Leaving Was Most Painful Journey Of My Life, Says Afghan Journalist

Bilal Sarwary who fled Afghanistan before as a child during the civil war in the 1990s, said he lost contact with three friends who were outside the airport with their families on Thursday.

Afghan journalist Bilal Sarwary began his career in 2001 helping cover the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan and subsequent fall of the Taliban. Never in the 20 years since did he imagine Kabul would once again fall to the Islamist terrorist group, he said. Fearing reprisals, Sarwary and his family were evacuated to Qatar along with more than 150 other people, including other journalists and artists, a few days before Thursday's deadly Islamic State suicide bombing outside Kabul airport. "For me personally it was 20 years of burying my life, my dreams, my network of friends, my home. So it was perhaps the most painful journey in my life," he told Reuters in Doha, where he arrived almost a week ago. "Even in my wildest dreams I did not believe that this would happen, that we would suddenly be forced to leave," he said. "All of us on that plane, we were not there to tell the story... this time we were the ones being forced to flee."