Death toll from 'unprecedented' earthquakes in Afghanistan doubles to 2,000

A boy sits with his cat in the yard of his destroyed house in the Zenda Yan area on Sunday Photo: AP

Death toll Number of earthquakes in the western Afghanistan surged to more than 2,000 on Sunday, the Taliban government said, as bodies continued to be removed from destroyed villages and buried in mass graves.

More than 1,300 homes were destroyed. Saturday's magnitude 6.3 earthquake, followed by eight strong aftershocks, shook hard-to-reach areas 30 kilometers (19 miles) northwest of the provincial capital Herat, officials said.

In the rural area of ​​Zinda Yang Village households were reduced to heaps of destroyed masonry as makeshift rescue teams continued to dig trenches on Sunday.

Aid gradually arrived in the disaster area, including food, water, tents and coffins for the dead, who were pulled from the rubble by excavators and people with picks and shovels.

Some of the bodies were shrouded in fleece blankets, workers used the same the very tools to dig up their mass graves in the brown earth.

Volunteer rescuer Khalid, 32, said: “Everyone is busy looking for bodies everywhere, we don’t know if there are others under the rubble too.

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“These people were destroyed,” he said.

Residents sit among the ruins of an earthquake-damaged house in Sarbuland village, Zende Yan district, Herat province, on Saturday. Photo: AFP

Mullah Janan Sayek, a spokesman for the disaster management ministry, said the country had «witnessed an unprecedented earthquake» that killed 2,053 people in 13 villages around noon on Sunday.

“We are doing everything possible to treat the victims of the incident,” he told reporters in Kabul. «On-site search operations are ongoing in the affected area.»

He also gave a figure of more than 9,000 injured, but later retracted this information, saying this referred to the number of residents in the affected area.

'Everything turned to sand'

33-year-old Amir Hussein worked all night as hopes faded and rescue efforts turned into a reconstruction operation in the village of Kashkak in the Zinda Jan district.

“We removed several bodies, three of them were small children, one of them was torn to pieces,” he said. “They just came from school. One of them was killed on the street, the other two were killed in their home.”

In the nearby village of Sarboland, an AFP reporter saw destroyed houses near the epicenter of the earthquake, which shook the area for more than five hours. .

The gutted houses showed personal belongings flapping in the harsh wind, and women and children stuck out in the open.

“At the first shock, all the houses collapsed,” 42 said 2-year-old Bashir Ahmad.