Kabul is mourning the victims of a truck bomb that killed at least 80 people and wounded hundreds amid growing public anger at the government's failure to prevent yet another deadly attack in the heart of the Afghan capital.
Wednesday's blast, at the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, ripped through a traffic-clogged street packed with people on their way to school or work during the morning rush hour, causing hundreds of casualties in an instant and sending a tower of black smoke into the sky.
President Ashraf Ghani made a televised address late on Wednesday, calling for national unity in the face of the attack, which his National Directorate for Security blamed on the Taliban-affiliated Haqqani network, but he faces an increasingly angry public.
"For God's sake, what is happening to this country?" said Ghulam Sakhi, a shoemaker whose shop is close to the site of the blast. "People leave home to fetch a loaf of bread for their children and later that evening, their dead body is sent back to the family."
The explosion occurred near the German embassy at one of the entrances to Kabul's unofficial Green Zone, a haphazard warren of concrete blast walls and sandbagged check points that has grown up around the diplomatic quarter over the years as the insurgency has intensified.
While the sewage tanker carrying the bomb was stopped from entering the zone, it was unclear how such a large quantity of explosives could get through the ring of checkpoints set up around Kabul to protect the capital.
A huge crater ripped into the ground at the site of the blast and shattered windows in houses more than a kilometre away were testament to the power of the explosion, which was set off by a bomb concealed in the tanker.
Several embassies were damaged and a number of foreigners wounded, but the majority of victims were, as ever in such attacks, Afghan civilians.
There has been no claim of responsibility but Afghanistan's National Directorate for Security blamed the Haqqani network, a Taliban affiliate directly integrated into the militant movement, and said it had been helped by Pakistan's intelligence service.
The Taliban have denied involvement.
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