"There was just a roaring sound, and then I opened my eyes and I was in a hospital," said Assadullah, pale and speaking in a low voice, the stump of his leg wrapped in bloodied bandages.
"I lost my leg and two fingers," said Assadullah, his face a grimace of pain as he lay in a van, his head resting in a friend's lap, before setting off to find better medical treatment in the Pakistani border city of Peshawar.
"There were other people hurt. People were running all over the place," he said.
Assadullah and his companions were among the very first that the Taleban had allowed to cross the border.
Most people were turned back when trying to enter or leave Afghanistan, and the Taleban appeared to be allowing only trucks carrying goods to cross into Pakistan.
The US has said that it deliberately picked targets away from civilian areas and wanted the Afghan people to know the strikes were an attack on the Taleban and bin Laden - and not on the public.
One senior Taleban Health Ministry official said six to eight people had been killed in the attacks, down from initial estimates from across the country of 20 deaths.
"It is difficult to give an exact assessment of the number of casualties, but they are perhaps no more than six, seven or eight deaths," Deputy Health Minister Mohammad Abbas told Qatar's al-Jazeera television.
Areas near Jalalabad were also a target when the US launched cruise missiles in August 1998 to strike at suspected training camps belonging to bin Laden, whom Washington blamed for masterminding the bomb attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, that killed 220 people.
A Russian memo given to the United Nations Security Council listed several places in Jalalabad as part of what it called the "terrorist infrastructure of Osama Bin Laden".
They included the Hotel Spingar, the city's main hotel, where the Taleban has also housed foreign journalists in the past, and two bases outside the city.
- REUTERS
