“Unspeakable”: An MSF Nurse Recounts the Attack on MSF’s Kunduz Hospital

In the Intensive Care Unit six patients were burning in their beds

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) nurse Lajos Zoltan Jecs was in Kunduz trauma hospital when the facility was struck by a series of aerial bombing raids in the early hours of Saturday morning. He describes his experience:

“It was absolutely terrifying. I was sleeping in our safe room in the hospital. At around 2am, I was woken up by the sound of a big explosion nearby. At first I didn't know what was going on. Over the past week we'd heard bombings and explosions before, but always further away. This one was different, close and loud. At first there was confusion, and dust settling. As we were trying to work out what was happening, there was more bombing.

After 20 or 30 minutes, I heard someone calling my name. It was one of the Emergency Room nurses. He staggered in with massive trauma to his arm. He was covered in blood, with wounds all over his body. At that point my brain just couldn't understand what was happening. For a second I was just stood still, shocked. He was calling for help. In the safe room, we have a limited supply of basic medical essentials, but there was no morphine to stop his pain. We did what we could.

I don't know exactly how long, but it was maybe half an hour afterwards that they stopped bombing. I went out with the project coordinator to see what had happened. What we saw was the hospital destroyed, burning. I don’t know what I felt, just shock again. We went to look for survivors. A few had already made it to one of the safe rooms. One by one, people started appearing, wounded, including some of our colleagues and caretakers of patients. We tried to take a look into one of the burning buildings. I cannot describe what was inside. There are no words for how terrible it was. In the Intensive Care Unit six patients were burning in their beds.

We looked for some staff that were supposed to be in the operating theater. It was awful. A patient there on the operating table, dead, in the middle of the destruction. We couldn't find our staff. Thankfully we later found that they had run out from the operating theater and had found a safe place.

Read more: http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2015/10/04/unspeakable-an-msf-nurse-recounts-the-attack-on-msf-s-kunduz-hospital.html#ixzz3nbe7qL9M



Oct. 3, 2015: The aftermath of an airstrike carried out by the US on the MSF clinic in Kunduz, Afghanistan. (Photo: MSF)

Read more: http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/2015/10/04/unspeakable-an-msf-nurse-recounts-the-attack-on-msf-s-kunduz-hospital.html#ixzz3nbfAiCQ5