Around 2,000 people were killed and more than 3,000 injured after a series of earthquakes flattened a district capital and villages in northern Afghanistan late last night and today. But unconfirmed reports suggest as many as 4,800 may have perished.
"It was a very heartrending catastrophe. About 2,000 died,"
Interior Minister Yunus Qanuni said. He appealed for international help, saying the interim government simply couldn't cope with the disaster.
"The bodies of 1,800 have been pulled out of the rubble, but many more are still buried. More than 3,000 have been injured and 30,000 displaced," Mr Qanuni said. Officals and aid workers said aftershocks continued this afternoon, hampering rescue efforts and terrifying residents in the devastated market town of Nahrin, a district capital of mud-brick buildings, and surrounding villages.
The city of Nahrin, near the epicentre in the rugged Hindu Kush mountains, has been destroyed and 1,500 homes had crumbled.
"Around 90 per cent of residential houses in old and new Nahrin towns have been destroyed by the earthquake and aftershocks," said Ehsan Ahmad Zahin of the French aid agency ACTED, which has a team on the spot.
A team from the United Nations, aid agencies and the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) headed from the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif to assess the damage, taking hundreds of tents and blankets, ICRC and UN officials said.
Government spokesman Mr Yusuf Nourestani said Russia planned to send a mobile clinic and the World Food Programme had sent 158 tonnes of food in addition to the UN and ICRC aid.
Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai cancelled a trip to Turkey scheduled for tomorrow because of the quake and called a meeting of all ministries to make plans to deal with the latest disaster to strike the war-ravaged country, officials said.