It was almost midnight when Hameed Jan was jolted awake in his bed by a deep rumble. Powerful tremors were shaking his small house in Piran village, in Afghanistan’s Kunar region, and he could see the walls beginning to crack.
“I jumped out of bed and rushed to where my children and parents were sleeping,” Jan said. “I managed to rescue two of my children and brought them outside to safety. I went back inside to save my younger siblings, but as I did the roof and walls collapsed around me.”
As the magnitude-6 earthquake hit eastern Afghanistan late on Sunday night, Jan found himself buried in the rubble of his own house. As much as he tried to claw at the debris, he struggled to push his head through the wreckage. It took villagers five hours to finally free him. When he finally broke through, he was greeted with scenes of tragedy and devastation.
His wife, two sons and two brothers were among the dead after the powerful earthquake had razed entire villages across the region to the ground. In the poverty-stricken, mountainous terrain of Kunar, most homes in the affected villages had been made only of mud, giving people little defence from the debris and floods caused by the earthquake when it struck as they slept. Most homes lay in piles of rubble or had been washed away entirely.
“It felt as if the entire mountain was collapsing on us,” Jan said. “Our village has been completely devastated and residential areas wiped out.”
The official death toll stood at 800 on Monday evening, with more than 2,500 injured, and was widely expected to rise significantly. Many in the villages of Kunar remained unaccounted for and rescuers continued to pull bodies from the rubble as all local hospitals declared a state of emergency.
The Taliban, who took control of the country more than four years ago when its internationally recognised government collapsed, dispatched helicopters but many areas remained impossible to access.
Sanaullah, another resident of Kunar province, had been away from his village when the earthquake struck. When he travelled back on Monday, he found that his house had been reduced to rubble and his brother had been killed alongside his five children. “It is the story of each and every house here,” he said. “Everyone I know here has lost at least three to five family members.”
Abdul Rahim, a cleric in Kunar, said graveyards in Mazar valley in Kunar were now overflowing with the dead. “Everywhere people are crying and embracing one another following a mass funeral,” he said. “The death toll is so high that graveyards are overflowing, and local people are busy digging graves in advance as bodies arrive every half hour.”
Many of those affected were critical of the rescue efforts by the Taliban, which was widely seen to lack the resources, manpower and funds to deal with a crisis on this scale. Since the Taliban retook power in 2021, it has become increasingly difficult for NGOs to operate in the country, particularly amid the draconian ban on women’s employment and education, and most foreign governments have withdrawn aid from Afghanistan, now one of the poorest countries in the world.
Sohail Shaheen, a Taliban spokesperson, called on international organisations to step in and offer assistance in the wake of the disaster. “Many villages are not accessible yet,” he said. “I fear the casualties are very high.”
One resident from the Maza Dara area, who asked to remain anonymous to speak freely, criticised the Taliban rescue efforts. “There are women and children pleading for help but there are no authorities present to help them,” he said.
“Everyone is trapped under the rubble and we are helpless and seeing them dying in front of our eyes,” he added. “There is no one here to help those buried and alive in the debris. There is no one here to remove the dead.”
