They’re looking for someone to blame, and we’re right there; the terrorists are not.

But I want them to know that first of all I’m a reporter and I should do my job. I want to see what is happening, see how people are dealing with it. And most of all, I want the world to know about Afghanistan, about how they are killing my people. I also want them to know that I have not forgotten the face of a single one of those victims I’ve seen and I probably never will.

I was a civilian, not a journalist, at the first suicide bombing I witnessed: the Enlightenment Movement Bombing in 2016. (Like others who have experienced international acts of terrorism — 9/11, the Munich Massacre, London Bridge — we Afghans name our bombings.)

I was very close to that one. The Enlightenment Movement, started by my fellow Hazaras, a largely Shiite minority group, drew a huge crowd to an anti-government demonstration by mainly young people like me. We were filled with enthusiasm and happiness that we were finally reclaiming our people’s long-denied rights. It was a hot July day and I took refuge from the afternoon heat in the shade of a wall.

That wall saved my life. I have no words to describe the horrible sound of that blast, a sound I had never heard before. Dust filled the air and I was lying on the ground, too shocked to move. Which was fortunate because a few minutes later came another blast — a vicious trick of terrorists to get first responders as well. Flying glass cut my nose, but I had no other injury.

Far worse was what I saw: the dead and dying, the dismembered victims and distraught survivors, the terrible screams of agony and suffering, and the howls of despair and rage. The blast killed 84 and wounded more than 400.

Police at the scene were as shocked as everyone else; and some of them were out of control, firing everywhere for no reason. One officer leveled his pistol straight at me. He looked crazed, as if he were about to shoot, when a man came and knocked his gun arm down. I was frozen with shock until an old man grabbed my hand and ordered me to run with him.

Many of my friends were among the dead and wounded, I would later learn. “We are changing history,” my friend Sharif Dawlat Shahi, a ministry of education employee, wrote on his Facebook page that morning. It was the last thing he ever wrote.