The death toll from the powerful earthquake that struck eastern Afghanistan at the weekend rose sharply to more than 2,200 on Thursday, September 4, according to a new toll, making it the deadliest in decades to hit the country. "Hundreds of bodies have been recovered from destroyed houses during search and rescue operations," deputy government spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat wrote on X on Thursday, announcing the new toll, adding that "rescue efforts are still ongoing."
The vast majority of those killed in the magnitude-6.0 earthquake that jolted the mountainous region bordering Pakistan late Sunday were in Kunar province, where 2,205 people died and 3,640 were injured, according to a Taliban government toll. Another 12 people were killed and hundreds injured in the neighbouring provinces of Nangarhar and Laghman. The toll had been expected to rise as volunteers and rescuers were still pulling bodies from the rubble.
Limited access to the hardest hit areas of mountainous Kunar province has delayed rescue and relief efforts, with rockfalls from repeated aftershocks obstructing already precarious roads etched onto the side of cliffs.
Various countries have flown in aid, but hundreds of villagers in the hard-hit Nurgal district were still stranded in the open air, squeezing multiple families under pieces of tarp pulled from the rubble and unsure of where they would get a morsel to eat. A fight broke out over food when some finally reached the field in Mazar Dara where hundreds of people were camped out, little aid having reached them.
Poor infrastructure in the impoverished country, still fragile from four decades of war, has also stymied the emergency response.
The World Health Organization warned that local healthcare services were "under immense strain", with shortages of trauma supplies, medicines and staff. The agency has appealed for $4 million to deliver lifesaving health interventions and expand mobile health services and supply distribution.
"Every hour counts," said WHO emergency team lead in Afghanistan Jamshed Tanoli. "Hospitals are struggling, families are grieving and survivors have lost everything."
The loss of US foreign aid to the country in January this year has exacerbated the rapid depletion of emergency stockpiles and logistical resources.
NGOs and the UN have warned that the earthquake creates a crisis within a crisis, with cash-strapped Afghanistan already contending with overlapping humanitarian disasters. Filippo Grandi, head of the UN's refugee agency, said the quake had "affected more than 500,000 people" in eastern Afghanistan.
The country is contending with endemic poverty, severe drought and the influx of millions of Afghans forced back to the country by neighbours Pakistan and Iran since the Taliban's 2021 takeover. Even as Afghanistan reeled from its latest disaster, Pakistan began a new push to expel Afghans, with more than 6,300 people crossing the Torkham border point in quake-hit Nangarhar province on Tuesday.