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An Afghan boy who lost his father in the recent earthquake, pictured outside the Red Crescent camp in the district of Zinda Jan, in Herat, Afghanistan. (Image: Reuters)
Four days earlier a magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck Afghanistan’s killing more than 2,000 people.
Another earthquake, this time of 6.3 magnitude, struck western Afghanistan’s Herat province in the early hours of Wednesday morning, four days after the province was hit by a magnitude 6.3 quake and eight powerful aftershocks. Over 2,000 people died over the weekend.
The latest earthquake led to the death of one person and led to 120 injuries, the AFP reported citing Abdul Zahir Noorzai, ambulance manager for Herat Regional Hospital.
According to the US Geological Survey and news agency AFP, the quake occurred at a shallow depth at around 05:10 am local time (00:40 GMT), with its epicentre about 29 kilometres north of the city of Herat.
Thousands of Afghans were spending a fourth night in the open after Saturday’s quakes flattened their villages when the quake struck. “It’s horrible, the whole of Herat is terrified. We are so scared that even when we see the trees moving (in the wind), we think it’s another earthquake coming,” a 32-year-old resident was quoted as saying by AFP.
Afghanistan media outlets said that most residents in Herat were spending their nights living in tents in the open air due to a fear of aftershocks following the weekend tremors.
Volunteers and rescuers were digging with their bare hands, as aid trickled in, in a last-ditch attempt to find survivors from the earlier series of earthquakes. The UN estimates that at least 12,000 people have been affected.
“We can’t give exact numbers for dead and wounded as it is in flux,” disaster management ministry spokesman Mullah Janan Sayeq told news agency AFP.
Afghanistan’s Taliban government is struggling to send aid and provide shelter on a large scale to those displaced because they do not have good relations with international aid organisations.
The nation is frequently hit by deadly earthquakes, but the weekend disaster was the worst to strike the war-ravaged country in more than 25 years, news agency AFP said in a report.
Houses in rural Afghanistan are made of mud and are supported by wooden poles, with little in the way of steel or concrete reinforcement. Multi-generational extended families live under the same roof, which means that a serious earthquake has the potential to devastate entire communities.
A dire humanitarian crisis caused due to widespread withdrawal of foreign aid is crippling Afghanistan and has exacerbated after Taliban returned to power. Herat province, on the border with Iran, is home to around 1.9 million people, and its rural communities are also suffering from a years-long drought.
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