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The response to Afghanistan’s latest earthquake disaster has been badly hampered by the poor state of the roads in worst-hit Kunar and Nangarhar provinces, where boulders and debris have made some routes in the mountainous region impassable.
Notably blocked after the 6.0-magnitude quake that struck overnight Sunday-Monday are roads leading to affected districts in Kunar province. At least 1,400 people have been killed and 3,000 injured, according to the Islamic Emirate government. The majority of the casualties are in Kunar.
“The further up you go, the more damaged the roads get,” said Sanaullah Noori, from the Afghanistan Natural Disaster Management Agency (ANDMA). “There are parts of the roads that have massive cracks. Other parts are blocked by fallen boulders and large chunks of debris.”
Samira Sayed-Rahman, director of programmes and advocacy at Save the Children, told The New Humanitarian that she and her team had to overcome several blocked roads on their way to visit their mobile health clinics in Kunar, where female doctors were treating women and children injured in the earthquake.
But other emergency aid responders were finding it challenging to get through to help survivors.
“At a certain point, your car just won’t go anywhere,” one of the drivers for an aid convoy stranded on the route told The New Humanitarian, asking not to be named.
“Whatever you do, press on the gas, put it in neutral, your tyres just spin and spin.”
On Tuesday, while rescuers and aid workers were heading to assist victims in the worst-affected parts of Kunar and Nangarhar provinces, a 5.2-magnitude aftershock struck the area, leading to an hours-long halt in rescue efforts.
Fatalities and injuries have also been reported in Laghman, Nuristan and Badakhshan provinces.
Local volunteers, many of them travelling in makeshift convoys, were immediately struck by just how bad the road conditions were.
Mohammad Hussain was among 90 young men from Jalalabad who had driven into Kunar province to help early Tuesday morning. Two hours into their journey towards Chapa Dara district, they had to abandon their vehicles and walk the rest of the way.
The 29-year-old said he kept telling himself, “You have to continue the climb, do whatever it takes to help your people.” But Hussain said a heart condition eventually kept him from continuing the mountainous trek and he had to turn around.
Determined to help in any way he could, Hussain had come up with a new idea by the time he made it back downhill in a friend’s car: He would set up a roadside collection point for supplies and money and have his friends walk the aid into the villages.
“Even if I had made it up there, with my condition I may have been able to do about 200 afghanis ($2.85) of work, but this way I’ve been able to collect 13,000 afghanis ($188) in less than seven hours,” Hussain said from his roadside aid station.
Helicoptering in aid, and out the injured
The scale of the devastation, including the destruction of at least 5,400 homes in some of the region’s most remote and impoverished communities, quickly caught the attention of Afghans at home and overseas.
Amid renewed calls for foreign assistance from the Islamic Emirate government, aid is continuing to pour in from abroad, including from the United Arab Emirates, India, Pakistan, and Iran.
Noori, the ANDMA worker, said perishables like food are being delivered via helicopter but heavier items like tents must be delivered by road.
There is a heavy reliance on helicopters in the relief operations, the ANDMA workers said – as was the case in the response to the 2022 earthquakes that claimed more than 1,000 lives in rural areas of Afghanistan's Paktika and Khost provinces.
“They bring in assistance, and on the way out they transport the injured to the hospital in Jalalabad,” Noori said, explaining that each helicopter can accommodate 15-20 patients and has doctors and Red Crescent workers on board to attend to the injured.
The Ministry of Public Health told local media that by Wednesday morning nearly 2,300 injured had received treatment in health facilities in Kunar, Nangarhar, and Kabul. By Wednesday afternoon, two government run hospitals in Kabul were treating at least 30 of the most severely injured. More were expected to arrive by the evening.
Both ANDMA and Save The Children said the scale of the destruction – including giant boulders taking out several homes at once – means aid efforts will have to continue into the foreseeable future, and that the casualty toll will likely increase.
“There are still so many villages in need that we haven’t been able to get to,” Rahimullah Hijran, another ANDMA worker, told The New Humanitarian. “There are still people buried under the rubble.”
With several villages still yet to be reached, Sayed-Rahman from Save the Children warned that “time is of the essence” for survivors. “Every woman I spoke to had lost multiple children,” she added. “It’s an absolutely devastating situation.”
Edited by Andrew Gully.
