For Mohammad Salim Taraki, Tuesday night was the longest of his life.
His ordeal began at about 10pm when he looked out of his hotel room and saw a squad of eight heavily armed insurgents running toward the lobby. For the next six and a half hours all he heard was gunfire and explosions.
From the floors above him came the sound of militants moving from room to room trying to find people to kill, in what is one of the largest and complex attacks ever mounted in the Afghan capital.
"They broke open the doors brought the people out and killed them," Taraki said. "I am a Muslim and I was waiting for my turn."
Taraki, who is mayor of the western city of Herat, was just one of many regional chiefs staying at the hotel who had travelled to Kabul for a two day conference on the handover of security responsibilities to Afghan forces in the coming years.
At the time he said he had no confidence that Afghan forces would come to his help in time, despite receiving several calls from the Kabul police chief and the country's interior minister, who said their men had the situation under control.
"I was not even one per cent hopeful that I would survive," he said.
Adding to his alarm were continuous calls from his panicking family who were watching the siege on the other side of the country on television.
One American guest reportedly used the hours of chaos to write a will. Others jumped out of windows to escape.
In total, nine Afghan civilians, mostly hotel workers in the lobby, and two police officers were killed. A Spanish citizen was also killed; he was reportedly an airline pilot who was on a stopover in Kabul.
Two Britons were also "caught up" in the attack, William Hague, the foreign secretary, said yesterday, but escaped unhurt. Eighteen people were wounded, the interior ministry said.
Three insurgents were shot dead while five blew themselves up, the National Directorate of Security (NDS) said. When Taraki opened his door in the early morning he saw body parts "everywhere", both inside and outside the hotel.
The bloody siege of the hilltop hotel, and the global media coverage it received, risks dealing a heavy psychological blow both inside and outside a country that is supposed to be capable of defending itself without Nato help by the end of 2014.
Anxious to dampen such concerns about foreign troop withdrawal, Hamid Karzai said the attack by militants who are "enjoying the killing of innocent people" would not stop the transfer of responsibility to Afghan forces, which is due to start next month with seven key cities and provinces being handed over.
The Afghan government declared the attack "unsuccessful" and said their own security forces, primarily police and an army commando unit, had almost single handed brought the assault to a relatively swift conclusion.
The NDS declared the attack "unsuccessful", saying the nine gunmen, who bypassed the hotel's two checkpoints by simply walking up a different side of the hill and cutting through a perimeter fence, had failed to cause "serious damage".
"They are staging these attacks to show that Afghan forces are not capable of taking the security of our country, but this latest incident proves we are capable," a NDS spokesman said.
He compared it to the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, and the siege of the Taj Mahal hotel, which took far longer to break.
Although Afghans may have led the charge, they also received support from a Nato quick reaction force, which included a US Blackhawk and an overhead drone that relayed video information.
The helicopter, which fired on and killed three raiders who were firing rocket propelled grenades from the roof of the hotel, was carrying sharpshooters from the New Zealand SAS. New Zealand's defence ministry said two of its special forces soldiers were wounded. A military source in Kabul said one of them was a member of a second SAS unit who was injured when a pair of grenades exploded inside the hotel.
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