BACHGAH (Afghanistan), May 3: It was before dawn and farmer Ghulam Mohaiudin was starting work before the hot sun rose over northern Afghanistan’s Bachgah valley. Then there was a huge bang and he thought the world had ended. He passed out but minutes later a “killing pain” in his injured eye and arm brought him back to his senses. With his good eye, the former anti-Soviet fighter saw bodies scattered around and other injured people writhing in agony.

“Was it doomsday? Was it the end of the world?” Mohaiudin said to himself before realising that it had been an explosion — and it had vaporised the house of his neighbour, a local militia commander. By sunset on Monday the people of the tiny farming village at the foot of the Hindu Kush mountains a few hours’ drive north of Kabul would have counted some 29 dead, many of them women and children.

And anger mounted as they discovered the cause of the deadly blast was a mammoth stockpile of arms, ammunition and mortar rounds hidden beneath warlord Jalal-i-Bachgah’s mud-brick house. It was the first fatal incident to hit the village for several years, since the Taliban’s armoured four-by-fours roared through its dusty streets on the way to fight forces loyal to late Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Masood.

Most of its inhabitants make a living from growing wheat as well as almond and walnut trees and it has been free of an ongoing Taliban-led insurgency plaguing southern and eastern Afghanistan.

But Monday’s blast was a grim reminder that very few corners of Afghanistan have escaped unscathed from the tide of war that has engulfed the country since the late 1970s. Warlord Jalal-i-Bachgah himself may have suffered the worst.

He is thought to have lost most of his family, including one of his wives, in the blast, which left his 16-room compound looking like it had been pulverised by an aerial bombardment.

His mother and sister were taken to hospital, along with dozens of other injured local residents, where the scale of the casualties threatened to overwhelm the basic health facilities the doctors could offer.—AFP