The New York Times, August 2025
Rescue workers on Monday scrambled to reach mountainous areas in eastern Afghanistan hit by a 6.0-magnitude earthquake that killed more than 800 people overnight, Afghan officials said, warning that the death toll would probably rise. Recovery efforts were complicated by landslides that stranded devastated villages already barely accessible by road. And so far, only a handful of countries have offered relief assistance to the Taliban government.
Most of the destruction from the earthquake, which struck just before midnight Sunday, took place in the province of Kunar, where dozens of villages of mud and brick houses were hit. “The area is very steep and narrow and most of it is inaccessible because of landslides and rains that fell over the past few days,” said Kate Carey, a Kabul-based officer with the United Nations’ Office for humanitarian affairs. The quake hit Afghanistan as the South Asian nation has been battling a series of overlapping humanitarian, economic and geopolitical crises.
Hundreds of hospitals and health care centers have shut down since the Trump administration suspended U.S. foreign aid this spring. More than 2.3 million Afghan nationals have returned to Afghanistan this year, in some cases by force, after being expelled from Pakistan or Iran amid a wave of xenophobia and political pressure in those countries. And four years into power, the Taliban have struggled to shed Afghanistan of its status of pariah and attract foreign investments despite timid engagement with Russia and China in recent months.
