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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.
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“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.
