A powerful earthquake struck a rural, mountainous region of eastern Afghanistan in the early hours of Wednesday, killing 1,000 people and injuring 1,500 more, a state-run news agency disclosed.

Officials warned that the already grim toll would likely rise as rescuers dig through collapsed dwellings.

The 5.9 magnitude quake struck hardest in the rugged terrain of the east, where people already live hardscrabble lives in a country in the grip of a humanitarian disaster made worse by the Taliban takeover in August.

Information remained scarce but quakes of that strength can cause severe damage in an area where homes and other buildings are poorly constructed and landslides are common. Experts put the depth at just 10 kilometres (6 miles) – another factor that could increase the impact.

The death toll given by Afghanistan’s state-run Bakhtar News Agency was equal to that of a quake in 2002 in northern Afghanistan that struck immediately after the US-led invasion overthrew the Taliban’s earlier government.

According to AFP, footage from Paktika province near the Pakistan border showed men carrying people in blankets to waiting helicopters. Others were treated on the ground. Some images showed residents picking through clay bricks and other rubble from destroyed stone houses, some of whose roofs or walls had caved in.

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“The death toll has reached 1,000 and the number is rising. People are digging grave after grave,” said the head of the information and culture department of Paktika province, Mohammad Amin Huzaifa, in a message to the press.

The quake struck about 44 kilometres (27 miles) from the city of Khost, near the Pakistani border, at a depth of 51 kilometres, the US Geological Survey said. The European Mediterranean Seismological Centre said shaking was felt by about 119 million people in Pakistan, Afghanistan and India.

In Kabul, Afghan Prime Minister Mohammad Hassan Akhund convened an emergency meeting at the presidential palace to coordinate the relief effort, and Bilal Karimi, a deputy spokesman for the Taliban government, wrote on Twitter to urge aid agencies to send teams to the area.

The “response is on its way”, the UN resident coordinator in Afghanistan, Ramiz Alakbarov, wrote on Twitter.

The disaster comes as Afghanistan has been enduring a severe economic crisis since the Taliban took over in August as US-led international forces withdrew after two decades of war. In response to the Taliban takeover, many governments have imposed sanctions on Afghanistan’s banking sector and cut billions of dollars worth of development aid.

Mountainous Afghanistan and the larger region of South Asia, where the Indian tectonic plate collides with the Eurasian plate to the north, has long been vulnerable to devastating earthquakes.

The Star