Death toll continues to rise after earthquake in eastern Afghanistan

Kabul: The death toll following an earthquake in Afghanistan on Wednesday has risen to 1000, another 1500 have been left injured.

That latest figure came from the state-run Bakhtar news agency as officials tried to help those affected after the magnitude-6.1 earthquake struck the Paktika province in the east of the country.

Afghans look at the destruction caused by an earthquake in the province of Paktika, eastern Afghanistan.Credit: Bakhtar/AP

Rescue efforts are likely to be complicated since many international aid agencies left Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover last year and the chaotic withdrawal of the US military from the longest war in its history.

But humanitarian aid has continued and international agencies such as the UN operate in the country.

In a rare move, the Taliban’s supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzadah, who almost never appears in public, pleaded with the international community and humanitarian organisations “to help the Afghan people affected by this great tragedy and to spare no effort to help the affected people.”

The Interior Ministry said the death toll was likely to rise “as some of the villages are in remote areas in the mountains and it will take some time to collect details”.

Afghan children stand near a house that was destroyed in an earthquake in the Spera District of the southwestern part of Khost Provinc.Credit: AP Photo

The quake struck early on Wednesday (Kabul time) about 44 kilometres from the city of Khost, near the Pakistani border. The US Geological Survey (USGS) put the quake’s depth at 10 kilometres. Shallow earthquakes tend to be felt further away.

Pakistan’s Meteorological Department put the quake’s magnitude at 6.1, the USGS has it at 5.9. Tremors were felt in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, and elsewhere in the eastern Punjab province.

The European seismological agency (EMSC) said the quake was felt more than 500 kilometres away and by 119 million people across Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

The death toll continues to climb after an earthquake in Afghanistan on Wednesday.Credit: Twitter/@AWahidRayan1/Bakhtar News Agency 

“Strong and long jolts,” a resident of the Afghan capital, Kabul, posted on the website of the EMSC.

“It was strong,” said a resident of the north-western Pakistani city of Peshawar.

At least 2000 homes were destroyed in the region, where on average every home has seven or eight people living in it, said Ramiz Alakbarov, the United Nations’ deputy special representative to Afghanistan.

Earthquake victims from Kayani, Paktika, are treated in hospital.Credit: Twitter/@AWahidRayan1/Bakhtar News Agency 

In Kabul, Prime Minister Mohammad Hassan Akhund convened an emergency meeting at the Presidential Palace to coordinate the relief effort.

“When such a big incident happens in any country, there is a need for help from other countries,” said Sharafuddin Muslim, deputy minister of state for disaster management. “It is very difficult for us to be able to respond to this huge incident.”

That may prove difficult given the international isolation of Afghanistan under the Taliban, who were toppled from power by the US after the 9/11 attacks. The newly restored government has issued a flurry of edicts curtailing the rights of women and girls and the news media in a turn back towards its harsh rule from the late 1990s.

The UN’s Ramiz Alakbarov expressed condolences to the victims and said that the world body’s agencies were responding to the earthquake’s devastation.

“Response is on its way,” he wrote on Twitter.

The Bakhtar news agency’s director-general, Abdul Wahid Rayan, earlier wrote on Twitter that 90 houses had been destroyed in Paktika and dozens of people were believed trapped under the rubble.

Footage from Paktika province near the Pakistan border showed victims being carried into helicopters. Images widely circulating online from the province showed destroyed stone houses, with residents picking through clay bricks and other rubble.

“A severe earthquake shook four districts of Paktika province, killing and injuring hundreds of our countrymen and destroying dozens of houses,” Bilal Karimi, a deputy spokesman for the Taliban government, wrote on Twitter. “We urge all aid agencies to send teams to the area immediately to prevent further catastrophe.”

In neighbouring Khost province, authorities believed there were also dozens injured and dead in the earthquake, Rayan said.

Mountainous Afghanistan and the larger region of south Asia along the Hindu Kush mountains, where the Indian tectonic plate collides with the Eurasian plate to the north, has long been vulnerable to devastating earthquakes.

Poor construction for homes, hospitals and other buildings put them at risk of collapse in earthquakes, while landslides remain commons across the mountains of Afghanistan.

A damaged house after an earthquake in Badghis, Afghanistan, earlier this year.Credit: AP

“The fear is that the victims will increase further, also because many people could be trapped under collapsed buildings,” said Stefano Sozza, Afghanistan country director for the Italian medical aid group Emergency.

Emergency, which was dispensing humanitarian aid in Afghanistan before the disaster, sent seven ambulances and staff to areas near the quake zone.

In 2015, a major earthquake that struck the country’s north-east killed over 200 people in Afghanistan and neighbouring northern Pakistan. A similar 6.1 earthquake in 2002 killed about 1000 people in northern Afghanistan. And in 1998, a 6.1-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tremors in Afghanistan’s remote north-east killed at least 4500 people.

AP, Reuters

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