At least 300 people have been killed in an intense 6.1 magnitude earthquake that rocked eastern Afghanistan.
Rescuers scrambled to find survivors in the rubble as helicopters arrived as a result of the early morning tremors that destroyed at least 90 homes in Paktika province.
Hibatullah Akhundzada, the head of state, declared: “Hundreds of houses have been demolished, and regrettably, 300 civilians have been slain and more than 500 have been injured.”
According to Bakhtar News Agency Director-General Abdul Wahid Rayan, who posted on Twitter that scores of people are reportedly trapped under the rubble, the death toll is still anticipated to grow.
Victims were seen being loaded into helicopters in the Paktika province, which is close to the Pakistani border, in order to be flown out of the area.
Images from the province that were widely shared online showed stone houses that had been wrecked, with locals rummaging through clay bricks and other debris.
In addition to people lying on gurneys, Bakhtar tweeted video of a resident receiving IV fluids from a plastic chair outside his home’s ruins.
According to the US Geological Survey (USGC), the earthquake occurred around 27 miles from the city of Khost, close to the Pakistani border.
‘Strong and long jolts,’ a Kabul, Afghanistan, resident wrote on the European Mediterranean Seismological Centre website (EMSC).
A resident of Peshawar, a city in northwest Pakistan, said, “It was strong.”
According to Salahuddin Ayubi, an official with the interior ministry, the majority of the recorded fatalities occurred in Paktika, where 255 people had been killed and more than 200 injured.
He reported that 25 fatalities and 90 hospitalizations had occurred in the province of Khost.
Since some of the settlements were in isolated mountainous areas and it would take some time to gather information, he predicted that the death toll will grow.
According to a subsequent tweet from Bilal Karimi, a deputy spokesman for the Taliban government, “a major earthquake hit four districts of Paktika province, killing and injuring hundreds of our people and damaging dozens of buildings.”
To avert more devastation, we implore all relief organizations to dispatch personnel there right away.
Neighbouring The earthquake was recorded as having a magnitude of 6.1 in Pakistan. Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, and other areas of the eastern Punjab province experienced tremors.
According to the European Seismological Center (EMSC), 119 million people in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan felt the earthquake’s shocks over a distance of 310 miles.
No early reports of damage or casualties in Pakistan were available.
In a statement, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif expressed his condolences for the earthquake and promised that his country will aid the people of Afghanistan.
The tragedy occurs as U.S.-led international forces were leaving Afghanistan after 20 years of war, and as Afghanistan has been going through a severe economic crisis ever since the Taliban seized power in August.
Many governments have put restrictions on Afghanistan’s banking industry and reduced billions of dollars’ worth of development aid in response to the Taliban takeover.
The nation is still receiving humanitarian aid, and foreign organizations like the United Nations are active there.
Any assistance from international organizations would be welcome, according to a spokesman for the Afghan foreign ministry.
A tectonic plate known as the Indian plate is pushing against the Eurasian plate from the north, which is causing seismic activity across significant portions of south Asia.
In 2015, an earthquake in the far-flung northeast of Afghanistan killed hundreds of people there as well as in neighbouring northern Pakistan.
Around 1,000 people were killed in northern Afghanistan in a similar 6.1 earthquake in 2002.
And in 1998, a distant northeastern Afghanistan earthquake with a 6.1 magnitude and ensuing tremors killed at least 4,500 people.