When US warplanes mistakenly bombed a hospital in the Afghan city of Kunduz, killing 22 people and injuring at least 37 others on Saturday, those who survived the horror described "unspeakable" nightmarish scenes, including six patients burning in the hospital's Intensive Care Unit (ICU).
The survivors said many of them were asleep when the bombs began falling early Saturday morning, catching them all flat-footed as all hell broke loose inside the hospital run by the Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).
One of the survivors is Lajos Zoltan Jecs, a nurse who recounted to reporters how hospital workers risked their lives to save the wounded.
"I have been working here since May, and I have seen a lot of heavy medical situations. But it is a totally different story when they are your colleagues, your friends,'' he said, according to Reuters.
"These are people who had been working hard for months, non-stop for the past week. They had not gone home, they had not seen their families, they had just been working in the hospital to help people... and now they are dead. These people are friends, close friends. I have no words to express this. It is unspeakable.''
According to Jecs, they had heard bombings and explosions over the past weeks, but these were further away.
Nobody could have prepared for the terror when the bombs started falling on the hospital itself. All was in mess, Jecs recounted. Aside from the six patients who got scorched in the ICU, another patient was killed by the explosion in the operating table, he said.
Others were wounded, including his colleague, an ER nurse who suffered massive trauma to his arm.
Jecs said they tried to make do with the limited supply of basic medical essentials to treat the wounded.
"It was crazy. We had to organise a mass casualty plan in the office, seeing which doctors were alive and available to help. We did an urgent surgery for one of our doctors. Unfortunately he died there on the office table. We did our best, but it wasn't enough.
"The whole situation was very hard. We saw our colleagues dying. Our pharmacist, I was just talking to him last night and planning the stocks, and then he died there in our office,'' Jecs told Reuters.
The nurse said it was difficult to digest what had happened. "It's completely unacceptable. How can this happen? What is the benefit of this? I cannot find words for this."
Saturday's bombardment in Kunduz sparked international outrage. Every person who died at the hospital was of Afghan nationality, MSF said.
