More than 800 dead and 2,700 injured: the terrible images of the earthquake that hits Afghanistan

Since the early hours of the morning, helicopters have taken off dozens of times from Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar province, to deliver aid and evacuate dozens of dead and wounded, according to the Defense Ministry.

Since returning to power in 2021, the Taliban authorities have faced another major earthquake: in 2023, in Herat, at the other end of the country, in the west bordering Iran, more than 1,500 people were killed and more than 63,000 homes destroyed.

This time, a provisional toll indicates 800 dead and 2,500 injured in the province of Kunar and 12 dead and 255 injured in the province of Nangarhar, announced government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid at a press conference in Kabul.

Afghan officials, who have repeatedly said that the death toll will change as searches continue in these remote, rugged areas, say the damage in Kunar is "very significant."

"We had never experienced anything like this," Ijaz Ulhaq Yaad, a senior official in Nourgal, told AFP overnight. "It was terrifying, the children and women were screaming," he said by telephone, a connection that was still open in the afternoon.

Most of these families, he continued, had just returned to Afghanistan, driven from their Pakistani or Iranian exile by the recent waves of expulsions from the two neighboring countries, which together have sent back nearly four million Afghans.

"There were about 2,000 refugee families who had returned and were planning to rebuild their homes" in this agricultural region bordering Pakistan, he explained.

For fear of aftershocks, "everyone is staying outside" even though "the three large villages in the Nourgal district have already been completely destroyed, according to our information," he said.

Furthermore, authorities, rescuers and the media are having great difficulty accessing villages and hamlets, while landslides have cut off roads.

Afghanistan is frequently hit by earthquakes, particularly in the Hindu Kush mountain range, near the junction of the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates, which accounts for 15 percent of the world's seismic energy.

Since 1900, the northeast of the country has experienced 12 earthquakes with a magnitude greater than 7, according to Brian Baptie, a seismologist with the British Geological Survey.

The one that occurred in the middle of the night - and followed by five aftershocks, one of which was 5.2 - was particularly violent.

The UN mission in Afghanistan, one of the last safety nets in a country that has been hit hard by recent drastic cuts in international humanitarian aid, particularly from the United States, said it was "deeply saddened by a devastating earthquake that has left hundreds dead."

"Our teams are on the ground providing emergency aid," she added. UN chief Antonio Guterres expressed his "total solidarity with the Afghan people."

In October 2023, the magnitude 6.3 earthquake in Herat, followed by eight aftershocks, was the deadliest earthquake to hit the country, one of the poorest in the world, in more than 25 years.