Searchers retrieve bodies as Afghan quake toll expected to rise

Volunteers and rescuers were pulling more bodies from the rubble
of destroyed buildings in eastern Afghanistan on Thursday, four days after an
earthquake that inflicted a death toll that was already at nearly 1,470 people,
Taliban authorities said.
The magnitude-6.0 earthquake that jolted the mountainous region bordering
Pakistan late Sunday is one of the deadliest in the country in decades.
The toll -- 1,469 dead and more than 3,700 injured -- will
likely rise, deputy Taliban government spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat said on
Thursday.
"Additional
bodies were recovered during these efforts, leading to an increase in the
reported casualties," Fitrat wrote on X, adding that a new toll would be
released later in the day.
"We cannot stop hoping" that injured people remain alive under the
rubble, he told AFP.
Limited
access to the hardest hit areas of mountainous Kunar province delayed rescue
and relief efforts, with rockfalls from repeated aftershocks obstructing
already precarious roads etched onto the side of cliffs.
While most
of the areas that had been unreachable were accessed by Wednesday, expectations
of finding survivors were fading fast.
"Many survivors are still believed to be trapped beneath collapsed homes
in remote villages, and the window for finding them alive is rapidly
closing," the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a statement late on
Wednesday.
- 'Crisis within a
crisis' -
Poor
infrastructure in the impoverished country, still fragile from four decades of
war, has also stymied the emergency response.
The WHO
warned that local healthcare services were "under immense strain",
with shortages of trauma supplies, medicines and staff.
The agency
has appealed for $4 million to deliver lifesaving health interventions and
expand mobile health services and supply distribution.
"Every
hour counts," WHO emergency team lead in Afghanistan Jamshed Tanoli said
in a statement. "Hospitals are struggling, families are grieving and
survivors have lost everything."
The loss
of US foreign aid to the country in January this year has exacerbated the rapid
depletion of emergency stockpiles and logistical resources.
NGOs and
the UN have warned the earthquake creates a crisis within a crisis, with
cash-strapped Afghanistan already contending with overlapping humanitarian
disasters.
UN refugee
chief Filippo Grandi said on X that the quake had "affected more than
500,000 people" in eastern Afghanistan.
After
decades of conflict, the country is contending with endemic poverty, severe
drought and the influx of millions of Afghans forced back to the country by
neighbours Pakistan and Iran since the Taliban's 2021 takeover.
Even as
Afghanistan reeled from its latest disaster, Pakistan began a new push to expel
Afghans, with more than 6,300 people crossing the Torkham border point in
quake-hit Nangarhar province on Tuesday.
















