A devastating earthquake kills at least 2,400 people in Afghanistan, according to the Taliban government international

Afghanistan was hit by one of the most devastating earthquakes in recent decades in the country. In the earthquake that occurred on Saturday, about 35 kilometers northwest of the city of Herat, at least 2,445 people were killed, while more than 9,000 others were injured, and at least 1,300 homes were destroyed, the organization’s spokesman, Janan Sayeq, said on Sunday at a conference. Journalist. Ministry of Disasters of the Taliban government. The spokesman for the fundamentalist executive authority, Zabihullah Mujahid, previously confirmed in a tweet on Twitter that rescue teams continue to search for survivors and bodies in the affected area, located about 900 kilometers west of Kabul. Images of the complete destruction of mud-brick buildings arriving from the Herat region raise fears that the number of casualties will continue to increase.

The first of seven earthquakes with magnitudes between 4.7 and 6.3 that shook western Afghanistan occurred on Saturday at 9 a.m. local time – 7:30 a.m. Spanish Peninsula time – at a depth of 14 kilometers and 33 kilometers upstream of the Zinda River. Herat region, according to the US Geological Survey. This was followed by four aftershocks in the next hour, followed by two more two hours later.

Early Sunday, the death toll rose sharply from 1,000 people reported to more than 2,400 so far. In a country left by four long decades of war and a very unstable infrastructure in ruins, information from remote areas takes time to arrive and, moreover, it is very difficult to organize rescue and relief operations that allow access to victims. These factors partly explain the sudden jump in the number of victims today.

The Afghan Red Crescent, for its part, confirmed a much lower death toll, 400, according to its spokesman Irfanullah Sharafzoi. But this spokesman warned that this number may rise, given that at least 12 villages in Zinda Jan, the epicenter, were “completely destroyed.” Sharafzoi then explained that while the humanitarian organization’s staff continued to search “through the rubble”, survivors had been evacuated to safer areas.

The village of Mahal and Dakka is the town that suffered the most damage from the earthquake. As the Disaster Ministry spokesman mentioned in his speech, dozens of national and international rescue teams have been deployed in the earthquake-hit area. A report issued by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimated that 4,200 people, from 600 families, were affected by the earthquake.

In the village of Sarbuland in the Zinda Jan area, close to the epicenter of the earthquake, an Agence France-Presse journalist noted that dozens of homes were destroyed. Groups of men in that town searched, digging with shovels, for survivors among the rubble of homes, while women and children waited in the open among the rubble, with the possessions they were able to save exposed to the sun and wind.

“As soon as the first earthquake happened, all the houses collapsed,” Bashir Ahmed, 42, said. “Those who were inside were buried. There are families we have no news about,” he added. “Everything turned into sand,” said Nick Mohammed, who was working when he felt the first quake.

“We came home and saw that there was nothing left. Everything had turned into sand,” this Afghan explained. “Right now, we don’t have anything. No blankets or anything. “We have been abandoned,” the 32-year-old added.

The Afghan health system, which relies almost entirely on foreign aid, has suffered severe cuts in the past two years since the Taliban seized power on August 15, 2021. Much of the international funding that supports it was then cut off. Many national and foreign NGOs providing medical assistance to the population were forced to stop doing so due to lack of funds.

The flight of many health workers from the country after the return of fundamentalists to power, as well as the ban on women from working by the Taliban, have dealt a new blow to the health system that will now have to cope with very large numbers of patients. Of those injured in the earthquake, some are very seriously injured. Although it is assumed that Afghan women who work as health care workers can continue to do so, it is not clear whether this exception to the ban on women working has been respected in all cases.

In Herat, considered the cultural capital of Afghanistan, residents and merchants rushed to the streets in panic when they felt the first shock. Herat is located 120 kilometers east of the border with Iran, and is the capital of the province of the same name, where about 1.9 million people live, according to World Bank data for 2019.

Afghanistan is a country with a high risk of earthquakes. The Hindu Kush mountain range, extending over the territory of Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan, is a place of great seismic activity and a common starting point for telluric movements. The vulnerability of the population, who live in rural areas in precarious mud-brick buildings and often lack medical care, increases the risk that a natural disaster like Saturday’s could cause a large number of casualties. The United Nations World Food Program estimates that there are currently 15 million people in Afghanistan, out of a total population of 43 million, who depend on humanitarian aid for food.

At the end of June last year, a similar earthquake – with a magnitude of 5.9 – in the Paktika and Khost provinces of eastern Afghanistan, on the border with Pakistan, killed more than 1,000 people and injured about 1,500 others, in addition to destroying hundreds of homes. .

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