Personal Stories from the Kabul Riots

There has been a lot of publicity about the CARE office being burnt and looted and it was probably the most damaged but I estimate about 12 international organization offices and guest houses were attacked, burnt to some extent and looted. This has left a lot of people with only the clothes they stand up in having lost everything including passports. The main therapy seems to be discussing and comparing experiences.

The bubble of Kabul has been burst. No longer do internationals feel safe in Kabul. The UN employees especially are forced to follow strict security regulations. This involves daily radio checks and radio checks when leaving and arriving at destinations even if less than a kilometer. No walking on the street and houses with a guard box outside containing 6 armed guards. Neither the UN security, ISAF, coalition forces nor national police protected the international aid workers. ISAF and coalition forces did not want to inflame the crowd so stayed out of it and some of the national police even joined the riot. The blue guard boxes outside UN offices and guest houses just identified them as targets. The armed guards disappeared and some were told to hide their guns incase they were taken off them by the crowd.

A mob came up my street but as there are no guard boxes did not identify the houses of internationals and targeted houses elsewhere. IOM (international organization of migration had three guest houses and their offices targeted, burnt and looted. People tell me of having to be evacuated from one office to another as the crowd moved towards them. Eventually they got in the back door of a large UN guest house and had to stand in the garden listening to the shouts and gun fire outside the gates and seeing the smoke of the guard box being burnt. The national police acted extremely well in this situation and blocked the street getting them out to the police station. Occupants of one guest house had a neighbour offer to sell their dog back to them and another had a neighbour offer to sell them a video of the looting. One man said that photos of his son were torn up. Apparently a number of the rioters were secondary school boys. A Spanish girl told me how the crowd threw monitof cocktails over the house garden wall (3.8 metres high) and tried to climb up and through the barbed wire. An Afghan girl was going to be thrown into a fire until it was realized she was not western.

It is surprising no international was killed. More problems are expected. There needs to be a full investigation into the crash and compensation paid to the victims families as a gesture of good will even if the driver is found to be not guilty. Even then now everyone understands that Kabul is not secure and they can organize riots with impunity.