A rescuer works following an earthquake at an unidentified location in Afghanistan, on this handout picture launched on November 3, 2025. Afghan Red Crescent/Handout by way of Reuters
The 6.3-magnitude quake struck in a single day at a depth of 28 kilometers (17 miles) with the epicentre close to town of Mazar-i-Sharif, in accordance with the U.S. Geological Survey.
More than 20 individuals had been killed and round 320 had been injured within the provinces of Balkh and Samangan, well being ministry spokesman Sharafat Zaman advised journalists on Monday morning, stressing that this was a preliminary toll.
He didn’t present a province-wide breakdown of the casualties.
Residents of Mazar-i-Sharif, certainly one of Afghanistan’s largest northern cities, scrambled into the streets attributable to fears their houses would collapse, an AFP correspondent noticed.
The metropolis’s famed Blue Mosque, a Fifteenth-century landmark recognized for its vibrant tiles, was additionally broken, an AFP journalist witnessed.
Pieces of the construction, significantly from certainly one of its minarets, broke off and lay scattered throughout the mosque’s grounds, one of many nation’s few remaining vacationer spots.
Correspondents within the capital Kabul, round 420 kilometres to the south, additionally mentioned they felt shaking.
Poor communication networks and infrastructure in mountainous Afghanistan have hampered catastrophe responses up to now, stopping authorities for hours and even days from reaching far-flung villages to evaluate the extent of the injury.
It is the most recent pure catastrophe for the Taliban authorities, which has confronted three main lethal earthquakes since taking up Afghanistan in 2021, even because the overseas assist that fashioned the spine of the nation’s economic system has dramatically dropped.
In August, a shallow 6.0-magnitude quake within the nation’s east worn out mountainside villages and killed greater than 2,200 individuals.
Large tremors in western Herat, close to the Iranian border, in 2023, and in japanese Nangarhar province in 2022 killed lots of and destroyed hundreds of houses.
The United Nations and assist companies have warned starvation is rising among the many Afghan inhabitants.
The remoted nation is affected by a humanitarian disaster compounded by drought, financial restrictions on the banking sector, and the pushback of hundreds of thousands of Afghan residents from neighbouring Iran and Pakistan.
Earthquakes are widespread in Afghanistan, significantly alongside the Hindu Kush mountain vary, close to the place the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates meet.
Many houses within the predominantly rural nation — devastated by many years of struggle — are shoddily constructed.
It usually takes hours or days to journey by steep roads and paths to distant villages, which are sometimes reduce off from assist throughout disasters or poor climate.
Published – November 03, 2025 06:32 am IST
