ISLAMABAD: More than 2,000 people have died after several strong earthquakes rattled western Afghanistan on Saturday, a spokesman for the Taliban government told German news agency (dpa) on Sunday.
“The number of wounded people is very high,“ Abdul Wahid Rayan, an official at the Ministry of Information and Culture, said.
Meanwhile, the search for survivors continued. The UN emergency agency OCHA had put the death toll at more than 100 on Saturday saying it expected the death toll to rise as scores of people were trapped under collapsed buildings.
Several villages in the hard-hit border province of Herat have been completely destroyed, authorities said. According to the WHO, about 4,200 people were affected and at least 600 houses destroyed. The largest hospital in the provincial capital of Herat alone had received nearly 200 dead and around 700 injured, according to medical sources.
At least eight quakes shook the border region near Iran within a short period of time on Saturday morning. The US Geological Survey (USGS), which monitors seismic activity, put the magnitude at values between 4.6 and 6.3. The tremors occurred north-west of the Afghan border town of Herat, at a shallow depth of around 10 kilometres.
The tremors were also felt in neighbouring Iran. Residents of Mashhad in Iran, a city with over 1 million inhabitants located about 300 kilometres from the earthquake zone, reported that the walls of their houses were shaking.
Severe earthquakes occur repeatedly in the region where the Arabian, Indian and Eurasian plates meet. A devastating quake killed more than 1,000 people in Afghanistan in 2022. After several decades of conflict, many houses are poorly built. Earthquakes therefore often cause major damage. - Bernama