January 14, 2008 – Serena Attack (02/09/08)
One night in late November 2007, I made a routine decision to work out at the Serena Gym. I hadn’t worked out in a while. I would be leaving in one short week for my wedding which was set for mid-December. It was a quarter to 6. The pool would close at 7pm. This was my last chance. I shut down my laptop, grabbed my gym bag, got into a company van and made my way to the Hotel Serena in downtown
Kabul .
It had been a typical weekday – wake up in the morning, Afghan naan and cheese, black tea with ground cardamom and sugar, guards in front of our guest house, protected company transportation, put in a hard day’s work, decide to work out maybe or go straight home – all with a slight measure of caution and putting danger out of one’s mind, which in about two months would seem foolish.
When we got close to the hotel, my driver and I noticed that the road in front of the hotel was closed. It was United Arab Emirates Day – the UAE is a small country on Saudia Arabia’s eastern border – and there was a big event inside the hotel so no traffic was allowed in from the main entrance. Under these circumstances and due to fatigue, I would have told the driver to drive me home.
The Hotel Serena was an escape, an oasis for expatriates, businessmen, Afghan and international government officials in the middle of
Kabul . Once inside its elegant walls, you felt protected. You felt like you weren’t in Afghanistan for an hour or two.
A policeman beside one of the barricades said that I could use the employee entrance on the side of the hotel down the street. I told the driver to drive on and I started walking down the street, computer briefcase in one hand, gym bag in the other, cars racing past – feeling a little nervous that I might be doing something stupid, but I was determined.
I got to the employee entrance and walked through a metal detector. An Afghan employee of the hotel checked my gym bag and looked inside my briefcase. He asked for my passport. I told him that I was a member of the gym and wanted to work out. A young Filipina woman was sitting with her legs dangling back and forth over the edge of a desk. She was waiting for a ride home but said that she’d call her supervisor to see if I could get in. She was a massage therapist at the hotel spa. I vaguely recalled seeing her in the reception area once or twice.
After getting the approval, she took me through a door and into a hallway which led to a staircase to the basement below. I had never known that the hotel had a basement and I looked around curiously as we passed the kitchen, the laundry room, the employee locker room. After some time, we arrived at a staircase which brought us up to an area beside the hotel restaurants. I said thanks to the woman who had been very kind. She said, “See you!”, waved and turned around with a smile.
I would remember her kindness to me on the night that the Serena was attacked. It was past 6pm on Monday night, January 14, 2008. My gym bag had been beneath my desk all day. I realized it was getting too late to work out at the gym and use the pool. Suddenly we heard a loud boom from across town. My brother called me immediately and asked, “Did you hear that?” I said that we had. It sounded like a suicide blast. He said he was going to try to find out more about it. I then got a call from one of our housemates. He wanted to see if I was okay. I said I was still at work. I asked if he’d heard what had happened. He somberly said that the explosion had come from the Serena parking lot and that there had been gunfire afterwards. I thought to myself, “Wait, I could have been there!”
As fragments of the news rolled in, it became clear to us that a terrorist attack had occurred. When my brother and I returned home an hour later, we met our housemates and we were all abuzz about the news, stunned and in disbelief. We were anxious to know more because all of us had memberships at the Serena Gym and we knew friends who may have been there. We counted out loud those people whom we knew were safely out of town on vacation.
We sat down for dinner and were speculating on how it would all unfold. I thought that perhaps the employee entrance was a weak point. Perhaps the attackers had discovered this entrance. We had too little information but our emotions were running high. Everyone tried to focus on their dinner. The TV was tuned to the BBC World Report.
Then we heard a familiar voice. A journalist whom we knew in
Kabul, Alastair Leithead of the BBC, was giving a report about the attack. We left the dinner table and sat down on the couches in the living room. Alastair told us that after the initial assault, one of the attackers had made his way into the hotel and gone directly to the hotel gym. We collectively gasped and looked at each other. Our sense of shock turned into an eerie realization that this was too close to home. The Serena Gym and its members had been targeted. The attacker had gone into the gym’s reception area, shot dead a Filipina employee and continued into the gym where he shot several other people, one on the treadmill and two inside of the men’s locker room.
The same Filipina woman who had helped me that night in November – I remembered her kindness. She didn’t deserve to die. Where was the justice or compassion in this? She had simply been in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
The next day was not a typical day in
Kabul . We were all shaken and still in disbelief that it had been so close, as if our own homes had been attacked. The oasis of the Serena permanently receded into the background. Curfews around town were reset from midnight to 7pm. Gone was the sense of security preceding this day. Gone was the feeling of protection. The security landscape in
Kabul had changed for good.
In the days after an attack that lasted only 4 minutes, we felt the instability of the “War on Terror” firsthand. The attack on the Serena had brought it to our front door like an unwelcome guest. This feeling had been at the front door of the Afghan people for decades. We suddenly knew what it was like to truly fear. We also knew that unless the situation on the ground changed fast, our unwelcome guest was here to stay. The Taliban had regrouped and were now strong enough to carry out such an attack. It was an ominous beginning to the New Year.
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