Closing summary
The death toll from the earthquake that has risen to over 800, the Taliban government spokesperson has said, with the majority of deaths occurring in the remote Kunar province. About 800 people died and 2,500 others were injured in Kunar, spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid told a press conference in Kabul, adding that the toll of 12 dead and 255 injured in the Nangarhar province had not changed.
Filippo Grandi, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, said the earthquake intensified existing humanitarian challenges in Afghanistan and urged international donors to support relief efforts. “This adds death and destruction to other challenges including drought and the forced return of millions of Afghans from neighbouring countries,” Grandi wrote on the social media platform X.
Rescuers are operating across Afghanistan’s east, with helicopters helping bring the injured to safety, while rubble is combed through in the hunt for survivors. The Taliban interior ministry has said in a statement that the vast majority of deaths occurred in the Kunar region (610), with a further 12 deaths in Nangarhar.
An unnamed but high-ranking Taliban official in the Kunar province has told BBC News that the rescue mission is now focused on finding survivors, not the dead. He said that rescue teams have been struggling to reach wounded people because significant numbers are waiting to be airlifted by helicopters as landslides have closed most of roads.
More than 1.2 million people likely felt strong or very strong shaking after Sunday’s earthquake, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS), which recorded at least five aftershocks throughout the night. As a reminder, the magnitude 6 earthquake hit four provinces in eastern Afghanistan around midnight on Sunday, with the rugged, mountainous region of Kunar the worst affected, triggering landslides and flooding.
The Afghan Red Crescent said its officials and medical teams have “rushed to the affected areas” of the earthquake and are “providing emergency assistance to impacted families”.
Humanitarian agencies say they are fighting a forgotten crisis in Afghanistan, where the United Nations estimates more than half the population is in urgent need of humanitarian aid. “So far, no foreign governments have reached out to provide support for rescue or relief work,” a spokesperson of Afghanistan’s foreign office said on Monday.
Rescuers have been battling to reach remote mountainous areas cut off from mobile networks along the Pakistani border, where mudbrick homes dotting the slopes collapsed in the quake. “The area of the earthquake was affected by heavy rain in the last 24-48 hours as well, so the risk of landslides and rock slides is also quite significant - that is why many of the roads are impassable,” Kate Carey, an officer at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Unocha), told Reuters.
One resident in Afghanistan’s Nurgal district, one of the worst-affected areas in Kunar, said almost the entire village had collapsed under the force of the earthquake. “Children are under the rubble. The elderly are under the rubble. Young people are under the rubble,” the villager, who did not give his name, told the Associated Press.
Muhammad Aziz, a labourer from Kunar’s Nur Gul district, said 10 of his relatives, including his five children, had been killed in the earthquake and many people from his village remained trapped under the rubble. “The poor people in this area have lost everything,” he said. “There is death in every home, and beneath the rubble of each roof, there are dead bodies.”
One survivor described seeing homes collapse before his eyes and people screaming for help.
Sadiqullah, who lives in the Maza Dara area of Nurgal, said he was woken by a deep boom that sounded like a storm approaching. Like many Afghans, he uses only one name.
He ran to where his children were sleeping and rescued three of them. He was about to return to grab the rest of his family when the room fell on top of him.
“I was half-buried and unable to get out,” he told the Associated Press by phone from Nangarhar Hospital.
“My wife and two sons are dead, and my father is injured and in hospital with me. We were trapped for three to four hours until people from other areas arrived and pulled me out.”
It felt like the whole mountain was shaking, he said.
