After big quakes, too scared to sleep anywhere but outside
HERAT, AFGHANISTAN ❯❯ The fear from a week of unrelenting earthquakes is palpable throughout the northwestern city of Herat in Afghanistan. Makeshift tents made of sticks and sheets have popped up across public parks, alleyways and grassy medians of main roads, the families within them too afraid to sleep in their homes.
Men pray in the street instead of at mosques, pleading with God to stop the destruction. Office buildings are empty; the oncecrowded money exchange that spanned four floors is closed. The only place in the city that is bustling is the airport, where those who can afford it have filled every plane heading out.
In just five days, three major earthquakes rocked this slice of Afghanistan close to Iran, killing nearly 1,300 people and injuring around 1,700 more, according to the United Nations. A handful of villages outside the city have been completely destroyed, in the deadliest natural disaster to hit the country in decades.
Herat City, the capital of the province, was spared the worst of the destruction. Apartment complexes, office buildings and some of the city's ancient ruins were damaged but not razed like the fragile mud-brick homes in the desert villages outside the urban center.
But the 6.3-magnitude quakes — two on Saturday and another early Wednesday morning — and their aftershocks have put residents already reeling from the Taliban takeover two years ago and subsequent economic collapse on edge.
Now, Herat City, once a center of medieval Islamic culture, home to poets and scholars, has transformed into a city of tents. Residents are racked with questions they fear the answers to: Will the quakes ever end? Will their family survive? Is this a punishment from God?
“I've been scared; I was thinking I might lose my life,” said Rustam Yaqoobi, 45, standing outside a mosquito-net-turned-shelter in an empty, dusty lot on the outskirts of the city. “I can't even think about the future, what will come. Only God knows.”
In the yard of the city's Great Mosque, a centuriesold Islamic complex lavishly adorned with bright blue tiles, thousands of people have set up makeshift shelters and slept there for nearly a week.
For Esmatullah Khaliqi, 25, and dozens of his relatives, including his 1-yearold daughter, their home since Saturday has been four sheets connected to wooden poles dug into the hard earth. There are neither toilets in the tent camp nor wells to collect water, and his family must spend the little savings they have to buy food from a nearby market and cook it on a gas burner outside their tent.
On Wednesday, after the third major quake, a businessman came and distributed water and baked goods, nearly causing a stampede. His was the only aid that had arrived, Khaliqi said.