Rescuers focus on remote mountainous regions after Afghanistan earthquake

After a devastating earthquake that left 900 people dead and 3, 000 injured in Afghanistan’s eastern Kunar region, according to a Taliban official, and destroyed villages and buildings, rescuers are attempting to reach remote areas.

The death toll is likely to rise.

Ehsanullah Ehsan, the provincial director of disaster management, announced early on Tuesday that work would be expanded to more of the mountainous areas of the area.

According to Ehsan, “we cannot accurately predict how many bodies might still be buried beneath the rubble.”

According to him, “our goal is to finish these operations as soon as we can and to begin distributing aid to the affected families,” adding that some of the injured have been transferred to hospitals in Kabul and the nearby Nangarhar province.

Eastern Afghanistan was the country’s most lethal country to have experienced just before midnight on Sunday, when a shallow earthquake of magnitude 6 struck just before midnight.

Volunteers are unable to reach remote areas along the Pakistani border, where largely mud-brick homes have been destroyed, due to the mountainous terrain.

Ehsan claims that the main challenge facing relief efforts has been getting vehicles on the steep mountain roads.

Extremely challenging

The World Health Organization (WHO) once again stated in a situational update that the destruction of roads and the remoteness of many villages “severely impedes the delivery of aid.”

The WHO claimed that more than 12, 000 people had been affected by the health system’s fragility prior to the earthquake, which means local capacity is completely strained, making them dependent on external actors.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies’ (IFRC) acting deputy head of delegation in Afghanistan, Homa Nader, stated to Al Jazeera that the road reconstruction project has become “nearly impossible.”

“There are still challenges to overcome. We had Andma, the disaster management directive that was released yesterday, along with heavy equipment to allow humanitarian organizations like the Afghan Red Crescent Society to conduct search and rescue operations, but it’s incredibly challenging, Nader said.

She continued, “absolutely likely that those [death toll] numbers will dramatically increase because we are not getting to the most remote villages as of yet,” while the organization is still awaiting a full incident report.

Due to its location near the confluence of the Indian and Eurasian plates, Afghanistan has previously experienced devastating earthquakes.