Quake in Afg kills 1k; deadliest in decades

Kabul: 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 country’s deadliest quakes in decades, the state-run news agency reported.

Officials warned that the already grim toll may still rise. Information from the remote area near the Pakistani border remained scarce, but early footage from villages tucked among the rough mountains showed residents picking through rubble of collapsed stone and mudbrick houses.

The disaster posed a major test for Afghanistan’s Taliban government, which seized power nearly 10 months ago as the U.S. and its NATO allies prepared to pull out of the country and has been largely shunned by the world community since.

Rescuers rushed to the area by helicopter, but the response is likely to be complicated since many international aid agencies left Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover.

Moreover, most governments are wary of dealing directly with the Taliban, a reluctance that could slow the deployment of emergency aid and teams typically sent after such natural disasters. In a rare move, the Taliban’s reclusive supreme leader, Haibatullah Akhundzadah, who almost never appears in public, called for “the international community and all humanitarian organisations to help the Afghan people affected by this great tragedy and to spare no effort to help the affected people.”

“We ask God to save our poor people from trials and harm,” he said in a statement put out by the Taliban spokesman. The disaster hits at a time when Afghanistan is already deep in one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, with millions facing increasing hunger and poverty after the cutoff of international financing to the Taliban. That has prompted a massive aid programme, but to avoid putting money in the Taliban’s hands, the world has funnelled funding through the U.N. and other humanitarian agencies — a system that may be too slow for an emergency response to the quake.

What’s more, 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. The 6.1 magnitude quake had its epicentre in Paktika province, some 50 kilometers southwest of the city of Khost, according to neighbouring Pakistan’s Meteorological Department.

Quakes of that strength can cause serious damage in an area where homes and other buildings are poorly constructed and landslides are common. Experts put the depth at just 10 kilometers — another factor that could lead to severe destruction. Footage from Paktika showed men carrying people in blankets to waiting helicopters. Others were treated on the ground. 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.

Some images showed residents picking through clay bricks and other rubble from destroyed stone houses, some of whose roofs or walls had caved in. The death toll given by the Bakhtar News Agency was equal to that of a quake in 2002 in northern Afghanistan.

Those are the deadliest since 1998, when an earthquake also 6.1 in magnitude and subsequent tremors in the remote northeast killed at least 4,500 people.

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. —AP