World News

Sohrab Faqiri spent Eid, the Muslim festival to mark the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, looking for the grave of his brother, killed in a massive Pakistan airstrike on Kabul this week.

Pakistan’s bombardment campaign, on what it says is terrorist and military infrastructure in neighbouring Afghanistan, appeared to have gone catastrophically wrong. A rehabilitation centre for drug addicts was hit on Monday night, according to the United Nations and the Afghan authorities. The UN’s preliminary death toll is 143 people, while the Taliban administration puts the figure at more than 400 dead.

Faqiri’s brother, Qais, a tailor and father of a 10-year-old boy, was being treated for the last three months at the facility, called Omid or “Hope”. Faqiri rushed there after the airstrike, but could not find him among the survivors. He spent the next two days visiting hospitals in Kabul, but there was no sign of Qais. Then, by chance, he saw a video of a mass burial by the authorities of the airstrike victims and spotted his brother.

On Thursday – marked as Eid in Afghanistan – he went to the hillside graveyard on the edge of Kabul, where the burial took place. There, he found rows of stones planted along lines of upturned earth. But there were no names to identify any of the bodies.

“Worst of all is that his grave is not known to us,” Faqiri said, speaking at the cemetery, bursting into tears. “This is the saddest moment, for a person on Eid day to search for the body of his brother.” He has not had the heart yet to tell their mother.