Families Bury Dead After Iran Earthquake
The last sound Hussein Sultani heard from his daughter-in-law was her scream when the earth began to shake.
His mud hut trembled as boulders dislodged from the surrounding hills rolled down onto the village, killing a group of women washing clothes at a nearby stream. Among the dead was his grandson and his 20-year-old daughter-in-law, Mariam.
Not a single home was standing in this village on Sunday, two days after an earthquake of 6.1 magnitude left an estimated 3,000 people dead and 2,000 injured in a mountainous region of northwestern Iran.
A second powerful earthquake of 5.1 magnitude hit the region on Sunday, destroying buildings damaged in Friday’s tremor and causing widespread panic, Tehran Radio reported. There was no word on casualties.
Friday’s quake in Iran was the most devastating of several Asian temblors in recent days in Armenia, China and Pakistan. Officials gave a lower Iranian death toll - 554 - than aid workers and villagers, but government officials said the casualty figures surely will rise as rescuers arrive on the scene.
Sultani, wearing a skullcap and walking with a stoop, made his way through the rubble with a flashlight searching for his family. Aid workers had given him a tent and cooking oil.
“I lost my daughter-in-law and her 3-year-old baby as well as my cousin,” he said.
Blood stained the snow-covered ground, and survivors huddled around small bonfires in the 19-degree cold. In the distance, howls could be heard from wolves and wild dogs, animals that have attacked corpses and hampered rescuers.
In hard-hit Ardabil province, an official told the Farsi-language Kayhan newspaper that 110 villages have been affected by the quake. The death toll in just six villages visited by reporters in the province was reported as more than 2,000 people.
Snow has kept aid workers from a string of villages beyond the Sabalan mountains, which they say may be the most devastated. Hundreds of sheep and cows - the livelihood of the farming villages - were buried under landslides and the collapsed walls of houses.
In Shiran, a wealthy farming community of 1,000, only a few people remained. One of them, Reza Azizvand, estimated that half the village’s residents had been killed - including his wife of five months.
“We loaded the dead in bulldozers, dug a mass grave and buried all the dead there, one beside the other,” Azizvand said as he sat in the one room left of his house.
At the cemetery, the names of the dead were written by hand on large wooden slates dug into the ground. Among Iran’s overwhelmingly Shiite Muslim population, mass graves are considered an insult and are a last resort for burial.
“We do not know who is where,” said a man in Viand, a village where 33 people had died.
“No one knows whether his neighbors have left the village to go live with relatives elsewhere, whether they are in a hospital or buried somewhere under the rubble.”