On Wednesday, a magnitude 6.3 earthquake slammed western Afghanistan, killing over 2,000 people after a series of similar tremors over the weekend.
The quake struck at a shallow depth at roughly 05:10 a.m. local time (00:40 GMT), with its epicentre about 29 kilometers north of Herat, according to the US Geological Survey.
Volunteers and rescuers have been working since Saturday in what are now desperate efforts to discover survivors of the previous set of earthquakes, which destroyed entire towns and killed more than 12,000 people, according to UN estimates.
Local and national officials have reported varying figures for the number of persons killed and injured in past earthquakes, but the disaster ministry has stated that 2,053 people died.
Mullah Janan Sayeq, disaster management ministry spokesman, stated, “We can’t give exact numbers for dead and wounded as it is in flux”.
There were no early indications of further injuries following Wednesday’s earthquake, which struck near Herat, a city of more than half a million people.
According to the UN, the previous earthquakes completely devastated at least 11 villages in Herat province’s Zenda Jan area.
Although catastrophic earthquakes strike Afghanistan on a regular basis, the weekend calamity was the worst to strike the war-torn country in more than 25 years.
The majority of rural Afghan dwellings are made of mud and erected around wooden support poles, with little steel or concrete reinforcement.
Because multigenerational extended families typically live under the same roof, severe earthquakes can devastate communities.
Afghanistan is already in a terrible humanitarian crisis as a result of the widespread withdrawal of foreign help following the Taliban’s re-election.
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