In the dark hours before midnight Sunday, eastern Afghanistan shook violently. A 6.0-magnitude earthquake struck near Jalalabad, leaving more than 800 people dead and nearly 3,000 injured, according to the United Nations. Entire villages in Kunar province, a rugged region where the mountains fold into narrow valleys, have been flattened.
The epicenter lay in an isolated stretch of terrain where rescue efforts are fraught with obstacles. Helicopters could not land overnight, forcing aid workers to wait until daylight to reach survivors. Roads, often little more than dirt paths carved into cliffsides, were already impassable after days of flooding and landslides.
Faridullah Fazli, a resident of Asadabad on the banks of the Kunar River, described being jolted awake by “a very strong earthquake, accompanied by sounds that were very scary.” He spent the night helping to carry the wounded to a nearby clinic. “It was a very scary situation, just an atmosphere of fear and terror,” he said.
In Mazar Dara, villagers said 95 percent of homes were destroyed, with five to ten people injured in nearly every household. Jalalabad’s main hospital quickly overflowed, treating hundreds of patients while anxious relatives searched for missing loved ones.
The quake struck a country already battered by crisis. Afghanistan has been enduring a severe drought, deep cuts to foreign aid, and what the World Food Program has called an unprecedented hunger emergency. Since the Taliban seized power in 2021, most international funding has dried up, leaving local authorities with limited capacity to respond to disasters of this scale.
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A Taliban official in Kunar province admitted the enormity of the task. “Entire villages are flattened. Roads to deep mountainous areas are still closed. Our priority now is not finding the dead under rubble, but reaching the injured.”
Afghanistan’s geography makes it especially vulnerable: the country sits astride multiple fault lines. Earthquakes are a recurring menace, but the combination of fragile mud-brick housing, scarce medical infrastructure, and political isolation has turned this latest tremor into a national catastrophe.
The Taliban have appealed for international assistance. For many Afghans, hope lies not only in survival but in whether the world still answers their call.