Less than a week following a devastating earthquake that claimed over 2,000 lives and razed entire villages, another powerful earthquake rocked western Afghanistan on a Wednesday morning.
This most recent earthquake registered a magnitude of 6.3 and occurred approximately 28 kilometers (17 miles) outside Herat, the capital of Herat province. It had a depth of about 10 kilometers (6 miles), as reported by the U.S. Geological Survey. The epicenter of the Saturday quake was roughly 40 kilometers (25 miles) northwest of the provincial capital, and a series of strong aftershocks, including another 6.3 magnitude tremor, followed.
Taliban officials indicated that the previous quakes had led to more than 2,000 fatalities in Herat. While they acknowledged that the quakes caused injuries and casualties in the thousands, they did not provide a detailed breakdown of the numbers.
In Naib Rafi, a village that once had around 2,500 inhabitants, residents reported that hardly anyone survived, except for men who were working outdoors when the earthquake struck. Survivors spent the day utilizing excavators to dig extensive trenches for mass burials. In the Zinda Jan district, a bulldozer cleared space for a long line of graves on a desolate field.
Mir Agha, a resident of Herat who joined hundreds of volunteers to assist the locals, described the heart-wrenching process of searching for a family member in the ruins of a collapsed house and then laying them to rest in a nearby grave.
Nearly 2,000 houses in 20 villages were leveled by the quakes, as reported by the Taliban, and the affected area has only one government-run hospital.
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