The smell of smoke still lingers in the air as men move silently through the rubble, lifting broken concrete with bare hands. Every few seconds, someone calls out a name. No one answers.
Outside what remains of the Omid Addiction Treatment Hospital, families have gathered since early morning—waiting, searching, hoping. Some clutch photographs. Others hold onto scraps of clothing pulled from the debris, trying to recognize what is left.
“I came here at dawn,” said Ahmad Rahimi, his voice shaking. “My brother was inside. I have checked the hospitals, I have checked the lists… his name is nowhere.”
Rescue workers continue to dig through the wreckage of the 2,000-bed facility, where hundreds of patients had been undergoing treatment for drug addiction. The building is now a blackened shell, its walls collapsed inward, trapping many beneath.
Hamdullah Fitrat, the Taliban deputy spokesperson, said the death toll has risen to 400, with around 250 others injured, after a Pakistani airstrike on the hospital in Kabul, but for many families, the numbers offer little clarity—only fear that their loved ones may be among the unidentified.
At Wazir Akbar Khan Hospital, corridors are filled with the wounded and the searching. Families move from bed to bed, lifting blankets, studying faces, asking doctors and nurses the same question: “Have you seen him?”
Some leave with answers. Many do not.
A young boy stood quietly near the entrance, holding onto an older man’s hand. “We are looking for my uncle,” said Farid Khan, speaking for the child. “They told us to check here. If he is not here, we will go somewhere else.”
Across the Kabul city, morgues are overwhelmed. Volunteers write numbers on pieces of paper, placing them beside bodies that have yet to be identified. Relatives walk slowly past, pausing, looking, sometimes collapsing in grief.
Among them is Bibi Gul, a mother searching for her son. “He is a father of two—a boy and a girl,” she said, clutching his photograph. “He went there to recover, to start a new life. Now I am searching for his body.”
Journalists arriving at the scene described devastation that is difficult to comprehend. TOLOnews Bahram Hamid told Sky News Yalda Hakim that his colleagues saw “bodies everywhere” inside the Kabul rehabilitation hospital following the reported airstrike.
Another TOLOnews journalist Imran Danish, reporting from the scene, said the building behind him was still burning hours after the strike. “Pakistani jet aircraft hit the building at around 9 p.m. on Monday evening,” he said. “Behind me, in this destroyed building, the dead bodies of addicted patients are still under the debris.”
Danish said survivors told him that some of the victims had been together just hours before the attack. “They said they had Iftar together,” he reported. “Now they are searching for their friends’ bodies.”
At the site, a reporter from Shamshad TV read aloud a letter written by the family of one of the victims. In it, they expressed hope and pride that their relative was recovering from addiction. It remains unclear whether the letter ever reached him before he was killed in the strike.
The hospital itself had long struggled under pressure. In 2023, Yalda Hakim visited the facility and reported that more than 3,000 patients were crammed into a center built for just 1,000 beds, highlighting the scale of Afghanistan’s addiction crisis.
Back at the site of the destruction, a rescuer shouted for silence. For a moment, the crowd froze. Beneath the noise of machinery and crackling debris, there was a faint sound—someone calling for help.
Men rushed forward.
For families waiting nearby, it was a fragile moment of hope in a day filled with despair.
As night approaches again, many refuse to leave. They sit along the roadside, eyes fixed on the ruins, waiting for news—any news.
“We are still looking,” Ahmad Rahimi said, staring at the shattered building. “Until we find him, we cannot stop.”
