Kabul’s car-bomb graveyard is a monument to years of bloodshed

The charred debris that now sits on the grounds of the Shahrak police station on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan, tells stories of attacks.

Officer Miragha Gulbahari picks up a rocket-propelled grenade from inside a charred minivan the Taliban used to target the Afghan parliament building last year. (Michael E. Miller/The Washington Post

By Michael E. Miller-January 27

KABUL — To understand the terror the Taliban has wreaked upon Afghanistan, head to the outskirts of the capital, down a lane of shin-deep mud, through mounds of garbage picked over by sheep and street urchins, over a putrid moat and past armed guards.

There you will find Shahrak police station — the final resting place for the wrecks that carried Kabul’s car bombs.

Here lie the charred husks of more than a dozen vehicles. Like exhibits in a macabre museum, the ruined cars recall the violence that has consumed the city in recent years. To one side sits the skeleton of a Taliban truck bomb thattargeted the Afghan parliament. Nearby, a suicide bomber’s scorched turban slowly fades in the sunlight.

Years of pain are piled up at Shahrak.

“We are used to it by now,” said police officer Miragha Gulbahari, holding the turban up for a reporter to see. “We have seen a lot of terrible things.”

Afghans are hoping the terror ends soon. On Jan. 18, officials from Afghanistan, Pakistan, China and the United States met for the second time to plan a tentative peace process. Afterward, the four countries said in a statement that they had “made progress on a road map toward initiating peace talks with Taliban groups.”

But Shahrak stands as a stark reminder of how far Afghanistan has to go and how hard it will be to strike a deal with the Taliban.

In contrast to several cities overrun by the Islamists in 2015, Kabul has remained firmly under government control since the Taliban fled in 2001. Yet a glance around this vehicular graveyard shows that even the capital is now well within the Taliban’s deadly reach.

“This one happened about a week ago,” said a young police officer, pointing to a shredded white Toyota Corolla. The driver had detonated his suicide vest on Jan. 4 near the Kabul airport but managed to kill only himself. A few hours later in almost exactly the same spot, a powerful Taliban truck bomb proved deadlier, killing one bystander, injuring dozens, shattering concrete blast walls and leaving a 15-foot crater in the road.

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