These days, the once thriving outpatient clinic at Afghanistan's leading hospital in the capital, Kabul, is shut - and the doctors are away.

A dozen Indian doctors and paramedics who run the clinic at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Child Health have also left, leaving the patients in the lurch.

They were shaken after a suicide attack in the city last month killed one of their own - a young doctor from India's north-eastern state of Manipur.

Seventeen people were killed in the 26 February attack on a number of guest houses in the Shar-i-Naw area. Seven of them, including the doctor, were Indians.