Death toll from Afghan quake rises, including 8 members of refugee family returned from Iran

ITTEFAQ, Afghanistan (AP) — For several minutes after the earthquake struck, he could hear their screams. Then there was silence.

Mohibullah Niazi, a neighbor who helped in the rescue efforts, said Saturday that the eight people killed on the outskirts of Kabul after a 5.8 magnitude earthquake struck northern Afghanistan the previous night were a refugee family recently returned from neighboring Iran.

There was only one survivor: a boy of around 3 years old, who was injured and has been hospitalized in Kabul.

Afghanistan’s deputy government spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat on Saturday increased the overall death toll from the quake to 12, with another four people injured. Fitrat said five homes were destroyed and another 33 significantly damaged, affecting 40 families in the provinces of Kabul, Panjshir, Logar, Nangarhar, Laghman and Nuristan.

The Afghanistan Disaster Management Authority put the overall death toll at nine. The reason for the discrepancy was not immediately clear.

The family near Kabul was among the millions of Afghan refugees who have recently returned from Iran and Pakistan, after both countries launched crackdowns in 2023 on foreigners — particularly Afghans — living in their countries.

They had arrived 15 days ago and were living in a tent on land next to Niazi’s home. The family head, Najibullah, who was about 50 years old, “had no other shelter,” Niazi said. “He was a very poor person.”

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‘We tried our best’

The family had set their tent up next to a wall separating the plot of land from Niazi’s home, which stood on higher ground, in the village of Ittefaq on the eastern outskirts of the Afghan capital.

Heavy rains over the past several days, which have led to deadly floods in many parts of Afghanistan, had left the ground sodden and soft. When the earthquake struck, the wall collapsed on the family.

“My daughter shouted to me that a wall had fallen on them. The whole family ran, but there were so many big rocks,” Niazi recounted Saturday as he stood at the scene. “We tried our best.”

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On Saturday morning, piles of bricks and mud were all that were left, along with blankets, cooking utensils and other personal belongings salvaged from the rubble and set into a pile.

“For about three minutes, I could hear the voices of these people,” Niazi said. “But we couldn’t do anything. There were two or three of us, but this was not the work of three people.”

Neighbors soon rushed to help, digging through the mud and rubble with spades and their hands. They alerted the local Taliban police checkpoint, which sent rescuers and ambulances.

The young boy, Aarash, was pulled out alive but injured, and rushed to the hospital. Health Ministry spokesperson Sharafat Zaman, who visited the boy Saturday, said he was being treated for a severe head injury.

For the rest of the family — the father and mother, four daughters aged between 12 and 23, and two sons — it was too late. The rescuers could only recover their bodies.

Niazi said he had hosted the family in his own home one night. On Friday, just half an hour before the earthquake struck, he had renewed the offer, telling the family they could spend the night in his own guest room to shelter from the cold and rain. “But they did not come with me,” he said.

A string of deadly quakes

Friday night’s quake had an epicenter in the Hindu Kush mountain range, about 150 kilometers (90 miles) east of the northern city of Kunduz, according to the Euro-Mediterranean Seismological Center and the U.S. Geological Survey. The area is roughly 290 kilometers (180 miles) northeast of Kabul.

Afghanistan lies in a highly seismically active part of the world, and quakes have caused thousands of deaths in recent years.

Last August, a 6.0 earthquake that struck a remote, mountainous part of eastern Afghanistan killed more than 2,200 people. Most casualties were in Kunar province, where people typically live in wood and mud-brick houses along steep valleys.

In November, a 6.3 earthquake struck Samangan province in northern Afghanistan, killing at last 27 people and injuring more than 950. It also damaged historical sites, including Afghanistan’s famed Blue Mosque in the city of Mazar-e-Sharif, and the Bagh-e-Jahan Nama Palace in Khulm.

On Oct. 7, 2023, a 6.3 quake followed by strong aftershocks in western Afghanistan killed thousands of people.

Associated Press writer Abdul Qahar Afghan in Ittefaq, Afghanistan, contributed to this report.