Kabul, Afghanistan – Abdul Aziz Oryakhil sat behind his desk in his office in Kabul. The events of the past few weeks in Afghanistan were nothing new to the 54-year-old firefighter.

Sipping on his tea, he seems relaxed. His walkie-talkie crackles with a male voice delivering intermittent reports. The firefighter claims to have witnessed countless horrors in his lifetime – perhaps more than anyone else in the country, he says – during Afghanistan’s tumultuous past, beginning with the Soviet-Afghan war, through the Taliban era of the 1990s.

But over the past two years Oryakhil’s units have been spending more time cleaning up after the devastating blasts that continue to rock the country than they have spent extinguishing fires…

Read the entire article here.