Afghanistan Earthquake Kills 622, Injures Over 1,500 As Rescuers Race Against Time

Taliban Soldiers And Civilians Carry Earthquake Victims To An Ambulance In Jalalabad Following Deadly Quake

The Chronify

September 1, 2025

At least 622 people were killed and more than 1,500 injured after a powerful earthquake struck eastern Afghanistan, devastating remote villages and overwhelming the country’s already strained healthcare system.

Eastern Afghanistan was rocked by a 6.0-magnitude earthquake on Monday, killing 622 people and injuring over 1,500, according to the Taliban-run interior ministry. The midnight tremor, which struck at a shallow depth of 10 kilometers, leveled mud and stone homes across multiple villages in Kunar province and surrounding areas near the Pakistan border.

Officials said three villages were completely destroyed, with extensive damage reported in many others. Najibullah Hanif, provincial information chief of Kunar, confirmed at least 250 deaths and 500 injuries in the province alone, warning that figures could rise sharply as more reports come in. In some villages, early assessments recorded dozens of fatalities and hundreds of injured.

Health ministry spokesperson Sharafat Zaman cautioned that the official casualty toll could increase as rescuers struggle to access remote hamlets scattered across the mountainous Hindu Kush region, an area with a long history of earthquakes and flash floods.

Images showed Taliban soldiers and civilians carrying victims to ambulances in Jalalabad, while helicopters were deployed to ferry the wounded from disaster zones to hospitals. Rescuers continued combing through rubble in search of survivors as overwhelmed clinics reported treating hundreds of patients.

The earthquake adds to Afghanistan’s mounting humanitarian crisis, as international aid has sharply declined since the Taliban takeover and thousands of Afghans have been forced back from neighboring countries. Despite the scale of the disaster, Afghan authorities confirmed that no foreign government has yet offered assistance for rescue or relief operations.

Afghanistan is highly prone to seismic activity due to its position along the boundary of the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates. A series of quakes in western Afghanistan last year killed more than 1,000 people, underscoring the extreme vulnerability of the impoverished nation to natural disasters.