‘TODAY I SAW DOOMSDAY’
Witnesses tell of girl and troops slain in carnage ‘tornado’
An Afghan translator for the US Marine Corps who was hoping to escape his native country sacrificed his safety to help victims of Thursday’s terror attack get to a hospital — after a little girl died in his arms.
The man, who gave his name as Carl, told Fox News by phone that he was waiting in line outside Hamid Karzai International Airport when a suicide bomber struck.
“There was an explosion that happened inside the crowd — a lot of people got hurt,” he said amid the confusion afterward.
“I got a baby girl — that she was 5 years old — she died right in my hands.”
Clearly shaken, he added, “She was not my baby girl. She was somebody else’s. I saw her on the ground and I picked her up and I [tried to take] her to the hospital, but she died in my hands.”
“Right now, I have some casualties with me, in my vehicle, and I’m taking them to the hospital . . . I got two other guys that they’re good.”
He went on: “I was good to get on a plane and get out because the Taliban, they’re after me. They have [gone] to my house.
“I shouldn’t be exposed. But it is what it is.”
Carl described the chaos that followed the blast, saying that “some of the Americans, they got hurt, too, and so people are running around there.”
He said he didn’t know “what exactly happened, but the explosion was very bad and there are a lot of people got hurt.”
“It happened by a canal. And the Americans were on the other side of the canal and they were checking people’s passports and stuff,” he said.
“And those people that have visas, they were taking them in, by the airport. So, that’s why they were outside.”
Carl also said that he had “tried and tried” to get into the airport and board a plane to safety since “the first day, the Taliban they took over.”
Meanwhile, an unidentified Afghan with a US Special Immigrant Visa told Reuters he’d been standing in line outside the airport’s Abbey Gate for about 10 hours when the first explosion occurred at around 5 p.m. Kabul time.
“It was as if someone pulled the ground from under my feet,” the man said.
“For a moment, I thought my eardrums were blasted and I lost my sense of hearing.”
He added, “I saw bodies and body parts flying in the air like a tornado taking plastic bags . . . into the air.”
“I saw bodies, body parts, elderly and injured men, women and children scattered in the blast site,” he recalled.
“It is not possible to see doomsday in this life, but today, I saw doomsday. I witnessed it with my own eyes.”
The man added that due to the chaotic and uncertain security situation, survivors were obligated to carry away the dead and wounded.
“Dead bodies and wounded were lying in the road and in the sewage canal,” he said.
“The little water flowing into it had turned into blood.”
Paul “Pen” Farthing, a former Royal Marine who runs an animal shelter in Afghanistan, told Britain’s Press Association that he and his staff were caught up in a firefight in the aftermath of the explosions.
“All of a sudden, we heard gunshots and our vehicle was targeted. Had our driver not turned around, he would have been shot in the head by a man with an AK-47,” he said.
The second blast was at or near the Baron Hotel, 200 yards from the airport. In recent days, many people, including Afghans, Britons and Americans, had been told to gather at the hotel before heading to the airport for evacuation.
Emergency, an Italian charity that operates hospitals in Afghanistan, said it had received at least 60 patients wounded in the airport attack, in addition to 10 who were dead when they arrived.
“Surgeons will be working into the night,” Marco Puntin, the charity’s manager in Afghanistan, told The Associated Press.
The wounded overflowed the triage zone into the physiotherapy area and more beds were being added, Puntin added.