The Taliban on Tuesday urged its fighters to aid natural disaster rescue and relief efforts and said it would not block global efforts in the battered region of northern Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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The region has been hard-hit by powerful earthquakes in the past, with a 7.6- magnitude quake in Kashmir in 2005 leaving over 75,000 people dead. “The mosque has also developed a few cracks”, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa information minister Mushtaq Ahmad Ghani told AFP.
The Pakistani town closest to the epicenter is Chitral, while on the Afghan side it is the Jurm district of Badakhshan. “Fortunately, the casualties are lower than initially expected”, Sayas said. Now, landslides and falling rocks have blocked the few existing roads.
Food and other essentials are ready to be sent out, Mr Adeeb said, but “getting there is not easy”.
The fundamentalist organisation also “declares its empathy with the affected Muslim brothers and asks Allah Almighty to bestow patience and great reward on their relatives”.
The worst impact was reported in Faizabad, capital of Badakhshan province but there was also significant damage in the provinces of Kunar, Nuristan, Laghman, Takhar, Baghlan and Nangarhar.
At this point, most observers expect death tolls to rise in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
With large mountainous areas of Afghanistan hit and icy weather closing in, the unstable security situation has posed a major challenge to global aid groups that have been repeatedly targeted by insurgents. Another 30 people died in the country’s tribal region. More than 50 were injured and 200 houses were destroyed.
Rescue and relief workers have increased emergency response efforts for the victims of a deadly quake in Afghanistan, said an official of the country’s National Disaster Management Authority (ANDMA) on Tuesday. Rescuers are struggling to reach quake-stricken regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Lt. Gen Asim Bajwa, a spokesman for the Pakistani military, said officials were still assessing the damage, with aircraft flying over quake zones.
According to Zahid Rafiq, an official with the Pakistani meteorological department, the quake was felt across the country.
According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the massive quake, which struck Pakistan and northern Afghanistan at 2:09pm Monday, was followed by seven aftershocks, measuring as high as magnitude 4.8.
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File picture shows residents walking past the rubble of a house after it was damaged by an natural disaster in Mingora, Swat, Pakistan, October 26, 2015.
