Afghanistan has suffered one of the most devastating earthquakes in the country in recent decades. In the earthquake that struck this Saturday about 35 kilometers northwest of the city of Herat, at least 2,445 people died, more than 2,000 were injured and at least 1,300 houses were destroyed, Janan Sayeeq, spokesman for the Ministry of Emergency Situations, reported this Sunday. the Taliban government. Sayeeq had previously assured in a press conference that there were 9,000 injured.
For his part, the spokesman for the fundamentalist executive branch, Zabihullah Mujahid, assured in a tweet that rescue teams continue to search for survivors and bodies in the damaged area, about 900 kilometers west of Kabul. The images of the complete destruction of precarious clay buildings arriving from the Herat region raise fears that the number of victims will continue to rise.
The first of the seven earthquakes measuring between 4.7 and 6.3 that shook western Afghanistan this Saturday occurred at 9 a.m. local time – 7:30 a.m. in Spanish peninsular time – at a depth of 14 kilometers and 33 kilometers from Zenda Jan district of Herat, according to the United States Geological Survey. Four aftershocks followed in the next hour, followed two hours later by two more quakes.
At the start of this Sunday, the death toll has risen sharply, from the original one thousand to now over 2,400. In a country that has already reduced a very precarious infrastructure to rubble after four long decades of war, it takes a long time for information to arrive from remote areas and, moreover, rescue and relief operations that allow access to the victims are only very difficult to organize. These factors partly explain the abrupt increase in the number of victims that day.
The Afghan Red Crescent, for its part, had confirmed an even lower number of deaths at 400, according to its spokesman Irfanullah Sharafzoy. However, this spokesman warned that this number could rise as at least twelve villages in Zenda Jan, at the epicenter of the earthquake, were “totally destroyed”. Sharafzoy then explained that while humanitarian workers continued to search “in the rubble,” survivors were evacuated to safer areas.
The village of Mahal Wadakah is the town that suffered the most damage from the earthquake. As the spokesman for the Ministry of Civil Protection explained in his appearance, a dozen national and international rescue teams are deployed in the earthquake-stricken region. A report by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimated that 4,200 people, members of 600 families, were affected by the earthquake.
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A man clears debris in a town in Zindah district this Sunday Jan. Omid Haqjoo (AP)
In the village of Sarboland, in Zenda Jan, an area close to the epicenter, a journalist from the France Presse agency noted the destruction of dozens of houses. In this city, groups of men used shovels to search for survivors in the rubble of houses, while women and children waited outdoors among the ruins, the belongings they managed to rescue exposed to the sun and wind.
“As soon as the first quake came, all the houses collapsed,” said Bashir Ahmad, 42. “Those who were inside were buried. There are families we have no news about,” he added. “Everything turned to sand,” said Nek Mohammad, who was working when the first quake was felt.
“We came home and saw there was nothing left. “Everything had turned to sand,” explained this Afghan. “At the moment we have nothing. No blankets or anything like that. “We are deserted,” this 32-year-old man added.
“Devastating news from Zindajan and Ghorian districts in Herat.
12 villages were completely destroyed, with children making up the majority of victims. Our thoughts are with the affected families. We pray for the safety of the 1,500 missing. #Herat #Afghanistan… pic.twitter.com/MRFSFyGkXR— Nilofar Ayoubi 🇦🇫 (@NilofarAyoubi) October 7, 2023
The Afghan health system, which relies almost entirely on foreign aid, has suffered drastic cuts in the two years since the Taliban came to power on August 15, 2021. Much of the international funding that supported it stopped as a result. Many domestic and foreign NGOs that provided medical assistance to the population were forced to cease operations due to lack of funds.
The flight of numerous health workers from the country after the fundamentalists returned to power, as well as the Taliban’s ban on women working, have dealt two new blows to a health system that is now struggling with a very high number of people injured by the earthquake, some of it very difficult. Although it is assumed that Afghan women working in the health sector can continue to work, it is not clear whether this exception to the ban on women working in the profession will be respected in all cases.
In Herat, considered Afghanistan’s cultural capital, panicked residents and traders poured onto the streets as they felt the initial shock. Herat, 120 kilometers east of the border with Iran, is the capital of the province of the same name, which is home to around 1.9 million people, according to 2019 data from the World Bank.
Afghanistan is a country with a high risk of earthquakes. The Hindu Kush Mountains, stretching across the territory of Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan, are a site of major seismic activity and a common source of telluric movements. The vulnerability of the population, who live in precarious clay buildings in rural areas and usually have no access to medical care, increases the risk that a natural disaster like the one on Saturday will cause a high number of victims. The United Nations World Food Program estimates that 15 million people in Afghanistan currently rely on humanitarian aid for food out of a total population of 43 million.
At the end of June last year, a similar magnitude 5.9 earthquake in the eastern Afghan provinces of Paktika and Khost on the border with Pakistan caused the deaths of more than 1,000 people and around 1,500 injuries, as well as the destruction of hundreds of homes.
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