Kabul, September 1: At least 622 people have died and over 1,500 were injured after a magnitude 6 earthquake struck eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistan border, officials said Monday. The quake, which hit the Jalalabad area around midnight local time, razed villages and left countless residents trapped under rubble, as helicopters ferried the wounded to hospitals.
The Taliban-run Afghan interior ministry reported that the provinces of Kunar and Nangarhar were the hardest hit, with at least 610 deaths in Kunar and 12 in Nangarhar. Numerous homes were destroyed, and entire villages were flattened.
“All our … teams have been mobilised to accelerate assistance, so that comprehensive and full support can be provided,” ministry spokesperson Abdul Maten Qanee told Reuters, noting efforts spanning security, food, and health services.
Images from Reuters Television showed residents helping soldiers and medics carry the wounded to ambulances while helicopters evacuated victims from remote areas. Rescuers raced to reach scattered hamlets in a region with a long history of earthquakes and floods.
The quake struck at a shallow depth of 10 km (6 miles) in the Hindu Kush mountain range, an area prone to deadly tremors where the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates meet. Military teams conducted 40 flights transporting 420 wounded and deceased victims, the defence ministry said.
“So far, no foreign governments have reached out to provide support for rescue or relief work,” a foreign office spokesperson added.
The disaster compounds the challenges facing Afghanistan, already strained by humanitarian crises, including sharp cuts in aid and pushbacks of its citizens from neighbouring countries. Last year, a series of earthquakes in western Afghanistan killed more than 1,000 people, highlighting the vulnerability of one of the world’s poorest nations to natural disasters.
This earthquake is Afghanistan’s deadliest since June 2022, when tremors of magnitude 6.1 killed at least 1,000 people. Authorities continue to comb rubble in hopes of finding survivors.
