Afghanistan is not only a country that is both ravaged by war and one of the poorest in the world, but it is also a land subject to the harsh forces of nature. On Saturday, October 7, an earthquake struck an area in western Afghanistan, 35 kilometers from the large city of Herat. It was one of the worst to hit the country in decades. On Sunday evening, Taliban authorities announced a death toll of over 2.053, with several thousand injured. These figures could not be verified or confirmed by independent sources.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, several earthquakes shook this part of the country on Saturday. The first, the largest, reached a magnitude of 6.3 on the Richter scale, and it was followed by strong aftershocks. According to Abdul Wahid Rayan, spokesman for the Ministry of Information and Culture, six villages and "1,320 houses are completely destroyed,". Housing in rural Afghanistan offers little resistance to such tremors. First responders report many casualties among women and children. Livestock have also suffered greatly.
A drone video taken on Saturday by a local Afghan media outlet gives an idea of the disaster: The village of Nayeb Rafi, in the north-western district of Zinda Jan, in the province of Herat, appears to be totally razed to the ground. Under a cloudless, windswept blue sky, unscathed civilians and residents of neighboring villages try to clear the rubble with their bare hands – their faces and clothes covered with dust – in search of survivors. According to regional officials, nearly 80 % of the village's population lost their lives in the disaster. According to Janan Saiq, spokesman for the Ministry of Disaster Management, thirteen villages in the Zinda Jan district suffered the same fate as Nayeb Rafi.
As is often the case in this type of situation, the local residents preferred to spend Saturday night outside, as winter had not yet arrived in this country with its often harsh climatic conditions. On Sunday, hospitals in the region registered hundreds of corpses, and the World Health Organization (WHO) reported that 500 victims had been taken to the main regional hospital in Herat province. For lack of space, bodies were also stored on military bases. Beds were set up in front of Herat's main hospital to accommodate the injured.
That evening, rescue efforts were still lacking in many areas, where residents didn't even have shovels to help their own communities. Although images show the arrival of an army helicopter in one of the villages on Saturday, only a dozen teams were mobilized for rescue efforts on Sunday, mostly from the military and local NGOs such as the Red Crescent.
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