Another strong earthquake yesterday morning shook western Afghanistan after deadly quakes on Saturday flattened whole villages in Herat Province, as officials yesterday significantly lowered the death toll from the weekend temblors to about 1,000.
The magnitude 6.3 earthquake yesterday was about 28km outside Herat, the provincial capital, and 10km deep, the US Geological Survey said.
It triggered a landslide that blocked the main Herat-Torghondi highway, Afghan Ministry of Information and Culture spokesman Abdul Wahid Rayan said.
Photo: Reuters
The aid group Doctors Without Borders said the Herat regional hospital received 117 injured from yesterday’s quake, adding that it was setting up four more medical tents at the facility.
“Our teams are assisting in triaging emergency cases and managing stabilized patients admitted in the medical tents,” it wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
The epicenter of Saturday’s quake — also of the same magnitude 6.3 — was about 40km northwest of the provincial capital, and several aftershocks have been strong.
The Taliban government had originally said that more than 2,000 people had been killed in that earthquake, but Afghan Minister of Public Health Qalandar Ebad yesterday lowered the toll to about 1,000, attributing the confusion to the remoteness of the area and double reporting by agencies involved in the rescue effort.
“We have over 1,000 people martyred from the first incident,” Ebad told reporters in Kabul.
Yesterday’s quake also flattened all 700 homes in Chahak village, which was untouched by the tremors of previous days. Now there are mounds of soil where dwellings used to be, but no deaths have been reported so far in Chahak because people have taken shelter in tents this week, fearing for their lives as tremors continue to rock Herat.
Some residents said they had never seen an earthquake before and wondered when the shaking of the ground would stop.
Many said they have no peace of mind inside the tents for fears the “ground will open and swallow us at any moment.”
Besides rubble and funerals after Saturday’s devastation, there is little left of the villages in the region’s dusty hills. Survivors are struggling to come to terms with the loss of multiple family members and in many places, living residents are outnumbered by volunteers who had come to search the debris and dig mass graves.
In Naib Rafi, a village that previously had about 2,500 residents, people said that almost no one was still alive besides men who were working outside when the quake struck. Survivors worked all day with excavators to dig long trenches for mass burials.
On a barren field in the district of Zinda Jan, a bulldozer removed mounds of earth to clear space for a long row of graves.
“It is very difficult to find a family member from a destroyed house and a few minutes to later bury him or her in a nearby grave, again under the ground,” said Mir Agha, who is from Herat and had joined hundreds of volunteers to help the locals.
Additional reporting by AFP
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