The sound of the blast ripped through Kabul, in an instant wrenching the Afghan capital's attention from a nationally televised interview in which a United States envoy revealed the first details of a deal to end America's longest war.
Last week's Taliban car bomb targeted a foreign compound but instead shredded Afghan homes, with stunned and bloodied families picking up children and fleeing in darkness as their once-solid world collapsed. One family saw 30 relatives wounded many of them women including a son still healing from an attack the year before.
"Our only hope was peace," Hayat Khan, the family's 54-year-old patriarch, said Tuesday, "and that doesn't happen now."
A relative held up a phone to show a photo of Zaki, dusty and bleeding and clutching a child, shortly after the blast. "Why doesn't he care about the killing of hundreds of civilians here?"
The collapse of the U.S.-Taliban peace efforts has turned quickly to talk of more war on all sides. The Taliban, while signaling they were still open to negotiations, said they would continue their fight against foreign "occupation."
And Trump, on the defensive after critics accused him of upending the talks in favor of rash showmanship, asserted that "we've hit the Taliban harder in the last four days than they've been hit in over 10 years."
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