Embassy tragedy: Afghan youth revisits last year’s blast in Kabul

The 24-year-old studies Peace and Conflict studies in Jamia Millia Islamia. Last year in July,after graduating from Atma Ram College in Dhaula Kuan,he had worked for a year in the Afghanistan Foreign Ministry,located near the Indian Embassy in Kabul.

And he was there when the blast happened.

It was July 7,around 8.30 in the morning,when suddenly,without warning,the windows of the foreign office shattered.

Saeedi looked around for a few moments,numb. “First I called my mother and father and they were all right. It was the Indian embassy and there are several casualties,my father told me,” said Saeedi.

A few minutes later,he was approaching the Indian Embassy,where he had been several times before to get his student visa for India and then for many conferences.

“It was all shattered. There was blood all over,cars had crumbled into smoking iron heaps,and there were cries all over. It was chaos.”

At that time in the morning,classes started in the nearby Malalay High School. Some of the children who attended the school never made it. The blast killed 20 of them. “The children were the hardest to look at. So many of them had died,” he says.

The place was littered with bodies — some dead,others injured. Ripped apart,some were simply unrecognisable. “There was an Indian diplomat whom I had met only three days ago,” he said. “We found half his body in his car. After searching for half an hour,someone found the rest of him on the third floor.”

The shock and trauma still sears.

“I grew up seeing blasts everywhere and even survived a few very closely,but I have seen nothing like the Indian Embassy blast. It was huge,” he said.

A few months later,Saeedi went back to the Embassy to get his visa to pursue a post graduate course in India. And he found everything had changed.

“There were so many checkpoints,so many walls and it was painful to get in there but I guess it helped minimise today’s casualties,” he said. “But so many civilians died. I don’t know about children yet,” he added as an afterthought.