Earthquake in Afghanistan leaves more than 800 dead

By Elian Peltier, Safiullah Padshah and Zia Ur Rehman

KABUL — Rescue workers on Monday (Sept 1) scrambled to reach mountainous areas in eastern Afghanistan hit by a 6.0-magnitude earthquake that killed more than 800 people overnight, Afghan officials said, warning that the death toll would probably rise.

Recovery efforts were complicated by landslides that stranded devastated villages already barely accessible by road. And so far, only a handful of countries have offered relief assistance to the Taliban government.

Most of the destruction from the earthquake, which struck just before midnight Sunday (August 31), took place in the province of Kunar, where dozens of villages of mud and brick houses were hit.

“The area is very steep and narrow and most of it is inaccessible because of landslides and rains that fell over the past few days,” said Kate Carey, a Kabul-based officer with the United Nations’ Office for humanitarian affairs.

The quake hit Afghanistan as the South Asian nation has been battling a series of overlapping humanitarian, economic and geopolitical crises.

Hundreds of hospitals and health care centres have shut down since the Trump administration suspended US foreign aid this spring. More than 2.3 million Afghan nationals have returned to Afghanistan this year, in some cases by force, after being expelled from Pakistan or Iran amid a wave of xenophobia and political pressure in those countries.

And four years into power, the Taliban have struggled to shed Afghanistan of its pariah status and attract foreign investments despite timid engagement with Russia and China in recent months.

As of Monday afternoon, Iran, India, Japan and the European Union had committed support to the victims of the earthquake, the spokesperson for the Taliban-run Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Hafiz Zia Ahmad Takal, told The New York Times. It stood in sharp contrast with the assistance offered in 2023 after a devastating earthquake killed more than 1,300 people in western Afghanistan.

“We were already unable to meet existing needs, and I’m not even talking about the new needs created by this earthquake,” said Sherine Ibrahim, the country director for Afghanistan for the International Rescue Committee, a nonprofit. “We’re making a plea to all donors to set aside politics to relieve populations.”

The United States and other foreign donors have grown reluctant to provide humanitarian or development aid to Afghanistan in recent years. The Taliban have remained unflinching on draconian restrictions they have imposed on women and girls, and widespread allegations have spread that the group diverts humanitarian aid to their fighters and some communities at the expense of others.

Last month, a report by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction found that the Taliban denied nonprofits the right to operate unless they hired Taliban-affiliated businesses or individuals, and redirected aid to Pashtun communities — the group’s dominant ethnicity.

“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,” said Gene Aloise, the acting special inspector general, said in the report.

The quake in eastern Afghanistan was a shallow one, just 5 miles from the earth’s surface. This made it more likely to be destructive, because shallower waves retain more of their power when hitting the surface. Less than 100 miles away, residents of Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, felt the aftershocks across the city, but no major damage was reported.

Road access was difficult for rescue workers in the area’s steep terrain, where landslides had struck. Homa Nader, the acting head of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent in Afghanistan, said it took Red Cross teams four hours overnight to reach the most affected area, in Nur Gal district, from Jalalabad, the closest large city just 35 miles away.

By Monday afternoon, the road linking Jalalabad, one of Afghanistan’s largest cities, to Kunar province had reopened, and a steady stream of ambulances were rushing to the affected areas while on the other side, dozens were ferrying victims back to the city.

Hospitals were operational in both Kunar and Nangarhar with no significant damage, Nader said, while health centres in three districts of Kunar reported minor structural damages. But one village, Maza Dara, was completely blocked and victims could only be carried out by helicopter, she said in a text message.

Zabihullah Mujahid, the Taliban’s chief spokesperson, said at a news conference in Kabul on Monday that 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 recurring 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.

In neighbouring Pakistan, tremors were felt across several districts of the northwestern border province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and other parts of the country, but officials reported no major damage or casualties.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres expressed his condolences to the victims’ families, adding, “The UN team in Afghanistan is mobilized and will spare no effort to assist those in need in the affected areas.”

But UN agencies and humanitarian organizations in Afghanistan have had to deeply cut their assistance efforts since the Trump administration, which provided 45% of the aid supplied to Afghanistan, suspended or eliminated nearly all of its contributions. Several European countries, including Britain, France and Sweden, followed.

Less than 30% of humanitarian needs for Afghanistan have been covered for 2025, according to the UN office for humanitarian affairs. That was before Sunday’s earthquake.

“Domestic governance structure and international aid are very critical in a moment like the aftermath of this earthquake, and both are at a low point in Afghanistan at the moment,” said Daniel Aldrich, the director of the Resilience Studies Program at Northeastern University.

More than half of the country’s 42 million people are in need of aid, according to UN officials, and humanitarian organizations were bracing for a painful winter amid dwindling funds and the return of more than 2 million Afghans forcibly returned from neighbouring Pakistan and Iran.

More are scheduled to arrive in the coming days: The earthquake hit while many Afghans living in Pakistan were on their way to Afghanistan, before a Monday deadline set by the Pakistani government for 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.

On Monday, the colourful truck carrying Meer’s extended family and their meagre belongings was at a border crossing, waiting to enter Afghanistan. Despite the destruction brought by the quake, he said he still planned to move to Jalalabad, 40 miles from the border, and transfer his livestock business there.

“May God watch over our Afghan people,” Meer said by telephone. “War, earthquakes, poverty — every hardship is a test from God.”

-New York Times