More than 800 people were killed and 2,500 were injured after a 6.0-magnitude earthquake rocked the mountainous areas of eastern Afghanistan on Sunday night, Afghan officials said on Monday The death toll would probably rise, they added, as rescue workers scrambled to reach communities stranded in isolated valleys hardly reachable by road.
The epicenter of the quake was near Jalalabad, a city of about 200,000 people, but most of the destruction took place in the province of Kunar, north of Jalalabad, where dozens of villages with mud and brick houses were hit. Less than 100 miles away, residents of Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, felt the aftershocks across the city throughout the night, but no major damage was reported.
The quake was a shallow one, just five miles from the earth’s surface, which made it likelier to be more destructive, as shallower waves retain more of their power when hitting the surface. 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, Nangarhar, Nuristan, Laghman and Kunar, had been affected by the quake.
Homa Nader, the acting head of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent in Afghanistan, said it took Red Cross teams from Jalalabad four hours overnight to reach the most affected area, in Nur Gal district, just 35 miles away.
Hospitals were operational in both Kunar and Nangarhar with no significant damage, Ms. Nader said, while health centers in three districts of Kunar reported minor structural damages. One village, Maza Dala, was completely blocked and victims could only be carried out by helicopter, she said by telephone.
Zabiullah Mujahid, the Taliban’s chief spokesman, told a news conference in Kabul on Monday that said 800 people had been killed and 2,500 injured in Kunar province alone. In Nangarhar province, he said, at least 12 people were killed and 255 were injured.
Earthquakes are a prevalent danger in Afghanistan and other countries in the region, where many people live on or near geological faults. In 2022, a 5.9-magnitude quake that struck a remote area of Afghanistan’s southeast killed 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.
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 2.3 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 are scheduled to arrive in the coming days. The earthquake hit while many Afghans living in Pakistan were on their way to Afghanistan, ahead of a Monday deadline set by the Pakistani government for all of them to leave or face arrest and deportation.
One of those Afghans, Said Meer, had planned to arrive in Jalalabad on Monday with his two wives and 12 children, a day after leaving Lahore, the city in eastern Pakistan where he was born and had spent his whole life. He was hoping to transfer his livestock business to Jalalabad.
On Monday, the colorful truck carrying Mr. Meer’s extended family and their meager belongings was at a border crossing, waiting to enter Afghanistan.
“May God watch over our Afghan people,” Mr. Meer said by telephone. “War, earthquakes, poverty — every hardship is a test from God.” Despite the destruction brought by the quake, he said he still planned to move to Jalalabad, 40 miles from the border.
In Pakistan, tremors were felt across several districts of the northwestern border province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, as well as in parts of Punjab Province, the Pakistan-administered part of Kashmir and the capital, Islamabad, the Pakistan Meteorological Department said. No major damage or casualties had been reported in Pakistan so far, officials said.
Afghanistan has been in the grip of one of the world’s most severe and persistent humanitarian crises, with less than 30 percent of its humanitarian needs covered for 2025, according to the United Nations office for humanitarian affairs. More than half of the country’s 42 million people are in need of aid, according to the U.N.
Since the Taliban returned to power, international assistance has gradually dwindled. Under President Trump, the United States, which last year provided 45 percent of the aid supplied to Afghanistan, has suspended or eliminated nearly all of its contributions. Several other European countries, including Britain, France and Sweden, have also cut back on assistance.
The Taliban have repeatedly called on foreign governments and businesses to finance Afghanistan’s reconstruction from four decades of war, but only Russia has formally recognized them as the country’s official government. As of Monday afternoon, Iran, India, Japan and the European Union had committed support to the victims of the earthquake, the spokesman for the Taliban-run Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Hafiz Zia Ahmad Takal, told The New York Times.
The U.N. Secretary General António Guterres expressed his condolences to the victims’ families and said, “The U.N. team in Afghanistan is mobilized and will spare no effort to assist those in need in the affected areas.”
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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