Kabul:
A magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck western Afghanistan on Wednesday, striking an area where more than 2,000 people were killed after a series of similar tremors over the weekend. The earthquake struck at a shallow depth around 5:10 a.m. local time (0040 GMT), with the epicenter about 18 miles (29 kilometers) north of the city of Herat, the United States Geological Survey said.
Volunteers and rescue workers have been engaged since Saturday in what are now last-ditch efforts to find survivors of the previous series of earthquakes, which the UN estimates leveled entire villages and affected more than 12,000 people.
Local and national officials have given conflicting figures on the number of deaths and injuries from the previous earthquakes, but the disaster ministry has said 2,053 people have died.
“We cannot provide exact numbers of deaths and injuries as they are constantly changing,” disaster management ministry spokesman Mullah Janan Sayeq said.
There were no immediate reports of new casualties after Wednesday’s earthquake, which struck near the city of Herat, home to more than half a million people.
According to the UN, the previous earthquakes completely destroyed at least 11 villages in the Zenda Jan district of Herat province.
“There is not a single house left, not even a room where we could spend the night,” said 40-year-old Mohammad Naeem, who told AFP he had lost 12 relatives, including his mother, after Saturday’s earthquakes.
‘We can’t live here anymore. You can see that our family was martyred here. How could we live here?’
Local media reported that many Herat residents had spent their nights in open-air tents due to fears of aftershocks following the weekend’s tremors.
Providing shelter on a large scale will be a challenge for Afghan Taliban authorities, who seized power in August 2021 and have had fractious relations with international aid agencies.
Afghanistan is regularly hit by deadly earthquakes, but the weekend’s disaster was the worst to hit the war-ravaged country in more than 25 years.
Most houses in rural Afghanistan are made of mud and built around wooden support posts, with little steel or concrete reinforcement.
Extended, multi-generational families generally live under the same roof, meaning severe earthquakes can devastate communities.
Afghanistan is already facing a serious humanitarian crisis, with large-scale withdrawals of foreign aid after the Taliban returned to power.
About 1.9 million people live in Herat province, on the border with Iran, and rural communities are suffering from years of drought.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)