The Afghan government has considerably revised downwards the toll of the earthquake which struck western Afghanistan on Saturday, October 7, to “more than 1,000 dead”, while new strong tremors in the same region this Wednesday created panic among the population.
Local and national authorities initially gave sometimes contradictory figures on the number of deaths in the first earthquake, before setting it at 2,053. But the Afghan Minister of Health, Qalandar Ebad, corrected this toll on Wednesday, attributing the confusion over the figures to the isolation of the most affected areas and double counting by different services involved in the relief efforts.
“When entire villages are destroyed and populations wiped out (…) verifying the number of people affected, killed and injured, is a very difficult process,” defended the minister to the press in Kabul. Now, “the figure we share of more than 1,000 dead is verified information,” he added, specifying that 2,400 people had been injured.
The earthquake was followed by two aftershocks of magnitude 5.0 and 4.1, but the damage caused to the ancient city of Herat, which is home to more than 500,000 people, appears minimal, noted a journalist from the France Media Agency. Since Saturday, many residents of this city have spent their nights in their garden or their car. In the most affected rural areas, people are sleeping in tents or under the stars.
12,000 people affected by the first earthquake
Volunteers with shovels and picks worked around the clock to find survivors following Saturday’s earthquake, which completely destroyed at least six villages in the rural district of Zenda Jan and affected more than 12,000 people, according to the ‘UN. Providing shelter in large quantities as winter approaches will be a challenge for Taliban authorities, who took power in August 2021 and have tense relations with international aid organizations.
The new earthquake on Wednesday, whose epicenter was detected about 30 kilometers north of Herat, the capital of the province of the same name, left at least one dead and 130 injured, the Minister of Defense also announced. health Qalandar Ebad.
Afghanistan is already suffering from a serious humanitarian crisis, with the widespread withdrawal of foreign aid since the return to power of the Taliban. The country frequently experiences earthquakes, particularly in the Hindu Kush mountain range, close to the junction point between the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates. In June 2022, a 5.9 magnitude earthquake left more than a thousand dead and tens of thousands homeless in Paktika province.
