Survivors of the powerful earthquake that struck eastern Afghanistan pleaded for urgent help on Monday (September 1) as Taliban soldiers and residents worked together to carry the injured into helicopters for evacuation, Reuters reports.
In Kunar’s Nurgal district, villagers said entire communities were wiped out. “This is Mazar Dara in Nurgal district. The entire village was destroyed,” one victim told reporters. “Children and elders are trapped under the rubble. We need urgent help.”
Authorities confirmed that more than 800 people were killed and thousands more injured across Kunar, Nangarhar, Laghman and Nuristan provinces in the magnitude 6.0 quake which struck late on Sunday (August 31), one of the worst such disasters in the country in recent years.
Emergency flights carried the wounded to hospitals in Jalalabad and Kabul, where doctors struggled to cope with the influx of casualties.
On the ground, survivors described scenes of devastation.
“Ninety-five percent of our village has been destroyed. In every house at least five to ten people are injured,” said another resident, urging fellow Muslims to provide aid.
Children and elders were seen inside helicopters receiving food, while others wept amid the ruins of their homes. A young boy cried as residents searched the rubble, hoping to find relatives alive.
“Some of our people are still buried under the soil. We need ambulances, we need doctors, we need everything to rescue the injured and recover the dead,” another survivor said.
Rescuers were battling to reach remote mountainous areas cut off from mobile networks along the Pakistani border, where mudbrick homes dotting the slopes collapsed in the quake.
