When what sounded like an explosion jolted Mirza Gul Sayar out of bed on Sunday night, he woke his wife and they rushed outside with their two children. They found his parents, his younger brother and wife already out in the darkness.
But with Mr. Sayar’s older brother and his family nowhere to be seen, his parents and brother ran back inside.
A few seconds later, another tremor shook the ground of eastern Afghanistan, and the family house collapsed. Around them, the screams and cries of neighbors echoed in the village.
“It was like doomsday for us,” Mr. Sayar said as he rested on a carpet in his cornfield, where he was spending Monday night with the surviving members of his family.
The earthquake that rocked eastern Afghanistan on Sunday killed at least 1,400 people and injured more than 3,100 others, according to the country’s authorities. It destroyed thousands of fragile houses and wiped away entire villages perched on the steep hills of the mountainous region or nestled in narrow valleys.
Rescue workers on the ground say it will take days to scour the rubble of villages that, two days after the quake, were still out of reach. The Afghan military has evacuated hundreds of people, the injured and the dead, while U.N. agencies have been working to recommission a helicopter that had been grounded as a result of aid cuts from the United States and other foreign donors.
Reports so far provide an incomplete picture of the devastation that has swept through eastern Afghanistan.
“All the figures that have been announced so far are from the villages where the government and military rescue teams could have access,” said Zahidullah Safi, the director of a district clinic in Kunar Province — one of the worst-hit areas, and where Mr. Sayar’s family lives. “There are some villages which are still under the debris and so far, no government or aid agency has arrived there.”
Sunday’s quake, the second devastating one in less than two years in Afghanistan, has added another layer of calamity on top of the overlapping economic, humanitarian and environmental crises that have all worsened in the South Asian nation over the past few months.
Emergency aid had already become scarcer this year after the United States and other major donors cut, suspended or reduced their humanitarian contributions to Afghanistan. Last year, the United States contributed more than 45 percent of the aid supplied to the country. That all but vanished after the Trump administration decimated the U. S. Agency for International Development and other foreign aid programs.
Even before the earthquake, U.N. agencies estimated that Afghanistan needed $2.4 billion in humanitarian funding this year, but they say that less than 30 percent of that sum has been received.
On Tuesday, Britain said that it would commit about $1.3 million in emergency support for those affected by the disaster. David Lammy, the British foreign secretary, said in a statement that the money would be distributed via the International Federation for the Red Cross and the U. N. Population Fund to ensure that “aid reaches those in need and does not go to the Taliban.”
The European Union is set to work with UNICEF, according to Sherine Ibrahim, the Afghanistan director for the International Rescue Committee, a nonprofit organization. The U.N. office for humanitarian affairs said it had unlocked $5 million in emergency funds.
Like Britain, many countries are wary of committing funds that may end up in the hands of the Taliban government.
A report by the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction published last month found that “the Taliban use every means at their disposal, including force, to ensure that aid goes where they want it to go, as opposed to where donors intend.”
Humanitarian workers have urged, so far with little success, that politics be set aside.
“A lot of help and assistance is still needed,” said Homa Nader, acting head of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent in Afghanistan.
This was all too apparent in Kunar’s Mazardara Valley. That was where Mr. Sayar lost seven family members in the quake.
On Monday and Tuesday, villagers and emergency workers searched through for neighbors, relatives and friends, dead or alive. They carried them on makeshift stretchers like bed frames over slopes and through narrow alleys, down to trampled cornfields where helicopters were landing and taking off. They flew back and forth between the devastated areas and the hospitals of Jalalabad, the closest large city, and Kabul, the capital, about 100 miles away.
Khalil Ur Rahman Babakhil, 30, had traveled from Kabul to Mazardara, where his in-laws lived. When he arrived on Monday, he found their house collapsed, and in front of it the bodies of his wife’s parents and three siblings.
“I don’t know how to let my wife know,” Mr. Babakhil said.
The bodies, like so many others, lay wrapped in colorful blankets because villagers had run out of the traditional white shrouds used to bury the dead.
Before the earthquake, more than half of Afghanistan’s 42 million people were already in need of humanitarian assistance. In Kunar Province’s remote district of Nurgal, where Mr. Sayar lives, most communities live in extreme poverty, with no steady source of income other than their biannual harvest of corn, which brings them about $220 a year.
About 3.5 million children under 5 are malnourished in Afghanistan, according to UNICEF.
On Tuesday in Kunar Province, children sat in silence in ambulances or walked bewildered among the collapsed homes.
Nezarullah, 17, stood in front of his destroyed house. He and his 13-year-old brother, Rezwanullah, lost 12 relatives, he said.
“Last night before the earthquake we were together, we had dinner together and then we slept together,” said Nezarullah, who goes by one name. “How can I help my younger brother and how can I rebuild the destroyed home, when I have nothing?”
In his cornfield, Mr. Sayar recounted the terror of two days earlier.
After he escaped the house, he said, he heard his sister-in-law, still inside, screaming in the middle of the night after the second tremor. But in the darkness, and without any tools, the people outside could do nothing to help.
When the sun rose on Monday, Mr. Sayar found her dead, with her son. He also found his parents and younger brother, who had fled the house but then rushed back inside.. Now they, too, were dead.
Elian Peltier is an international correspondent for The Times, covering Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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