Taliban officials have confirmed that 920 have been killed and hundreds injured after an earthquake struck Afghanistan. Pictures from the country show landslides and ruined mud-built homes in eastern Paktika province where rescue teams have been running against time to treat the wounded.
The Taliban has engaged helicopters to ferry victims to hospitals in remote areas. Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada informed that hundreds of houses were destroyed with the death toll likely to shoot up.
Speaking at the press conference, deputy minister for disaster management Sharafuddin Muslim announced that at least 920 people had been killed and a further 600 injured.
According to the BBC, the quake struck about 44km (27 miles) from the south-eastern city of Khost shortly after 01:30 local time (21:00 Tuesday GMT), when many people were at home, asleep in their beds. Earthquakes tend to cause significant damage in Afghanistan, where there are many rural areas where dwellings are unstable or poorly built.
The Taliban requested aid agencies to rush aid to the affected areas. Devastated by decades of conflict, Afghanistan is finding it hard to improve its protections against earthquakes and other natural disasters despite aid agencies polling in their efforts to reinforce some buildings.
With very few aircraft and helicopters available to rescuers, the impoverished country’s emergency services have struggled to deal with natural disasters over the years. According to the BBC, most of the casualties so far were in the Gayan and Barmal districts in Paktika. Local media site Etilaat-e Roz reported that a whole village in Gayan had been destroyed.
Seismologists say that the earthquake having a magnitude of 6.1 struck at a depth of some 51km. A UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs report says that over 7000 people have died due to earthquakes in Afghanistan in the past 10 years.
