KABUL, Afghanistan
A powerful earthquake in a remote area of Afghanistan’s Paktika province has killed at least 1,000 people and injured at least 1,500, with the toll expected to rise in the impoverished country.
According to Taliban officials,
hundreds more were injured in what appears to have been the deadliest quake in
two decades, striking during the night with heavy rain hampering rescue
efforts.
Footage from Paktika showed
people being carried into helicopters to be airlifted from the area. Others
were treated on the ground. One resident could be seen receiving IV fluids
while sitting in a plastic chair outside the rubble of his home and still more
were sprawled on stretchers.
Karim Nyazai was in the
provincial capital and returned immediately to find his village devastated and
22 members of his extended family dead.
“I was away from my family who
live in a remote village in the Gyan district. I went there as soon as I could
find a car in the early morning,” he told the Guardian.
“The entire village is buried.
Those who could manage to get out before everything fell down were managing to
take out the bodies of their loved ones out of the rubble. There were bodies
wrapped in blankets everywhere.
“I lost 22 members of my [extended family] including my sister, and three of my brothers. More than 70 people in the village died.”
In the immediate aftermath of
the disaster, Bilal Karimi, a deputy spokesperson for the Taliban government,
called for aid agencies to assist with the emergency efforts. “We urge all aid
agencies to send teams to the area immediately to prevent further catastrophe,”
he said.
In response, the UN and EU
were quick to offer help.
“Inter-agency assessment teams
have already been deployed to a number of affected areas,” tweeted the UN
office for humanitarian affairs in Afghanistan.
Tomas Niklasson, the EU
special envoy for Afghanistan, tweeted: “The EU is monitoring the situation and
stands ready to coordinate and provide EU emergency assistance to people and
communities affected.”
With photographs from the area
showing collapsed houses and bodies being dug out of the rubble, a tribal
leader from Paktika province, Yaqub Manzor, said survivors and rescuers were
scrambling to help those affected.
“The local markets are closed
and all the people have rushed to the affected areas,” Manzor told the AFP news
agency by telephone.
The Afghan prime minister,
Mohammad Hassan Akhund, convened an emergency meeting at the presidential
palace to coordinate the relief effort for victims in Paktika and Khost, a
neighbouring province.
Earlier, Abdul Wahid Rayan, the director general of the Bakthar news agency, said the areas hit by the earthquake were in mountainous regions, meaning rescue work required helicopters.
But he added: “Afghanistan has
a shortage of helicopters and these areas being hard to access is making relief
work difficult.”
Rayan said 90 houses had been
destroyed in Gayan, a district in the north of Paktika.
The centre of the earthquake –
estimated by Pakistan to have had a magnitude of 6.1 and 5.9 by the US
Geological Survey – occurred about 30 miles south-west of the city of Khost. It
occurred at the relatively shallow depth of 6 miles, worsening its impact.
Tremors were noticed in
neighbouring countries, with “strong and long jolts” felt in the Afghan
capital, Kabul, according to a resident who posted on the website of the European-Mediterranean
Seismological Centre.
Deaths were also reported in
the eastern provinces of Khost and Nangarhar, said Mohammad Nassim Haqqani, the
head of the Afghan disaster-response authority.
Rescue efforts are likely to
be complicated since many international aid agencies left Afghanistan after the
Taliban took control last year and the chaotic withdrawal of the US military
from the longest war in its history. Rescuers rushed to the area by helicopter.
The death toll, given by
Afghan emergency official Mawlawi Sharafuddin Muslim, made it the deadliest
quake since 2002, when a 6.1-magnitude tremor killed about 1,000 people in
northern Afghanistan, immediately after the US-led invasion overthrew the
Taliban government after the 9/11 attacks.
Pakistan’s prime minister,
Shehbaz Sharif, offered his condolences over the earthquake in a statement,
saying his nation would provide help to the Afghan people. At the Vatican, Pope
Francis offered prayers for all those killed and injured and for the “suffering
of the dear Afghan population”.
Afghanistan and the larger region of south Asia along the Hindu Kush mountains
has long been vulnerable to devastating earthquakes.
The disaster comes as
Afghanistan grapples with a severe economic crisis that has gripped it since
the Taliban takeover.
In response to the new regime,
many nations imposed sanctions on Afghanistan’s banking sector and cut billions
of dollars worth of development aid. Humanitarian aid has continued, however,
with international agencies such as the UN still operating.
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