'All our dreams turned to dust'

KABUL • In a shed beside the mosque his father had helped to build, Mr Hussein's body lay on a marble slab on Friday morning as his brother Hamid and other relatives washed him for burial.

Delicately, they patched the shrapnel wounds that had killed him the day before, using bits of cotton and plaster, and clear plastic tape. Neighbours and relatives appeared in the doorway, watching and offering advice; in this township on the outskirts of Kabul, people are buried in the same way a child is raised, as a common affair.

"We all went together to the airport a few days ago," said Mr Jamil, 28, one of Mr Hussein's seven brothers.

Mr Jamil had worked for an American non-governmental organisation, and had applied for a US visa.

Mr Hussein, the oldest, had been a police officer who had worked with US Special Forces; Mr Hamid, the second-oldest, was an army major who had served alongside the Americans in Helmand province.

All three felt they and their families' lives were in danger with the Taleban in power again, especially since they belong to the Hazara Shi'ite minority.

Three days ago, Mr Hussein had taken his wife and five children to the airport, but the Taleban had driven them back.

"They were beating us with whips and cables and firing in the air," said his wife Mahera, 35. "I was afraid for the children."

Yet her husband was desperate to escape. The couple decided that if he could get into the airport, perhaps he could find a way to bring the rest of the family inside safely.

She told their son Ruhullah, 16, to accompany his father because he spoke some English.

The father and son were among the thousands of Afghans who went to the airport on Thursday, hoping to get through Taleban checkpoints and crowds, despite warnings of a plot by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria group to attack the airport.

Mr Hussein's brother Hamid, the army officer, went with them, but he said they got separated in the dense crowd as they approached Abbey Gate, where US Marines were checking documents and allowing entry to a select few.

The airport's fortress architecture of blast walls and barbed wire, designed to deter car bombs and complex attacks, had funnelled the crowd into a narrow choke point beside the canal.

It was there the bomber struck.

"The blast hit us and knocked us down," Mr Hamid said. "There were bodies everywhere. I could hardly see anything; we were choking on dust and smoke. I couldn't find the others, and I had to escape."

When she heard the news of a blast at the airport, Ms Mahera tried calling her husband and son, but their phones were off. At dawn, she took her eldest son with her and went into the city to join the procession of relatives combing through the hospital's morgues for missing loved ones, charnel houses that had filled with the scores of Afghans killed in the blast.

"It was terrifying. The bodies were missing heads and limbs. There were men, women and children," Ms Mahera said.

Finally, she found her husband's corpse in a hospital in the Wazir Akbar Khan neighbourhood of Kabul.

"The earth and sky trembled, and I fell down," she said. "All of our dreams turned to dust."

Among the Afghan security forces, there had been a popular saying in Farsi that Mr Hussein would have been familiar with: ya watan, ya kafan. Give me the nation, or the shroud. "When the Taleban came to Kabul, I cried for my country, more than I cried for our father," Mr Jamil said. "The army, the police, everything we built, it's all gone now."

NYTIMES