KABUL, Afghanistan – It is a place as necessary as it is tragic: a fortified hospital in central Kabul, full of broken bones and bullet-abused children, those who have lost limbs and loved ones in the bloodshed that has taken over Afghanistan.
But since August 15, the day the Taliban passed through the gates of the capital to hoist its black and white flag at the presidential palace, Kabul’s intensive care hospital dedicated to caring for war wounded has noticed a marked change in the nature of admissions.
“There has been a remarkable change in injuries,” says Alberto Zanin, the medical coordinator of the Italy-based NGO EMERGENCY, from the small walled garden in the center of the hospital: a herbaceous pocket of paradise within the pandemonium . “Before there were many FDI, bombs and explosions aimed at the city. Now things are different.
Zanin promises that a strange kind of “peace” erupted over the besieged city in the first weeks after the Taliban’s capture. After all, the group – which had long been carrying out specific attacks that routinely shook Kabul – had won. Still, relative placidity marked a far cry from 2020 and the first half of 2021, when war-related violence soared to new levels.
One of the most prominent problems that EMERGENCY has had since the Taliban’s acquisition is the group’s celebratory open-air shooting. On Friday, the quick shots wounded 12 – two of them children. One of the injured children, about 7 years old, entered with a bullet in the head and the other boy, unknown, received a blow to the chest. They both fight for their lives.
Following complaints to the Ministry of Public Health, the Taliban authorities announced a public ban on such conduct.
But despite last month’s seemingly peaceful shift in power – as President Ashraf Ghani fled, allowing the Taliban to enter without resistance – the confusion and chaos of that first day provided a platform for underlying anarchy that Zanin described it as something like a “disaster.” ”
“There were a lot of troublemakers, a lot of criminals taking advantage of the situation,” he explains. “People injured by general crime or by unknown attackers.”
A 35-year-old businessman, Haji Hamyoon, suffered a bullet directly in the stomach as he was on his way to work that Sunday afternoon as the Taliban entered the city.
“My oxygen was very small and I thought I would die,” he says softly, staring at the blinding daylight in the sheltered courtyard next to his room. “But I’ve been here for 24 days, and in ten days my wife will have our first baby and I need to be okay for that. I want the fight to stop and come back to life.”
EMERGENCY medical clinics in other Afghan provinces have also experienced a kind of silence since the Taliban took the helm, Zanin said. On the one hand, its facilities in Lashkargah, a province that was so full of battles that staff were forced to sleep inside for three weeks in a row while rockets and shells crashed around it – now has the space to admit patients for traffic accidents. This is something they have not been able to do for years.
The relative halt to the bloodshed came to a halt on August 27 when ISIS blew up the turbulent U.S. exit scenes around Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) with a coordinated suicide attack that went assume the lives of more than 160 people, including 13 American troops.
One of the EMERGENCY employees lost almost his entire family (about five members) at the airport gate. On arrival, sixteen Afghans were declared dead and four died in the following hours. But now there are dozens of wounded left to fight the burns, shrapnel implanted in the frames and faces and adapt to life as paraplegics.
There were other fatalities not directly related to the explosion.
In one case, EMERGENCY attended to a deaf man with a disability who, by chance, was driving around in the vicinity shortly after the explosion. Unfortunately, he did not listen to the strict instructions of the Taliban to stop at a checkpoint and later opened fire. He succumbed to his injuries when he arrived at the hospital.
EMERGENCY lounges and quiet rooms, founded in 2000 under the first Taliban government in Afghanistan, are an amalgam of fear, misery and triumph. A child who suffered a head injury in an explosion calls out to his mother with a trembling, whispering confusion like a wounded animal, and a blind man stretches out into nothingness, exposing his healed arms with deep layers of pink .
Another young man, with an empty chest and protruding cheekbones, oscillates between anguish and laughter. His name is Abdul and he is believed to be about 14 or 15 years old, although the EMERGENCY staff predicts that his actual age is probably closer to 18 years. Abdul lost both legs a few days ago against a landmine in Logar province, though he smiles and bends his fragile body in prayer, accepting his new reality with a shoulder assault.
However, several young people, all in their twenties, tell me that they were shot in disputes with people they knew close to home on the outskirts of the city for the past two weeks, highlighting the maneuver of the area outside the war and turning- se in an increase in violence and crime.
Unfortunately, some patients are haunted for having become a burden to their low-income families. They worry that they will no longer be able to provide them and will need constant medical care and help for the rest of their lives.
Still, the will to survive is unmistakable. The proportion of admissions of EMERGENCY patients remains the same: approximately 30% of women and 70% of men. Of this, about a quarter are children.
But in addition to the incessant conflicts and clashes that have permeated the Taliban’s push for power over the past eighteen months, EMERGENCY personnel have also been forced to fight the COVID-19 pandemic, which Zanin characterized as a “Nightmare.” The Delta variant caused a second wave of infections earlier this year; however, with the arrival of vaccines, first from India and more recently Johnson & Johnson, medical staff claim that the situation is now mostly under control.
In fact, it is seldom mentioned by those who are on the ground of the warring nation and who have had to survive a very visible war.
The last plot of the two-decade-long war extends into the Panjshir Valley, about 80 kilometers north of the capital. EMERGENCY operates a state-of-the-art maternity ward, located on a hill in and around the snow-capped mountains and deep valleys. However, in recent days there have been deep concerns that the new government has instituted a medical and humanitarian blockade. However, Zanin notes that as of Monday, buses full of patients resumed back and forth to the white-and-red clinic and that he remains confident they have the supply for an approximate duration of four to five. months, even with a blockade as contradictory information on how the Taliban continues to have a lot of control.
“We’re always prepared for situations like these,” he says. “But we’ve never had to deal with it in Panjshir before.”
Although communications in the isolated province have dropped, partner hospitals currently communicate twice a day via satellite.
And even within the city, there is certainly no rest for the tired.
As I venture into the midday sun, the disturbing tranquility — not to be confused with serenity — is broken by the heavy and seemingly endless rain of bullets fired directly into the streets of the interior. Even when you think it has stopped, the battery starts again.
“They’re trying to get rid of the protesters outside,” exclaims a local staff member as we walk away from the glass windows and enter the central garden, which just in the morning seemed to be that oasis amidst the madness. “A lot of women are upset, so they go to the White House!”
The irony of his words – a bit twisted in translation but referring to the nearby presidential palace – is not lost. Hundreds of young Afghans, men and women and young children, carried placards and sang the word “freedom” repeatedly. Just over a week after the United States left, and many feel as if they have nothing left to lose. Many feel disappointed by the nation that for two decades urged them to demand equal rights.
Only that struggle not to lose everything they have won was countered by the Taliban firing into the scorching air as a scattering tactic.
“Six recipes,” Zanin wrote to me later in a text, emphasizing that they were not the result of bullets, but other injuries related to the commotion.
Even with small moments of relief like the days after the fall of one government and the rise of the next, it is the kind of work that never ends.
“What you can see here, you just can’t see in Europe,” Zanin says, his eyes scanning the sky as if lost in his thoughts. “You stay here and everyone becomes a member of your family. Your life adapts. It is very difficult to return home. What do I do there? My chances to help are here. ”