People dug through the rubble of the quake in western Afghanistan for their few possessions, but the material losses seemed unimportant.
Saturday’s 6.3-magnitude quake killed and injured thousands when it leveled an untold number of homes in Herat province. Picking through the rubble on Monday, Asadullah Khan paused to think about a future marred by grief.
Khan lost three daughters, his mother and his sister-in-law. Five members of his uncle’s family have died. His neighbors are grief-stricken, too.
“We have lost 23 people in this village,” Khan said.
The Taliban-appointed deputy prime minister for economic affairs, Abdul Ghani Baradar, and his team visited the quake-affected region on Monday to deliver “immediate relief assistance” and ensure “equitable and accurate distribution of aid,” authorities said.
Top United Nations officials also went to Zinda Jan to assess the extent of the damage.
In neighboring Pakistan, the government held a special session to review aid for Afghanistan, including relief teams.
Afghanistan has few reliable statistics, but a spokesman for Afghanistan’s national disaster authority, Janan Sayiq, told reporters in Kabul that about 4,000 people were killed or injured by the disaster.
He did not provide a breakdown, but the UN estimates that 1,023 people were killed and 1,663 people injured in 11 villages in Zinda Jan alone.
Nearly 2,000 houses in 20 villages were destroyed, according to the Taliban.
