‘Pray for Me’: Kabul Hotel Guest’s Plea During Afghan Hotel Attack

As militants laid fire and bombed the Intercontinental Hotel, Aziz posted a plea for help on Facebook.

As gunmen went on a rampage in Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel on the night of 20 January, Aziz Tayeb posted a desperate plea on Facebook: “Pray for me. I may die.”

The telecom executive hid behind a pillar, as six heavily armed attackers stormed the luxury hotel and began spraying terrified guests and staff with bullets.  

The post, translated reads, "This is the horror of life and life is nothing more. Thanks for prayers, messages, and bells of all dears and lords. I'm fine and I got out of the hotel, but over 100 people and my friends in the hotel with death and life. Death to fear and please pray for their health.”

Reuters reported at least 30 people dead, six who were Ukrainian, in the 12-hour ordeal, as Taliban militants engaged in a fierce gunfight with Afghan security forces.

I saw people who were enjoying themselves a second ago, screaming and fleeing like crazy, and some of them falling down, hit by bullets.

Aziz Tayeb

One of Tayeb’s colleagues, who had been stranded on the fifth floor of the six-storey building throughout the attack, told him that some areas of the hotel resembled a butcher shop with blood everywhere.

The attackers were eventually killed.

Tayeb, a regional director for Afghan Telecom in the western city of Herat, was staying at the hilltop hotel – not part of the global Intercontinental chain – with a number of his colleagues from around the country, ahead of an annual conference scheduled to begin on 21 January.

Witnesses added that gunmen shot at people who were having dinner in one of the restaurants in the hotel, before breaking into guests’ rooms and taking dozens hostage, including foreigners.

Tayeb and a few friends managed to escape to the hotel's outdoor pool area where they hid, listening to the horrifying attack, just metres away, PTI reported.

I could repeatedly hear blasts one after another, hand grenades, they used many grenades. We contacted security officials who arrived an hour later. As we were being escorted out, I saw five or six bodies outside the hotel. The second, third, and fifth floors were on fire – the fifth floor was in flames.

Aziz Tayeb

Once he was a safe distance from the hotel, Tayeb called his colleagues still trapped inside the burning building, he said.

Some of my friends and colleagues were crying, afraid that they would die of smoke inhalation.

A witness said that the hotel's security team fled "without a fight", leaving guests to their fate.

"They didn't attack. They didn't do anything to them. They had no experience," said the 24-year-old man, a hotel employee who spoke on condition of anonymity, PTI reported.

He ran from the hotel with some of them, he said. "I was asking them, where should I go?"

As he waited for news of his colleagues, Tayeb updated his Facebook status to thank his friends for their prayers. "Staying alive in this country is a mere coincidence," he wrote, before making another plea.

"More than a 100 of my colleagues and friends are caught between life and death. Please pray for them.”

(With inputs from PTI and Reuters)

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