Quake-Ravaged Afghanistan Receives Help

As soldiers dug hundreds of bodies from flattened homes in remote northern Afghanistan on Sunday, rescue workers flew in supplies for an emergency medical clinic to help survivors of an earthquake that killed at least 2,500 people and injured 2,000.

Saturday’s magnitude 6.9 quake erased entire villages, sliced into mountains and triggered landslides. Some local officials said the death toll had reached 5,000. Among those killed were 140 schoolchildren in Rostaq.

“We need help desperately. Thousands of people are dead,” a spokesman for a northern alliance fighting Afghanistan’s Taliban government said from the stricken area.

United Nations officials flew over some of the most desolate and hardest-hit regions Sunday, setting down briefly near the quake’s epicenter in Shari Basurkh, about 30 miles from the Badakhshan provincial capital of Feyzabad.

They delivered tents, plastic sheeting and materials for an emergency clinic to be set up in Shari Basurkh for the many wounded.

The quake was centered near the site where a temblor in February killed 2,300 people and left an additional 8,000 homeless.

Alfredo Witschi-Cestari, head of the U.N.’s humanitarian aid office in neighboring Pakistan, said the latest quake was the more devastating of the two.

While the first struck a region with about 30,000 people, the second affected a hilly, rugged area that is home to about twice that population.

The area’s sun-baked mud homes, already weakened by the February temblor, crumbled during Saturday’s violent shaking. The homes had been made more vulnerable by the relentless rain that battered the region in recent days.

Food, blankets, tents and plastic sheeting were to be loaded onto cargo helicopters today in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.

They are scheduled to be sent to Feyzabad. From there, the supplies will be forwarded to the areas that suffered the greatest damage.