Injured people waited to be airlifted out of Kunar province on Sept. 1, after a 6.0-magnitude earthquake struck eastern Afghanistan
Monday, September 1, 2025
By Haq Nawaz Khan, Rick Noack and Grace Moon/The Washington Post
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — At least 812 people were killed and more than 2,800 injured after a 6.0-magnitude earthquake struck eastern Afghanistan, the Taliban-run government said Monday, the latest deadly temblor to hit the region in recent years.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the earthquake struck about 17 miles outside the city of Jalalabad late Sunday. Damage and casualties were reported in Nangahar province, which includes Jalalabad, as well as the neighboring Konar and Laghman provinces. The quake was felt across the region, including in neighboring Pakistan and in Kabul, the Afghan capital.
Aerial footage recorded from Afghan military helicopters and distributed by state broadcasters showed several villages that appeared to be destroyed.
In an initial assessment, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said the earthquake’s shallow hypocenter — estimated at five to six miles beneath the surface — exacerbated its impact. As many as 12,000 people were directly affected, the U.N. said.
Afghan authorities ferried injured survivors Monday to Jalalabad Airport, where they were transported to regional hospitals. Authorities in Kabul said the government had deployed all available civil defense workers, medical staff and military personnel to the earthquake zone. Some villages remained cut off from access roads Monday night and could be reached only by helicopter or on foot.
Joy Singhal, a representative for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, said rescue operations started almost immediately after the earthquake but were hampered by landslides that made many roads inaccessible. “In some locations, volunteers have to walk up to four hours,” he said.
Residents said authorities were already stretched thin. According to Ikram Mamond, a 28-year-old social worker in Konar, rescue workers searching the rubble for survivors in one of the flattened villages appeared to lack manpower.
Mamond said he encountered a grieving man who was pleading with local officials to help with the burials of his mother, his wife and his five children. In Islamic tradition, the deceased are buried as soon as possible. “But there were bodies everywhere,” Mamond said.
Sharifullah Sharafat, a resident of Chawkay District in Konar province, said he narrowly survived Sunday’s earthquake. “Many of the houses in our village have collapsed,” Sharafat said in a phone interview.
“There are no words to describe the screams we heard,” he said, adding that many victims in the village have not yet been recovered.
Konar resident Mawlawi Sanaullah found his house collapsed and many family members buried under the rubble. “My son is gone,” Sanaullah said, holding back tears in an interview with state-run RTA television.
The disaster hit a region where most residents cannot afford to build homes strong enough to withstand quakes.
Motorcycle repairman Ataullah Hassankhil said many of the collapsed homes were crude mud houses that had clung to mountain slopes. “When the earthquake struck, the houses collapsed into each other, setting off a chain of destruction,” said Hassankhil, who was returning from a visit to the heavily damaged village of Dewa Gal in Konar.
Afghanistan has frequently been hit by deadly earthquakes, including in 2022 and 2023. More than 1,000 people died in each of those disasters.
Afghanistan’s east — the epicenter of Sunday’s quake, as well as the 2022 disaster — is in one of the world’s most seismically active regions. A 2007 U.S. Geological Survey report likened several characteristics of eastern Afghanistan’s main seismic faults to those of the San Andreas fault.
In northeastern Afghanistan, these “complex fault systems” have resulted in 12 earthquakes with magnitudes above 7 since 1900, Brian Baptie, a seismologist at the British Geological Survey, wrote in an emailed statement.
“This latest earthquake is likely to dwarf the scale of the humanitarian needs caused by the Herat earthquakes of 2023,” Sherine Ibrahim, Afghanistan director for the International Rescue Committee, said in a statement. In 2023, it took months for much of the damage to be repaired and for locals to be resettled.
As international donors have slashed their aid budgets over the past 12 months, humanitarian workers have warned of a worsening health crisis in Afghanistan. In the most severe blow, the Trump administration this year cut nearly all U.S.-funded humanitarian and economic projects, which had accounted for more than 40 percent of all foreign assistance.
The funding cuts have coincided with an influx of Afghans from neighboring countries, including Pakistan and Iran. Both nations have either forcibly deported Afghans or pressured them to leave, sending more than 2 million back to Afghanistan, according to the U.N.
“This earthquake strikes a country already facing lack of global support for a severe humanitarian crisis,” Graham Davison, Afghanistan director for the humanitarian organization CARE, said in a statement. “Nearly half of the population of Afghanistan — 23 million people — is already reliant on humanitarian aid, and yet the Humanitarian Response Plan is only 28 percent funded.”
The Taliban-run government is struggling to keep clinics and hospitals stocked, and the World Food Program has said it can support only 1 million of the 10 million Afghans who are in urgent need of food assistance.
Mamond, the social worker in Konar, saw no foreign aid workers in the quake’s epicenter Monday. “But this disaster is far beyond what the government can manage,” he said.
Noack reported from Paris and Moon from Seoul.
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