At least 500 people were killed and more than 1,000 others injured by a 6-magnitude earthquake in eastern Afghanistan, the national broadcaster said on Monday. Officials said the death toll was likely to rise significantly as rescue workers rushed to reach communities in mountainous areas hit by the quake.
The epicenter of the quake late Sunday was near Jalalabad, a city of about 200,000 people, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. Less than 100 miles away, residents of Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, fled their homes as aftershocks were felt across the city throughout the night.
The quake was a shallow one, just five miles from the earth’s surface, which made it likelier to be destructive. Soon after the initial shaking stopped, people scrambled in the middle of the night to reach neighbors trapped under the debris of collapsed houses, according to videos shared on social media.
Road access was difficult for rescue workers in the area’s steep terrain, where landslides had struck, said Kate Carey, the deputy head of the United Nations’ office of humanitarian affairs in Afghanistan. She said at least four eastern provinces, Nangahar, Nuristan, Laghman and Kunar, had been affected by the quake.
Earthquakes are a prevalent danger in Afghanistan and other countries in the region, where many people live on or near geological faults. Many of Afghanistan’s most densely populated towns and cities sit on or near faultlines. In 2022, a 5.9-magnitude quake struck in a remote area of Afghanistan’s southeast, killing at least 1,300 people, according to the United Nations. The Taliban, who have ruled Afghanistan since 2021, said at the time that more than 4,000 people had died.
On Monday, Sharafat Amar, a spokesman for Afghanistan’s Ministry of Health, said on X that several villages had been completely destroyed.
In neighboring Pakistan, tremors were felt across several districts of the northwestern border province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, as well in as parts of Punjab Province, the Pakistan-administered part of Kashmir and the capital, Islamabad, the Pakistan Meteorological Department said. No major damage or casualties have been reported in Pakistan so far, officials said.
The quake is the latest in a series of overlapping crises for Afghanistan. Hundreds of hospitals and health care centers have been forced to shut down since the Trump administration suspended U.S. foreign aid earlier this year. More than two million Afghan nationals have returned to the country, in some cases by force, after being expelled from Pakistan or Iran amid a wave of xenophobia and political pressure in those countries.
More had been scheduled to arrive in the coming days: The earthquake on Sunday hit as many Afghans living in Pakistan were traveling to Afghanistan, ahead of a Monday deadline set by the Pakistani government for all of them to leave or face arrest and deportation.
Zia ur-Rehman contributed reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan.
Elian Peltier is an international correspondent for The Times, covering Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Mike Ives is a reporter for The Times based in Seoul, covering breaking news around the world.
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