At least a thousand people were killed in the powerful earthquake that struck southeastern Afghanistan overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday, according to a senior official from one of the worst affected provinces.
“The death toll has reached 1,000 dead and this figure is increasing. People are digging grave after grave,” Paktika Province Information and Culture Department Chief Mohammad Amin Huzaifa said in a message to the press.
The toll could rise further as many people remain trapped under the rubble of their demolished homes.
“We call on aid agencies to provide immediate relief to the victims of the earthquake in order to avert a humanitarian catastrophe,” deputy government spokesman Bilal Karimi tweeted.
The earthquake, with a magnitude of 5.9, occurred at a depth of 10 km around 1:30 a.m. Wednesday, very close to the border with Pakistan, according to the American Seismological Institute (USGS).
A second quake of magnitude 4.5 hit almost the same place at the same time, according to the USGS.
According to Yaqub Manzor, a tribal leader from Paktika, many of the injured came from Giyan district in the province and were taken to hospital by ambulances and also helicopters.
“Local markets are closed and people have rushed [pour aider] in the affected areas,” he told AFP by telephone.
Photos posted on social networks show collapsed houses in the streets of a village, in this poor and difficult to access rural region.
Videos also show residents of the affected areas loading injured people into a helicopter.
“Much of the region is mountainous and travel is difficult. It will take time to transport the dead and injured,” said Minister of Natural Disasters Mohammad Abbas Akhund.
Limited in number and capacity for a long time, the emergency services in Afghanistan are unsuited to dealing alone with a major natural disaster.
“The government is doing the best it can,” tweeted Anas Haqqani, another senior Taliban official. “We hope that the international community and humanitarian organizations will also help people in this terrible situation. »
Frequent earthquakes
The earthquake was felt in several provinces of the region and also in the capital Kabul located about 200 km north of its epicenter.
It was also in neighboring Pakistan where one person was killed and a few houses damaged.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said he was “deeply saddened” by this tragedy and indicated that the Pakistani authorities were working to support their Afghan counterparts.
“The European Union is monitoring the situation […] and stands ready to coordinate and provide emergency assistance,” his special envoy to Afghanistan, Tomas Niklasson, also tweeted.
The UN announced that it had deployed teams to assess the extent of the damage in several of the affected areas and, from the Vatican, Pope Francis expressed his “sympathy” to the victims.
Afghanistan is frequently hit by earthquakes, particularly in the Hindu Kush mountain range which lies at the junction between the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates.
These disasters can be particularly devastating due to the weak resilience of rural Afghan homes.
In October 2015, a powerful earthquake of magnitude 7.5 hit the Hindu Kush range, straddling Afghanistan and Pakistan, killing more than 380 people in these two countries.
Since the Taliban came to power in Kabul in August 2021, Afghanistan has been plunged into a serious financial and humanitarian crisis caused by the freezing of billions of assets held abroad and the abrupt cessation of international aid. which carried the country at arm’s length for 20 years and which is now coming back in dribs and drabs.