Afghanistan Earthquake : "Children are Under the Rubble"

"Children are under the rubble. The elderly are under the rubble. Young people are under the rubble."

"We need help here. We need people to come here and join us. Let us pull out the people who are buried."

"There is no one who can come and remove dead bodies from under the rubble."

Nurgal district resident

 

"I was half-buried and unable to get out."

"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."

Sadiqullah, resident of Maza Dara area, Nurgal

 

"[The death toll had risen to at least 800 with more than 3,500 injured; most casualties were in Kunar]."

"Helicopters reached some areas but road travel was difficult]."

"There are some villages where the injured and dead haven't been recovered from the rubble, so that's why the numbers may increase."

Zabihullah Mujahid, chief spokesman, Taliban 

Residents walk by a house destroyed by the earthquake in Maza Dara, Kunar province, Afghanistan. Photograph: Wahidullah Kakar/AP

By Tuesday, following the Sunday tremblor, the death toll from a major earthquake in eastern Afghanistan passed 1,400 on Tuesday, with over 3,000 people injured. "We cannot afford to forget the people of Afghanistan who are facing multiple crises, multiple shocks, and the resilience of the communities has been saturated," said Indrika Ratwatte, the UN's resident co-ordinator for Afghanistan, urging the international community to step forward. "These are life and death decisions while we race against time to reach people." 

 

In desperate times of natural disasters, people living remotely in areas where access is difficult and made more so by conditions wrought by an earth upheaval, people are left to their desperate attempts to give aid to those among them unfortunate enough to be caught in the destruction of a shallow earthquake. Eastern Afghanistan teetered under the shock of a 6.0 magnitude quake, late Sunday. Before outside rescue assistance could arrive, locals were frantically trying to dig victims out from the rubble, moving it by hand.

 

According to one resident in Nurgal district where the quake hit villages in Kunar province not far from the city of Jalalabad, his entire village had been destroyed. The quake, hitting before midnight, was centred 27 kilometers east-north-east of Jalalabad, at an eight-kilometre depth. More damage tends to ensue with quakes of shallow depth. Aftershocks that followed the original quake, add to the panic and fear and ongoing danger and damage. 

 

An earthquake of magnitude 5.5 shook southeastern Afghanistan on Tuesday, sparking fears of further destruction almost two days after a large quake in the same region killed more than 1,400 people and injured thousands more. CBC News

 

Rescuers were seen in footage, taking injured people from collapsed buildings on stretchers, placing them into helicopters. Most casualties from the quake were located, according to the Taliban government's spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, in Kunar. Pakistan felt the quake as far as its capital, Islamabad, although no reports of casualties or damage have come out of Pakistan. 

 

Eastern Afghanistan communities are located in remote areas, within the mountainous landscape. Roads have been blocked and people are unable to communicate, while aid workers are forced to walk four or five hours before reaching  survivors. Rescue flights have operated out of Nangarhar Airport to  transport the rescued injured to hospitals for emergency care.

 

Low-rise constructions, of concrete and brick are hugely susceptible to earthquake damage, as are the homes constructed with mud bricks and wood. That they are poorly built, makes them more susceptible to damage. Homes were seen to collapse by one survivors, accompanied by the sounds of people screaming for help. Sadiqullah described being wakened by a deep boom he took for the warning signals of an approaching storm.

 

Once awake, he rushed to his children's sleeping quarters and was able to bring three of them to safety. On the cusp of returning to bring the remainder of his family out of danger, the room he was in collapsed on top of him. It felt, he explained, as though the entire mountain was shaking. Medical teams from Kunar, Nangarhar and the national capital Kabul, arrived in the area finally. 

 

A health ministry spokesman, Sharafat Zaman, explained further that many areas had been unable to report casualty figures, and "the numbers were expected to change as deaths and injuries are  reported".  Sherine Ibraham, country director for the aid agency, described entire roads and communities cut off from accessing nearby towns or hospital. "Although we have been able to act fast, we are profoundly fearful for the additional strain this will have on the overall humanitarian response in Afghanistan", he stated. 

 

 

A deadly earthquake in northeastern Afghanistan has killed more than 1,400 people and injured at least 3,000, according to the Taliban. Afghan volunteers and Taliban security personnel transfer the injured to a military helicopter in the Mazar Dara village of Nurgal, a district of Kunar province on Monday. (Wakil Kohsar/AFP/Getty Images)

 

In a statement by the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, immediate needs include search and rescue support, emergency health care and medical supplies, food, clean water, and restoration of road access to reach isolated communities. In October of 2023 a magnitude 6.3 earthquake had hit Afghanistan, with strong aftershocks following. An estimated 4,000 people died in that quake, according to the Taliban.

 

Now, according to the International Rescue Committee, Sunday's earthquake in Afghanistan was expected to "dwarf the scale of the humanitarian needs" that the 2023 disaster had caused. 

 

Civil defense workers, locals, and army soldiers prepare to evacuate injured victims of an earthquake that killed hundreds and destroyed numerous villages in eastern Afghanistan, in Mazar Dara, Kunar province, Monday, Sept. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Hedayat Shah)