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Toll prone to rise, with vital injury reported throughout mountainous provinces of Kunar and Nangahar, sources say.
Revealed On 1 Sep 2025
A magnitude 6.0 earthquake has struck japanese Afghanistan, with early studies indicating that a minimum of 10 individuals had been killed and 20 others injured, in response to sources.
The tremor shook the Kunar and Nangahar provinces at about midnight native time on Monday (19:30 GMT, Sunday), native sources instructed Al Jazeera, with vital injury reported throughout a number of districts within the mountainous areas.
The sources stated the toll was preliminary and that figures are prone to rise as assessments proceed.
The USA Geological Survey stated the 6.0 magnitude quake was centred 27km (17 miles) east of the town of Jalalabad within the Nangahar province. It occurred at a depth of simply 8km (5 miles).
A short time later, one other 4.5 magnitude tremor occurred close to Basawul in Nangahar.
Al Jazeera’s Kamal Hyder, reporting from the town of Lahore in Pakistan, stated the impact of the earthquake was felt in an unlimited space of the neighbouring nation too, together with the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab provinces.
“Experiences from Afghanistan’s Kunar point out whole villages have been worn out, persons are below the rubble and rescue operations are below approach,” he stated.
“Kunar is an impoverished and mountainous area. The homes there are very weak, constructed of mud and rocks. So they might not have the ability to face up to this explicit earthquake, given the truth that this was shallow. It additionally occurred late within the evening, when lots of people had been inside their properties,” he stated.
Hyder added that entry to Kunar is tough and that communications there seem like down in the meanwhile.
Specialists, in the meantime, say the affected space is in a area vulnerable to massive earthquakes.
“It’s a really tectonically lively space on the junction of the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates, and the Indian plate is transferring northwards and sliding previous components of Eurasia,” stated Chris Elders, an emeritus professor at Curtin College’s Faculty of Earth at Planetary Sciences in Western Australia.
It’s an space that “additionally has fairly a excessive inhabitants density and an space that’s very mountainous”, which means that earthquakes there typically additionally set off landslides, he stated.
“It’s not solely the buildings that can shake and turn out to be unstable, however the hillsides can even shake and turn out to be unstable, and that’s what triggers the landslide,” he added.
In October 2023, an earthquake in Afghanistan’s western province of Herat killed a minimum of 2,400 individuals, the Taliban administration stated.