How can I forget that fateful day when I went to Islamabad for the engagement ceremony of my elder brother: April 10 1988. My brother, his to-be brother-in-law and I started to set out to the bus stand for Rawalpindi, do some shopping and make arrangements for the engagement event for that evening. It was 9 am, as I recall it, and we had not moved more than few meters from the house -- and boom! -- we heard the sound of some kind of blast that may not have been heard ever before, and what followed afterwards was smoke or fire flames; sky high.
We felt stunned and shocked by that sound and what we were watching high on sky, and all the people of that area started running here and there. Some feared that the Kahota atomic plant had been attacked by enemy planes. That wasn’t the case. The blast was at Faizabad heavy arms and artillery depot at Rawalpindi. Missiles were flying and falling all over the Islamabad and nearby mountains. It was just mayhem we never could have imagined and within few minutes, we witnessed the stinger missile from US smash a window of a house, hit the kitchen first, destroy all and then some how rotate all over sitting area, damaging the ceiling fan. Another missile we saw had entered the ground and gone deep.
I don’t remember much of the engagement ceremony. All I recall now is the tragic and horrific scenes at PIMS, those were the starting days of that health institute and hundreds of injured were being brought one after another. I did my part and stayed all night, helping out with the emergency work but I fully remember that child whose leg had to be amputated and was running with high grade fever. I shall never hope to witness something like that in my life. Some 4-5 thousand people had died that same day and Mr. Khaqan Abbasi was among them too.
The detail is meant to narrate something which none of my colleagues had witnessed and shared that disaster with the people of twin city.
The ammunition had came or was sent by US for the proxy war against Russian invasion and was being used by Afghan Mujahideens -- as they were called at that time -- they were the friends of later years, and they became Taliban. It was their country and they got it back by pushing one superpower back into their boundary and… later disintegrate.
The US of America is the encroacher, on one or the other pretext, its another western power , invading a sovereign nation, which was already had been badly bruised by earlier Russian adventurism.
It is high time (before it's too late) for the US to back out from this total chaotic and fruitless, exercise, which is destroying their own integrity as a nation as well as their cracking economy.
Let the Afghan people have a chance to rebuild themselves, which they didn't get even after the Russian left -- they surely taught them a lesson!
Taliban or no Taliban, Afghanistan is for Afghans... Just leave US!, under the cover of NATO.
No comments:
Post a Comment