that we realised that our cousin must have been caught in the bombing,” Ibrahim said.
Relatives load the coffin of one victim of the bombings into a car. Many of the victims remain unclaimed |CREDIT: AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images
Ibrahim said the family had not yet had the heart to tell Abdul Rahim’s father what had happened to his son. “He is constantly calling me from Kunduz asking about his son, what do I tell him?”
While Islamic State Khorasan had claimed responsibility for the attack, Ibrahim said the blame was not theirs alone: “There are so many people who should be held responsible.”
At another nearby Kabul hospital, a security guard described scenes of utter chaos as crowds of wounded arrived in blood-soaked clothes.
“We received 32 injured last night and sadly 15 died inside the hospital,” said Rafiullah, the guard at Emergency Hospital.
Hard-pressed medical staff in the three operating theatres of the facility worked through the night into Friday treating casualties.
“It was very tiring, exhausting. They finished with the last patient around 4 a.m. this morning, so the three theatres have been working all night long basically,” said Rossella Miccio, president of the Italian aid group that runs Emergency Hospital.
“Fortunately all the colleagues that were supposed to come to work today are there... and they didn't face any major problem on the way to the hospital,” she told Reuters.
Another hospital official told Reuters that over 120 people were wounded in the attack, with some still hospitalised but many having been discharged.
With warnings about the potential threat of further attacks circulating, medical workers fear they could once again be facing a mass casualty event.
“Everybody is concerned at this moment in Kabul, nobody knows what to expect in the coming hours,” said Ms Miccio.