Where entire villages once stood, the lives of hundreds of families lie in ruins. Buried under ruins, rescue workers in Afghanistan are desperately searching for survivors. “It was unbearable. We saw five or six villages. They were leveled to the ground,” says Mohammed Rafik Shirsai in a voice message. The experienced doctor is part of a rescue team in western Afghanistan, from the provincial capital Herat.
On Saturday morning, several earthquakes startled residents of the Afghan border province near Iran. In just a few hours, the earth shook nine times and more than a dozen villages were largely destroyed. The most affected area was the Sindajan district, northwest of Herat. The military and emergency services rushed to the disaster areas to help.
Depressing scenes
“You can no longer see the difference between a house and a street,” Schirsai continues. “Under every piece of earth there could be a person who has lost his life and whom no one can save. Unfortunately, we were no longer able to help,” says the doctor, describing the depressing scenes. Videos on social media showed rescue workers with bulldozers on site and helpers, some of whom were digging for missing people using only their hands.
Even 300 kilometers away in neighboring Iran, walls and ceiling lights were shaking on Saturday, as residents of the metropolis of Mashhad said. There, too, the authorities put emergency services on alert and sent teams to the border to examine possible damage.
The number of victims has risen sharply
Afghanistan’s civil protection agency put the number of deaths on Sunday at more than 2,000. Thousands of other residents of the province, which also borders Turkmenistan in the north, were injured in the quake. There is great concern that the number of victims will continue to rise in the coming days. The UN emergency relief office OCHA initially assumed more than 100 deaths on Saturday.
The quakes bring back memories of the devastating disaster last summer, when more than 1,000 people were killed in an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.9 in the east of the country. Severe earthquakes occur again and again in the region, especially in the Hindu Kush, where the Indian and Eurasian plates meet.
Difficult rescue work
The Taliban have been back in power for more than two years, and the country is politically isolated internationally because of its repressive policies, which primarily discriminate against women and girls. This is also one reason why rescue work is sometimes difficult to progress. After decades of conflict, many villages with simple construction are ill-equipped to deal with earthquakes.
“The soil and rubble fell on the people, making it impossible to breathe,” Schirsai continues in a calm, depressed voice. “The death toll is much higher than what you have heard. For example, in a village where a thousand people lived, it is now said that only 20 people are alive. You understand the scale of the disaster.”
