Disaster area
Afghanistan shaken again by a severe earthquake
A boy mourns next to the grave of his little brother, who died in Herat province in western Afghanistan. photo
© Ebrahim Noroozi/AP/dpa
The earth in western Afghanistan cannot rest. A strong earthquake is registered again. Meanwhile, the region is lacking basic necessities – and a harsh winter is imminent.
The UN emergency relief office OCHA, however, had previously put the number of deaths at more than 1,000. Herat is located in the border province of the same name near Iran and is the second largest city in Afghanistan after Kabul.
On Saturday morning, at least eight earthquakes shook the border region near Iran within a short period of time. The US earthquake monitoring station USGS put the magnitude at values between 4.6 and 6.3. The tremors occurred northwest of Herat at a shallow depth of around ten kilometers. Tremors of magnitude 5.1 were recorded on Monday.
Warning of famine
Due to drastically reduced funding, the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) is now warning of a famine. “The situation is pretty hopeless,” said WFP regional director for Asia and the Pacific, John Aylieff, to the editorial network Germany (RND). Humanitarian aid programs are “drastically underfunded.”
The WFP has 80 percent less money for Afghanistan than last year, said Aylieff. Instead of 1.6 billion US dollars (around 1.5 billion euros), only 340 million US dollars (around 320 million euros) would be available for Afghanistan. “15 million people in Afghanistan are currently suffering from hunger, we wanted to reach at least 13 million. Due to a lack of funding, we had to cut off aid to ten million people,” he told the RND.
“They can’t survive without supplies”
The approaching “brutal” winter in Afghanistan is making things “particularly critical”: “Some mountain villages are cut off from the outside world by the snow for up to six months. They cannot survive without supplies,” said Aylieff. He expects drastic consequences: “Of course people will flee. But above all, more people will die.”
The UN representative called on the international community to increase its support for Afghanistan. “Even if the Taliban make many highly problematic decisions, humanity must come first,” he said. The support for Afghanistan has fallen significantly more compared to the aid for other countries. “That doesn’t meet the need in any way.”
There are frequent severe earthquakes in the region where the Arabian, Indian and Eurasian plates meet. More than 1,000 people died in a devastating earthquake in Afghanistan in 2022. After several decades of conflict, many houses are poorly built. Earthquakes therefore often cause great damage.