The blast near Kabul's Indian Embassy on Thursday morning set Maihan Saeedi's mind racing back.

Last year, when a similar blast occurred outside the embassy, he was there to witness the carnage — the deaths, the wreckage and the shattered survivors. This time, far from Ground Zero, Newsline found Saeedi, an Afghan national, uneasily counting the toll.

The 24-year-old studies Peace and Conflict studies in Jamia Millia Islamia. Last year in July, after graduating from Atma Ram College in Dhaula Kuan, he had worked for a year in the Afghanistan Foreign Ministry, located near the Indian Embassy in Kabul.

And he was there when the blast happened.

It was July 7, around 8.30 in the morning, when suddenly, without warning, the windows of the foreign office shattered.

Saeedi looked around for a few moments, numb. “First I called my mother and father and they were all right. It was the Indian embassy and there are several casualties, my father told me,” said Saeedi.

A few minutes later, he was approaching the Indian Embassy, where he had been several times before to get his student visa for India and then for many conferences.

“It was all shattered. There was blood all over, cars had crumbled into smoking iron heaps, and there were cries all over. It was chaos.”

At that time in the morning, classes started in the nearby Malalay High School. Some of the children who attended the school never made it. The blast killed 20 of them. “The children were the hardest to look at. So many of them had died,” he says.

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