Kabul, Afghanistan— A terrible earthquake hit eastern Afghanistan soon before midnight on Sunday, leaving a path of wreckage and a rising death toll. According to official statistics from the Taliban administration, the 6.0-magnitude quake and its five aftershocks had killed more than 800 people and hurt about 2,700.
The earthquake’s epicenter was about 27 kilometers (17 miles) from Jalalabad, and it hit at a shallow depth of only 8 kilometers (5 miles) below the surface of the Earth. The Kunar province, which shares a border with Pakistan, was impacted the hardest. The shaking was especially bad for the modest mud and stone houses that are ubiquitous in the region’s steep valleys. Many of them were entirely destroyed.
Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban leadership, said that Kunar province alone has the most deaths and injuries, with almost 800 people dead and 2,500 hurt. In the nearby province of Nangarhar, 12 more people died and 255 were hurt. In the province of Laghman, 58 people were hurt. Ehsanullah Ehsan, the chief of disaster management in Kunar, said that the number of deaths could climb as rescue teams continue to retrieve victims from the rubble. Many people are “stuck under the rubble of their roofs.”
The earthquake has made the already terrible humanitarian situation in Afghanistan much worse. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) said that some of the communities in Kunar that were hit the hardest are still hard to reach because of blocked roads, which makes it harder to get help and rescue people.
The world has started to respond to the situation. Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, said in a statement that the UN was working with Afghan officials to “quickly assess needs, provide emergency assistance, and be ready to mobilize additional support.” He also said that the UN’s global emergency response fund would give out an initial $5 million. The Vatican released a tweet from Pope Leo XIV in which he said he was “deeply saddened by the significant loss of life” caused by the quake.
The disaster shows how weak Afghanistan really is. The country is one of the poorest in the world and is dealing with a long-lasting humanitarian catastrophe and the recent arrival of millions of Afghans who had to leave Pakistan and Iran. Since the Taliban came back in 2021, international help has dropped a lot. The US, which used to be the biggest donor, stopped almost all funding in early 2025 after Donald Trump became president. This has made it even harder for the country to respond to catastrophic calamities, allowing people to sleep outside while help slowly comes in.