When the explosion struck, Ahmad was in the camp yard, performing his ablutions in preparation for the nightly prayer. He does not know what was hit first. What he remembers is a thundering sound, flames moving faster than thought, trying to run – and heat scorching his right hand. As parts of the rehabilitation centre collapsed, Ahmad’s fellow patients tried to rush outside, but the spreading fire made escape impossible. Enveloped in smoke, people were soon piling up on one another. Eventually, a man in white clothing – whom Ahmad assumed was a doctor – pulled him out of the crowd, led him outside the compound and put him in an ambulance, which then took him to a public hospital. Not everyone was so lucky.

On 16 March, around 9 PM, the Pakistani air force flew over eastern Kabul and struck the Omid Drug Rehabilitation Centre, a 2,000-bed facility that has been operating on the site of a former NATO base, Camp Phoenix, since 2016. One bomb hit the main hall; two others struck shipping containers where patients were housed. According to Human Rights Watch, which described the attack as a possible war crime, 143 people were killed and 250 were injured.

Islamabad has shamelessly defended the strike. Ahmed Sharif Chaudhry, the Pakistani military spokesman, claimed that the planes in fact hit a nearby “ammunition depot” belonging to terror groups. He denied that the rehab centre even existed. “That was a military containerised structure,” he told the television broadcaster Geo News. “If [the Taliban] claim that there were drug addicts at the site, then this is an old habit of theirs where they use drug addicts as suicide bombers.”

The strikes were part of Operation Ghazab lil-Haq (meaning “Righteous Fury”), a coordinated ground and air offensive against Taliban positions that Pakistan launched in February, apparently in response to cross-border raids. So far 289 Afghan civilians have been killed or injured in the operation.

In the aftermath of the attack, the international media has understandably focused on the apparent sense of impunity that undergirds Ghazab lil-Haq. But the devastation at Omid was not caused by the blast alone. In the past weeks, three of my colleagues at Zan Times have conducted extensive investigations at the rehabilitation centre and across Kabul. They discovered that the Taliban bears a share of the responsibility for the death toll. Their central finding is that patients at the camp were effectively prisoners, held in treatment wards against their will. While the Pakistani airstrike started the fire, it was Taliban policies that turned it into a mass murder.

“The doors had been locked to stop patients from fleeing,” Shamsuddin, a retired lawyer whose 26-year-old son died in the attack, told my colleagues. Shamsuddin was praying at his home five kilometres from the camp when he heard the blast and saw flames. By the time he reached the camp gates, a crowd had already gathered. “Mothers were crying,” he said – but Taliban officials did not allow them inside.

Hafiz Mozamel, the director of Omid, told BBC Dari that around 50 Taliban soldiers were stationed to guard the facility “because some of the patients want to flee”. Two of his staffers confirmed as much to my colleagues. On the night of the strike, the soldiers made no attempt to go inside and rescue their wards. Instead, they fired bullets into the air to deter the patients from leaving.

The tragedy at Omid is a logical, if extreme, consequence of the Taliban’s broader drug policy. Since returning to power in 2021, the regime has launched a brutal war against addiction, sweeping up tens of thousands of drug users of the streets and locking them up in rehabilitation camps. State propaganda outlets have described the campaign as a great success; apparently, thousands have been “treated”. But investigations by Zan Times and others have revealed a more sordid reality inside these camps: cold water and shaved heads, hunger and forced withdrawal, confinement and beatings.

The Taliban’s drug war distills their general approach to governance. Supposedly armed with the true knowledge of God’s teachings, the mullahs in power believe they have the divine right to rule over and make decisions for all Afghans, with or without consent. Their abiding goal is to lead people away from the temptations of vice. In the pursuit of virtue, any means is justified, even mass murder.

Sharia is now the law of the land in Afghanistan. Women have been largely erased from public life; men are expected to conform visibly, by growing beards, wearing traditional dress and generally avoiding anything deemed to be imitative of the West.

The Taliban has imposed God’s word through a mix of coercion and intimidation. Religious police patrol the streets and arrest transgressors, including women without burqas or face covering. Corporal punishment and public flogging have returned. According to the human rights organisation Rawadari, Taliban authorities arbitrarily detained at least 2,559 people in 2025, more than twice as many as in the previous year. Most arrests were linked to alleged violations of morality laws and codes around clothes, beards and public behaviour.

The drug war, which has largely been overlooked by the international media, is one front in this larger crusade. It is a direct rebuke to the period of Western-backed republican rule between 2001 and 2021, during which the number of drug users grew significantly. Large communities of addicts formed in abandoned lots and under bridges in many major cities. Among the most infamous sites was Pul-e-Sokhta, a neighbourhood in western Kabul where thousands camped under a large overpass.

The rise in addiction was a result of deeper structural crises: war, displacement, unemployment – and their long-term psychological effects. Many of the victims were young men who had migrated in search of work to Iran, where they took to drugs while labouring in industrial cities. The Taliban vilified them as the “burnt generation of the occupation years” in its state propaganda, and took dramatic steps to address this perceived social problem. Pul-e-Sokhta (“the scorched bridge”) was cleared, repainted and renamed Pol-e-Khoshbakhti – “the bridge of good fortune”.

Ahmad’s story is not unusual. Four years ago, aged 18, he left in search of work to Iran, where he picked up a heroin addiction. This January, when construction work dried up there, he borrowed money from relatives so he could return home. But Taliban forces arrested him in Char Asiab, about 11 kilometres south of Kabul, because they suspected he was an addict. Inside the rehab centre he was sent to, there was little that resembled treatment. “In the first month, as I went through withdrawal, I asked for drugs,” he told my colleagues. “Instead, they threw cold water at me. There was no doctor or medicine, only cold water.”

The Taliban’s stated goal is rehabilitation, but its effect has also been to remove addicts from public view. A 2023 investigation by Zan Times cast a light on the obscure fate of many detainees. In Herat, former drug users described being beaten and sent to work in a state-run salt mine, where they were paid below market rate, if at all, and held in captivity until their contracts ended. When family members tried to secure a relative’s release, they were often turned away.

Omid (meaning ‘hope’) was one of the more notorious rehabilitation centres. About three years ago, when the Taliban intensified its drug crackdown, about 5,000 people were crammed in there – more than twice its proper capacity. Some patients lived in containers, others in wooded dormitories. In January 2023, state-friendly YouTubers visited the site and filmed videos intended to draw attention to the wonderful treatment taking place there. It makes for difficult viewing. Men in thin clothes lie under torn blankets in the dead of winter, in slippers or barefoot, some visibly wounded. Several complain of hunger. A few eat fresh snow out of desperation.

Several former patients were retained at Omid as unpaid “volunteers”. One of them was Mohammad, a 29-year-old who was “admitted” there in 2023 and now does guard duty. “We were on patrol when a plane circled overhead,” he recalled of the 16 March attack. “Then the sound of bombs started.”

Mohammad first rushed to the containers. But “when I looked inside, there was no one left,” he said. “All of them were burned.” At the main hall, where voices could be heard under the rubble, he and other volunteers pulled out bodies for hours. “Until around 4AM, we were taking out the dead,” he said. “I carried out around seven injured people. The rest were all dead.” He remembers one voice in particular: it belonged to a man who was pinned beneath the debris, alive but fading. “Take me home,” he said. “Take me home.”

Counsellors and staff remained on site for days, removing bodies and survivors from the wreckage, sorting those who could still walk from those who could not. Around 350 patients were transferred to a different hospital in the same compound. More than 500 were sent to Aghosh camp, a large rehabilitation centre in another part of the city.

Relatives went from one hospital to another, trying to find the living, then the dead. It took Rahim two days to locate his brother Nasim, a military veteran of the republic who had fallen on hard times after the Taliban came to power. He had struggled to hold down a job, started taking pills, became irritable, was bad-tempered around his wife and children, and generally seemed lost. Rahim had admitted him to Omid on the very morning of the attack. “His body was completely burned,” Rahim said. “Blackened, with the flesh gone and almost nothing left but bone. Only one eye remained.” The Taliban has not offered the family any assistance, or even contacted them.

Experts at the state forensic centre in Kabul faced an uphill battle. A doctor involved in handling the bodies described the procedure as follows: take a photograph, label the body bag, refrigerate those corpses that can be identified, and store the fragmented remains separately. Families were shown images via a projector and asked if they saw someone they knew. Because there was no equipment to perform DNA testing, many of the victims were buried in mass graves.

The Taliban’s public response was thin and contemptuous. In an Eid address that lasted more than 40 minutes, Hibatullah Akhundzada, the supreme leader, failed to mention the attack on Omid. At a public funeral, Sirajuddin Haqqani, the interior minister, referred to the dead as “poudari” – a slur, closer in tone to “junkie”. He went so far as to suggest that Pakistan had favoured the rehabilitation patients by murdering them and thus elevating them to martyrdom. “These were people who used to die under Pul-e-Sokhta in such a way that they would not even receive a burial or a shroud,” he said. “God granted them such dignity that we now take pride in them. Shame on those who disgraced themselves by killing poudari.”

This military confrontation between Afghanistan and Pakistan looks set to continue. Mullah Yaqoob, the Taliban defence minister, recently said in a TV interview that an attack on Kabul would be met with a retaliatory strike against Islamabad. Whether or not he carries through with that threat, it seems certain that, in the coming months, more civilians from both countries will end up “martyred” like the patients at Omid.

This story is published in collaboration with Zan Times, a women-led investigative newsroom that covers human rights in Afghanistan.

All names have been changed to protect the subject’s identity.