PESHAWAR, Pakistan - At least 812 were killed and more than 2,800 injured after a 6.0-magnitude earthquake struck eastern Afghanistan, the Taliban-run government said Monday, in one of the worst natural disasters in recent memory here.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the earthquake struck about 17 miles from the eastern city of Jalalabad on Sunday night. Damage and casualties were reported from Nangahar province, which includes Jalalabad, as well as the neighboring Konar and Laghman provinces; and the quake was felt across the region, including in neighboring Pakistan and in Kabul, the Afghan capital.
"Rescue and relief efforts are underway," said Abdul Ghani Musamim, a spokesperson for the governor of the eastern Konar province, where most losses appeared to have occurred.
Aerial footage recorded from Afghan military helicopters and distributed by state broadcasters showed several villages appearing to be entirely or mostly destroyed.
The United Nations and international aid groups did not immediately release estimates of the number of fatalities and the extent of the damage. During past natural disasters in Afghanistan, the Taliban-run government's figures were at times significantly higher than what final U.N. data showed.
Afghan authorities ferried injured survivors Monday to Jalalabad Airport, where they were transported to regional hospitals. Authorities in Kabul said the government had deployed all available civil defense workers, medical staff and military personnel to the earthquake zone.
Sharifullah Sharafat, a resident of Chawkay District in Konar province, said he narrowly survived Sunday's earthquake. "Many of the houses in our village have collapsed," Sharafat said in a phone interview.
"There are no words to describe the screams we heard," he said, adding that many victims in the village have not yet been recovered. The lack of electricity and earthquake-linked landslides have slowed the rescue efforts, he said.
Konar resident Mawlawi Sanaullah found his house collapsed and many family members buried under the rubble. "My son is gone," Sanaullah said, holding back tears in an interview with state-run RTA television.
Motorcycle repairman Ataullah Hassankhil said nearly all residents in the village of Dewa Gal in Konar appeared to have been killed in the quake. When the 42-year-old arrived there on Monday, rescue teams were searching the rubble for survivors.
"There was a woman mourning the loss of her six children," Hassankhil said in a phone interview. "It broke my heart."
Many of the collapsed homes were crude mud houses that had clung to mountain slopes. "When the earthquake struck, the houses collapsed into each other, setting off a chain of destruction," Hassankhil said.
Officials said Monday morning that they were still working to establish contact with some of the villages feared to have been affected.
Afghanistan has frequently been hit by deadly earthquakes, including in 2022 and 2023. More than 1,000 people died in each of those disasters.
Afghanistan's east - the epicenter of Sunday's quake and of the 2022 disaster - is in one of the world's most seismically active regions. A 2007 U.S. Geological Survey report likened several characteristics of eastern Afghanistan's main seismic faults to those of the San Andreas fault.
In northeastern Afghanistan, these "complex fault systems" have resulted in 12 earthquakes with magnitudes above seven since 1900, said Brian Baptie, a seismologist at the British Geological Survey, in an emailed statement.
"This latest earthquake is likely to dwarf the scale of the humanitarian needs caused by the Herat earthquakes of 2023," Sherine Ibrahim, Afghanistan director for the International Rescue Committee, said in a statement.
As international donors slashed their aid budgets over the past 12 months, humanitarian workers have warned of a worsening health crisis in Afghanistan. In the most severe blow, the Trump administration earlier this year cut nearly all U.S.-funded humanitarian and economic projects, which had accounted for more than 40 percent of all foreign assistance.
"This earthquake strikes a country already facing lack of global support for a severe humanitarian crisis," Graham Davison, Afghanistan director for humanitarian organization CARE, said in a statement. "Nearly half of the population of Afghanistan - 23 million people - is already reliant on humanitarian aid, and yet the Humanitarian Response Plan is only 28 percent funded."
The Taliban-run government is struggling to keep clinics and hospitals stocked, and the World Food Program has said it can support only 1 million of the 10 million Afghans who are in urgent need of food assistance.
"People are now facing enormous challenges," said Hassankhil, who visited the earthquake epicenter on Monday. "There's no food and clean water."