Quake Kills Over 1,200 in Afghanistan

More than 1,200 people were killed when a powerful nighttime earthquake flattened thousands of homes and leveled a district capital in the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains, government officials said today.

The magnitude 5.9 quake wiped out the town of Nahrin, 105 miles north of Kabul, the capital, and more than 600 bodies have been pulled from the rubble, said Interior Minister Younis Qanooni.

As Qanooni toured the devastated area this morning, men covered in a glaze of dust and sweat picked through 8-foot-high piles of debris, loading horses and donkeys with what goods they could salvage.

Many roads were clogged with boulders, thin almond trees had been pushed over, and hundreds of mud-brick homes looked like a giant fist had smashed through them.

“This is a very bad scene,” Qanooni said. “We have found 600 bodies, and there is at least that many still buried.”

The quake, or zelzilla in Dari, hit about 7:30 p.m. local time Monday, when most Nahrin residents were in their homes.

Shopkeeper Mohammed Haji Sayed was drinking tea in his living room, watching his daughter work on her lessons. He felt the ground heave, heard the snap of wooden ceiling beams and saw the roof crash down on 10-year-old Payrai, burying her.

“I couldn’t get to her; I couldn’t move,” he said. “She looked up at me. She yelled. Then she was underground.”

On Tuesday, Sayed laid his girl to rest in a grave near their home. But he was still digging furiously through the rubble today, looking for her notebooks.

Aid Transported Over Tortuous Roads

Nahrin is in a remote part of the northeastern province of Baghlan, and the extent of devastation was not clear until Tuesday afternoon, when reports began to trickle out of the villages of hundreds of people killed. Aid agencies launched a massive emergency assistance effort from two directions to help.

Tents, blankets, food, stoves, medicine and at least one mobile clinic were sent to the area over tortuous, unpaved roads, with officials voicing fear that many people would die from injuries before they could be reached and treated.

Relief organizations in Kabul, a 10-hour drive from the south over the high, snow-covered Salang Pass, and in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, a four-hour drive to the west, dispatched truck convoys that were arriving throughout the night Tuesday and early today.

But the relief efforts were hampered by aftershocks and by roads still scattered with debris from an earthquake that struck earlier this month.

“It’s a desperate situation, and we’re sending everything we got,” said Richard Piper of the International Organization for Migration, who is based in Mazar-i-Sharif.

“The people who flew over the area saw utter devastation,” said Yusuf Hassan, a United Nations spokesman in Kabul.

There were conflicting reports about the number of deaths, some reaching as high as 4,000 and some in the hundreds, but officials said this was understandable in a country without a working telephone network or good road system, where covering even relatively short distances can take hours.

U.S. special envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, speaking outside the sandbagged U.S. Embassy in Kabul at noon Tuesday, stunned reporters when he said that he had just been told by the country’s interim administration that the death toll was at least 1,800. He pledged immediate U.S. support to help the victims.

No foreigners were believed to be among the missing or dead. Brig. Gen. John W. Rosa Jr. said at a Pentagon briefing Tuesday that no U.S. or other coalition forces were hurt.

Kabul radio and television said 5,000 people had been injured in the earthquake and subsequent jolts, some as big as magnitude 5.

More than 12,000 yards of white cloth had been sent to wrap the dead, the television reported. Some reports said that 30,000 people were homeless.

Interim Prime Minister Hamid Karzai, who had been scheduled to go to Turkey today, canceled his trip in order to attend to the disaster. He was expected to visit the area today.

‘The Administration Is Doing the Best It Can’

His spokesman Yusuf Nuristani said the government was allocating $600,000 for immediate emergency assistance, and he pledged $147 to each family of those killed and $88 for families suffering injuries.

“The administration is doing the best it can,” he said.

In Nahrin, as in most Afghan towns, the great majority of houses are made of mud bricks, with tree branches and skinny logs used as support beams.

In some older parts of the stricken area, entire streets were erased, with children and dogs climbing over the rubble that was left.

This morning, violent aftershocks continued to jar residents, who yelled out “Zelzilla! Zelzilla!” and ran to open spaces. Some people were upset that few relief convoys had arrived. “Nobody has come here, not even to look,” said Gholam Sakhi, one of the elders in Nahrin.

Gen. Khalil, a military commander from nearby Pul-i-Kumri, ordered two military helicopters to ferry out the injured but said dozens more were needed.

“Everyone is trying to find the members of their families to bring them out of the destroyed walls or collapsed areas,” Khalil said. “The earthquake is going on, and each time, the people are very afraid.”

U.N. Arranges Helicopter Surveys

On Tuesday night, U.N. officials were arranging helicopter flights to survey the area, while big blue UNICEF trucks chugged through a barren moonlit landscape notorious for bandits.

When the quake hit, tremors could be felt in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, nearly 300 miles away.

The U.S. Geological Survey said Monday’s quake was relatively shallow, about 40 miles beneath the surface, which made it more dangerous than most temblors its size.

Monday’s quake was the second serious temblor to batter Afghanistan this month. More than 100 people were buried by a quake-triggered landslide in Samangan province on March 3.

That quake, the strongest in the region since 1983, was magnitude 7.2.

U.N. spokesman Hassan described the region as one already ravaged by drought and by the war between the former Taliban regime and Northern Alliance forces, and said that it had more recently seen tensions between members of the Tajik and Pushtun ethnic groups.

“It is an area that has seen more than enough share of misfortune,” he said.

Gettleman reported from Nahrin and Daniszewski from Kabul.