Scared Afghan quake survivors ‘panicked, traumatised’
HERAT: Afghan earthquake survivor Negar could hardly bear a single night in her half-demolished village, for fear of more atershocks, before she asked to be sent back to the city.
Yahya Kalilah, the Doctors Without Borders programme head in Afghanistan, said this week that many survivors have been let “panicked and traumatised.”
Negar is one of thousands who have fled their homes ater a series of earthquakes with magnitudes measuring between 4.2 and 6.3 jolted western Afghanistan this month, killing at least 1,000 people.
Fity-year-old Negar, who like many Afghans goes by one name, was taken with her family back to her village of Nayeb Rafi in Herat province but was gripped by panic that the house would collapse.
“When we went to the village, we passed out and they brought us back to the city unconscious,” she told AFP from a makeshit aid camp in Herat city, the provincial capital.
“There was the noise of machinery pulling the corpses from the ground. We saw that and it increased our fear and panic. When there are seven or eight hundred families, some of them dead and half of them alive, wouldn’t you be afraid?”
The quake series began on Oct.7 with a 6.3 tremor and at least eight powerful atershocks that devastated rural villages northwest of Herat city.
The Taliban government said more than 1,000 people were killed, while the World Health organisation (WHO) put the figure at nearly 1,400 by late on Saturday.
Ghulam Sakhi has spent the past 12 days in a small tent set up in a city centre square, believing it’s safer than the rural areas.
“Until the threat of atershocks is gone, we are forced to stay here. We are afraid. Our house is also no longer a place where we could live, it has cracks all over it,” the 42-year-old said.
“People are not feeling safe. I will assure you 100 per cent, no one will sleep in their house.”
Providing shelter on a large scale will be a challenge for Afghanistan’s Taliban authorities, who seized power in August 2021 and have fractious relations with international aid organisations.
Afghanistan is already suffering a dire humanitarian crisis as winter approaches, with the widespread withdrawal of foreign aid that followed the Taliban’s return to power.
The WHO reported that the “poor, overcrowded environment with limited access to water and winter essentials like warm blankets and clothes will likely lead to an increase in the incidence and severity of infectious diseases.”