4,000 Feared Dead, 20,000 Hurt in Afghanistan Quake

More than 4,000 people died and 20,000 were injured when a major earthquake, followed by deadly landslides, shattered towns and villages in a remote region of Afghanistan, the country’s ambassador to the U.N. reported Friday.

Because of freezing temperatures and the difficulty of getting assistance into the area, fatalities were expected to increase among the injured and the estimated 40,000 people left homeless by the magnitude 6.1 temblor, said Ravan A.G. Farhadi, Afghanistan’s chief delegate here.

The quake hit after 7 p.m. Wednesday near the city of Rustaq, a community of about 150,000 in the northern reaches of the Hindu Kush mountain range. It was followed by a series of aftershocks and by landslides, Farhadi said.

More than 20 villages, including six large ones, were destroyed, he added.

Information about the extent of the damage began filtering out Friday after the first rescuers arrived.

The ambassador, relying on radio and satellite phone reports from military units sent into the area, described a scene of chaos as survivors stumbled into pitch-black darkness, snow and temperatures in the 20s. Many victims died while waiting helplessly for aid that never arrived.

“The problem was that it happened after dark,” he said. “It was night, and nobody could help anybody. Many of the injured died during the night.”

Farhadi appealed for immediate international assistance.

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said his country will mobilize assistance, and the Red Cross and U.N. each prepared Friday to send a small relief team to the area.

Relief teams were set to fly into nearby towns and travel overland to the quake region. Officials said the terrain is so treacherous and the snow so deep that neither team was likely to reach the area until late today or Sunday.

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Sarah Russell, a U.N. spokeswoman in Islamabad, Pakistan, said the world organization could draw on large stores of food, clothing and medicine stockpiled in northern Afghanistan, but a massive airlift seems unlikely in the immediate future.

“We are doing our best to get in there, but it is a very tough journey,” Russell said.

The tragedy hit a country already impoverished and ripped apart by nearly 20 years of warfare.

Farhadi represents President Burhanuddin Rabbani’s ousted government, which was driven from the capital of Kabul in September 1996, when Kabul was seized by forces of the militant Islamic Taliban movement.

The Taliban now controls about 85% of the country, but the U.N. has refused to recognize its government.

The region hit by the quake is controlled by the northern opposition alliance, a fractious coalition of warlords opposed to the Taliban. Some of the fiercest fighting in recent months has occurred just south of there.

Pakistan’s state-run news agency reported that Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar ordered his troops in neighboring Kunduz province to stop all fighting in the area.

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In an interview with Associated Press, Sher Mohammed, a spokesman for Rabbani’s forces in the area, gave an estimate of casualties similar to that made by Farhadi. He blamed many of the fatalities on landslides triggered by the quake.

“The hills collapsed into each other, making a huge crater in the earth,” he said.

The Taliban’s Radio Shariat reported the earthquake in its evening news report and said about 3,200 people were dead.

Waverly Person, director of the National Earthquake Information Center at Golden, Colo., described the area as “very active seismically” but said the quake was unusually shallow, occurring only nine to 10 miles beneath the surface.

“The reason there was so much loss of life was this was a comparatively shallow quake, and the buildings in that part of the world are very prone to quake damage,” Person said.

William Davnie, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Dushanbe, the capital of neighboring Tajikistan, said in a telephone interview that most of the housing in that area of Afghanistan is of mud construction and subject to collapse amid such force.

Despite assurances, it was not clear whether the warring parties in Afghanistan will cooperate with efforts to help the quake victims.

Turner reported from the U.N. and Filkins from Varanasi, India. Times staff writers Kenneth Reich in Los Angeles and Carol J. Williams in Moscow also contributed to this report.