‘Covered in dust and too shocked to speak’: Afghan villagers reel at scale of quake’s devastation

Just before midnight on Sunday, Matiullah Shahab woke up to find his house in Afghanistan’s remote Kunar province shaking.

An earthquake measuring 6.0 magnitude had struck eastern Afghanistan, leaving at least 800 people dead, according to the UN.

Even though the epicentre of the quake was 16km (10 miles) away, the whole of Shahab’s village of Asadabad trembled. The 23 family members who live with him ran out of their bedrooms as they feared the walls would fall in on them, and stayed awake all night in their garden. “We were all afraid,” he says.

The areas worst hit by the quake were Nangarhar and Kunar provinces, but it was felt as far away as Kabul and in neighbouring Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad.

When day broke, Matiullah – who is a freelance journalist and human rights activist – drove from his home to try to reach the remote mountainous area at the epicentre of the quake.

He says he had to get out of his car and walk for two hours before he arrived at the worst-hit villages as there were rocks on the road.

He arrived at the village of Andarlachak to find several young children being treated by medics in the street. A pair of toddlers lay together on a stretcher with bruises on their chests and faces.

Other children were wrapped in white sheets. Some 79 people died in that village alone.

“I saw many dead bodies,” Matiullah tells the BBC. “I felt the aftershocks 17 times.”

Matiullah helped the local people dig graves for the many people who had died.

“The villages I visited were destroyed,” he says. One man told Shabab that his wife and four children had died. But most were too shocked to speak.

“Peoples’ faces were covered in dust and there was a silence,” he said. “They were like robots – no one could talk about it.”

Due to the blocked roads, Taliban government rescue operations have relied on helicopters to reach the mountain villages. But the remote, mountainous terrain means some places remain inaccessible, while there are reports of people dying under the rubble while awaiting rescue.

Matiullah says volunteers were trying to rescue trapped people, and saw two women being pulled from a destroyed house.

“They got them out, injured, and they are now in the hospital,” he says. He was not allowed to take photos of the rescue operation because the Taliban does not allow photos of women.

Many residents are now sleeping out in the open and need tents, Matiullah adds.

Another resident in Kunar’s Sokai district, Ezzatullah Safi, says part of his house collapsed in the earthquake.

“I woke to the screams of children, women, and animals,” he tells the BBC.

“The earthquake was intense, and the night felt like a small apocalypse. Strong winds followed the tremors, with light rain falling. My children clung to me, crying in fear. Dust filled the air.

“The mobile network went down immediately. We couldn’t contact relatives. With the house damaged and no electricity, we relied on the light from our phones.”

He says government helicopters arrived in the morning and airlifted the injured from the mountains down to the main Kunar highway, where they were transferred by vehicles to clinics.

“There’s a heavy atmosphere of grief here,” Ezzatullah notes.

“[The] electricity is out, markets remained closed all day. Some areas are still unreachable – remote villages five to six hours away in the mountains.”

Additional reporting by Iftikhar Khan