UN: Death toll of children in Afghan quake now at 155

GAYAN, Afghanistan — The death toll of children in last week’s devastating earthquake in southeastern Afghanistan has risen to at least 155, the United Nations said as the scope of the deadliest quake to hit the impoverished country in two decades comes into focus.

The U.N.’s humanitarian coordination organization, OCHA, said Sunday that another 250 children were injured in the magnitude 6 temblor that struck the mountainous villages in the Paktika and Khost provinces near the country’s border with Pakistan, flattening homes and triggering landslides.

Most of the children died in Paktika’s hard-hit Gayan district, which remains a scene of life in ruins, days after the disaster.

The quake has also left an estimated 65 children orphaned or unaccompanied, the U.N. humanitarian office added.

Even as badly needed food, medicine and other international aid has trickled into the provinces on precarious dirt roads, despair is growing among newly homeless survivors. Many villagers who were scraping by have lost everything.

In ravaged Gayan, villagers are grappling with the extent of the tragedy.

When the earthquake last week demolished his house and those around it, Abdullah tried to claw through the rubble and rescue his children. For hours, he called for help, shouting from under a deep pile of mud.

When he and his neighbors finally cleared the wreckage, he discovered a nightmarish scene — the bodies of 12 family members, including his son and daughter, laying dead in the debris. Four other relatives were injured.

“What happened that night is very difficult to explain in words,” the 65-year-old farmer and teacher, who like many Afghans goes by one name, told The Associated Press. “Everything is under the ground now. We have just buried the bodies.”

He pulled away more rubble from his collapsed mud-and-brick home.