Over 800 people have lost their lives and around 2,500 were injured when a 6.0 magnitude earthquake struck eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistan border a little before midnight on Sunday (August 31), according to the Taliban’s chief spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid. The numbers can be expected to increase as rescue workers are facing challenges accessing remote villages.
The earthquake’s epicentre was in Kuz Kunar district in Kunar province, 27 km from Jalalabad, Afghanistan’s fifth-largest city. Residents of Kabul, which is around 140 km from the epicenter, and across the border in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad—more than 300 km away—said they felt buildings shaking.
The earthquake was at a shallow depth—just 8 km deep—making it more destructive. A man in Nurgul district reportedly lost 17 members of his family in the quake. Sadiqullah, a resident of the Maza Dara area of Nurgal, who lost his wife and two sons, recalled that he was “woken by a deep boom that sounded like a storm approaching. “It felt like the whole mountain was shaking,” he told Associated Press.
Afghanistan is prone to earthquakes as it is located on top of a number of fault lines where the Indian and Eurasian plates meet. Since the Taliban captured power in August 2021, the country has been ravaged by several major earthquakes. In June 2022, Paktika in eastern Afghanistan was hit by a 5.9 magnitude earthquake that killed over 1,000 people. In October 2023, a 6.3 quake—Afghanistan’s deadliest in two decades—a densely populated area near Herat. The Taliban regime claimed that at least 4,000 people perished, while U.N. agencies put the figure at a more modest 1,500.
The earthquake is yet another cruel jolt for the people of war-ravaged Afghanistan, who are already struggling with crippling poverty, severe drought, aid cuts, and an unprecedented hunger crisis in addition to living under the brutal rule of the Taliban.
Horrific scenes are being reported from quake-hit sites. Since most houses in villages are made of wood, stone and mud, they have collapsed; entire villages are reported to have been flattened. Rescue efforts are being hampered by a lack of trained personnel and equipment on the ground. People are using their bare hands to claw their way through debris to rescue their missing kin.
“The area where the earthquake hit lies in a mountainous region, with few roads. The few roads that exist are blocked due to landslide debris,” Abdullah, an employee with the World Food Program, told The Diplomat. Besides, over the weekend, Nangarhar Province was hit by flash floods, which damaged roads and houses in the region. “Access to several quake-hit areas is only on foot,” he said.
While helicopters have been pressed into service to ferry the injured to hospitals in Jalalabad, it will be some days before rescue teams with equipment will be able to arrive to pull out people trapped under the debris. “By then, it will be too late,” Abdullah warned.
Sayed Khan, who also works at WFP, said that the number of people killed instantly by the earthquake could be higher than in previous quakes. Since it happened in the middle of the night, people would have been at home. Hence, when “the earth shook on Sunday night and brought down homes in seconds,” many people would have been trapped in the debris.
Khan recalled that the earthquake at Herat in 2023 happened during the day, when most Afghan men are outside working in their fields. So, when the quake hit, fewer men got trapped under the rubble. However, since women and girls in Afghanistan are confined by diktats to the four walls of their home, 90 percent of the fatalities in the Herat earthquake were of women and children, according to the United Nations.
While the Kunar earthquake, by virtue of having struck in the dead of the night, would have trapped women and men in the debris in similar numbers, women and girls are more likely to be denied immediate access to treatment and health facilities.
According to the BBC’s Afghan service, injured women are being brought into Jalalabad’s main hospital. “But there are far more men in the hospital currently than women,” it says, citing a local reporter.
Since Kunar is a “very conservative area,” women may get treated later due to cultural reasons. “It’s feared some women may have chosen to stay, or to wait for daylight to be taken to hospital by their families.” When the earthquake shook Paktika province in 2022, “the number of injured women in hospitals [began to] rise two days after the earthquake.”
Due to the Taliban’s diktats preventing women from stepping out of the confines of their home, without a close male relative accompanying them, women injured in the Kunar quake will feel constrained from accessing hospitals. In hospitals, there are only a few women doctors to treat them.
The earthquake that hit Kunar was a natural disaster. But since that disaster struck, a man-made disaster is unfolding. The impact of the Taliban’s brutal policies towards women, together with President Donald Trump’s aid cuts, will grow the death toll in the coming days.
