In Kabul, Prime Minister Mohammad Hassan Akhund convened an emergency meeting at the presidential palace to coordinate the relief effort, and Bilal Karimi, a deputy spokesman for the Taliban government, wrote on Twitter to urge aid agencies to send teams to the area. The Taliban are still trying to reconstitute government ministries abandoned by staff loyal to its previous Western-backed government, and it was not clear how officials arrived at the casualty tolls reported by Bakhtar. “Due to how condensed the area is in that part of the world, we’ve seen in the past similar earthquakes deal significant damage.” Older buildings are likely to crumble and fail,” he said. “Because of the mountainous area, there are rockslides and landslides that we won’t know about until later reporting. But a quake’s death toll more often comes down to geography, building quality, and population density. In most places in the world, an earthquake of that magnitude wouldn’t inflict such extensive devastation, said Robert Sanders, a seismologist with the U.S. Those are the deadliest since 1998, when a 6.1 magnitude earthquake and subsequent tremors in Afghanistan’s remote northeast killed at least 4,500 people. The death toll given by the Bakhtar News Agency was equal to that of a quake in 2002 in northern Afghanistan. Some images showed residents picking through clay bricks and other rubble from destroyed stone houses, some of whose roofs or walls had caved in. 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 gurneys.
Buildings were also damaged in Khost province, and tremors were felt some 375 kilometers (230 miles) away in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.įootage from Paktika showed men carrying people in blankets to waiting helicopters. Neighboring Pakistan’s Meteorological Department said the quake’s epicenter was in Afghanistan’s Paktika province, some 50 kilometers (31 miles) southwest of the city of Khost. “It is very difficult for us to be able to respond to this huge incident.” “When such a big incident happens in any country, there is a need for help from other countries,” said Sharafuddin Muslim. What underlies US inertia on mass shootings? It may be lack of trust. In light of those difficulties, a Taliban official asked for international help. Reaching rural areas even in the best circumstances remains difficult in Afghanistan, a landlocked nation just smaller than Texas with rutted mountain roadways that may now have sustained significant damage. Rescuers rushed to the area by helicopter Wednesday, but the response is likely to be complicated since many international aid agencies left Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover. The disaster posed a major test for the Taliban-led government, which seized power last year as the United States planned to pull out from the country and end its longest war, two decades after toppling the same insurgents in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Experts put the depth at just 10 kilometers (6 miles) – another factor that could lead to severe destruction. Information remained scarce on the magnitude 6.1 earthquake near the Pakistani border, but quakes of that strength can cause serious damage in an area where homes and other buildings are poorly constructed and landslides are common.
Officials warned that the already grim toll may still rise. A powerful earthquake struck a rural, mountainous region of eastern Afghanistan early Wednesday, killing 1,000 people and injuring 1,500 more in one of the deadliest quakes in decades, the state-run news agency reported.
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