An earthquake rocked eastern Afghanistan early Wednesday, killing at least 255 people, officials said.
Information on the magnitude 6 quake that shook Paktika province remained scant, but it comes as the international community has largely abandoned Afghanistan after the Taliban took over the country last year amid the chaotic withdrawal of the US military. of the longest war in its history.
That will likely complicate any relief effort for this country of 38 million people.
The state-run Bakhtar news agency reported the death toll, saying rescuers were arriving by helicopter. The news agency’s director general, Abdul Wahid Rayan, wrote on Twitter that 90 houses have been destroyed in Paktika and dozens of people are believed to be trapped under the rubble.
Footage from Paktika province, near the Pakistani border, showed victims being taken to helicopters to be airlifted out of the area. Images widely circulated online from the province showed stone houses destroyed, with residents picking up clay bricks and other debris.
Bakhtar posted images of a resident receiving intravenous fluids from a plastic chair outside the rubble of his home and others lying on stretchers.
“A strong earthquake shook four districts in Paktika province, killing and injuring hundreds of our compatriots and destroying dozens of houses,” Bilal Karimi, deputy spokesman for the Taliban government, wrote separately on Twitter. “We urge all relief agencies to send teams to the area immediately to prevent further catastrophe.”
In just one district of neighboring Khost province, the quake killed at least 25 people and injured more than 95, local officials said as they warned the death toll would rise without urgent government help.
From Kabul, Prime Minister Mohammad Hassan Akhund called an emergency meeting at the Presidential Palace to coordinate relief efforts for the victims in Paktika and Khost.
The UN resident coordinator in Afghanistan, Ramiz Alakbarov, expressed his condolences to the victims and said that the world body’s agencies were responding to the devastation of the earthquake.
“Answer is on its way,” he wrote on Twitter.
The Meteorological Department of neighboring Pakistan put the quake at a magnitude of 6.1. Tremors were felt in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad and elsewhere in the eastern province of Punjab. Some remote areas of Pakistan received reports of damage to houses near the Afghan border, but it was not immediately clear whether it was due to rain or the earthquake, said Taimoor Khan, a spokesman for disaster management in the area.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif offered his condolences over the earthquake in a statement and said his nation would provide aid to the Afghan people.
The European seismological agency, EMSC, said tremors from the quake were felt over 500 kilometers (310 miles) by 119 million people in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.
Mountainous Afghanistan and the larger region of South Asia along the Hindu Kush mountains, where the Indian tectonic plate collides with the Eurasian plate to the north, have long been vulnerable to devastating earthquakes. Poor construction of homes, hospitals and other buildings puts them at risk of collapsing in earthquakes, while landslides remain common in Afghanistan’s mountains.
In 2015, a major earthquake in the northeast of the country killed more than 200 people in Afghanistan and neighboring northern Pakistan. A similar 6.1 earthquake in 2002 killed about 1,000 people in northern Afghanistan. And in 1998, a 6.1-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tremors in remote northeastern Afghanistan killed at least 4,500 people.
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Associated Press writers Rahim Faiez and Munir Ahmed in Islamabad and Jon Gambrell and Isabel DeBre in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.
Reference-www.nbcbayarea.com