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15-05-2026
By SJA Jafri + Agencies
KARACHI/ KABUL: On a rainy, cold morning Masooda makes her way to a hillside cemetery in north-west Kabul to visit the grave of her younger brother Mirwais but she doesn’t know exactly where he was buried after he was killed in a Pakistani airstrike two months ago.
Instead, she stands at the edge of a mass grave, neatly covered with tiny white stones and roughly marked with grey granite slabs, which is the final resting place of some of the at least 269 people killed in the attack on a drug rehabilitation centre.
Exactly how many are in the grave is impossible to say; like Mirwais, who was 24, many were barely identifiable reduced to body parts or burned beyond recognition.
“My brother’s body was in pieces. There was barely anything left of him to give us,” says Masooda, 27, breaking down as she speaks. “They just found his torso. I identified it through a birthmark he had.”
The attack on the Omid Drug Rehabilitation Hospital is the deadliest attack in Afghanistan, possibly ever, but certainly in recent history, including 20 years of war between the Taliban, and NATO and Afghan republic forces.
A report released on Tuesday by the United Nations puts the number they can confirm at 269, but acknowledges the real figure is likely to be significantly higher.
There are calls for the attack to be investigated as a war crime.
Fighting between Pakistan and Afghanistan has been going on for months, leaving hundreds dead, most of them from Pakistani airstrikes. Islamabad accuses the Taliban government of sheltering militants who attack Pakistan. Kabul denies doing so.
The carnage at the drug rehab centre accounts for most of those killed in the fighting this year. The scale of the death toll is so staggering it has shocked Afghanistan, despite its long familiarity with violent conflict.
The UN, which was given access to the site, as well as a media teams who were on the ground in the immediate aftermath, confirm the strike hit civilians undergoing treatment. Human Rights Watch called it “an unlawful attack and a possible war crime” nut Pakistan disputes it hit a civilian target. In a statement to media it said that “no hospital, no drug rehabilitation centre, and no civilian facility was targeted”, adding: “The targets were military and terrorist infrastructure.”
Masooda is angered by the claim.
“Pakistan is lying. I have seen it and it wasn’t a military camp. There were men admitted there who had come to get healed and return to their families,” says Masooda. She is not alone. Themedia has spoken to the families of more than 30 victims including those of recovering addicts, and employees of the centre who reject Pakistan’s claims.
Omid centre may be located in a former military training compound called Camp Phoenix, which used to be used by the US and NATO forces but it is far from new.
Opened in 2016, after the Americans abandoned the base and five years before the Taliban seized power in 2021, Omid was well-known and had been widely covered by domestic and international news outlets.
The media had been given access inside the facility in 2023 to speak to recovering addicts.
“It’s literally about a kilometer away from the main UN offices. We have UN agencies, support to the patients of that hospital. So the site was well known to us,” said Fiona Frazer, the representative of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Afghanistan.
Mirwais, one of an estimated three million Afghans struggling with drug addiction was one of the newest inpatients.
