Afghan Quake Kills 4,000 Subfreezing Temperatures And Remoteness Threaten Estimated 40,000 Homeless People

More than 4,000 people died and 20,000 were injured when a major earthquake, followed by deadly landslides, shattered towns and villages in a remote region of Afghanistan, the country’s ambassador to the United Nations reported Friday.

Because of subfreezing temperatures and the difficultly of getting assistance into the area, fatalities also threaten to increase among the injured and the estimated 40,000 people left homeless by the magnitude 6.1 temblor, said Ravan A.G. Farhadi, Afghanistan’s chief delegate here.

The quake hit after 7 p.m. Wednesday near the city of Rustaq, a community of about 150,000 in the northern reaches of the Hindu Kush. It was followed by a series of aftershocks and by landslides, Farhadi said. More than 20 villages, including six large ones, have been destroyed, he added.

Information about the extent of the damage just began filtering out Friday after the first rescuers arrived.

The ambassador, relying on radio and satellite phone reports from military units sent into the area, described a scene of chaos as survivors stumbled into pitch-black darkness, snow and temperatures in the 20s. Many victims died while waiting for aid that never arrived.

“The problem was that it happened after dark,” he said. “It was night and nobody could help anybody. Many of the injured died during the night.”

Farhadi appealed for immediate international assistance.

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said his country would mobilize assistance and the Red Cross and United Nations prepared Friday to send small relief teams to the area.

Relief teams were set to fly into nearby towns and travel overland to the quake region. Officials said the terrain was so treacherous and the snow so deep that neither team would likely reach the area until late Saturday or Sunday.

Sarah Russell, a U.N. spokeswoman in Islamabad, Pakistan, said the world organization could draw on large stores of food, clothing and medicine stockpiled in northern Afghanistan, but a massive airlift seems unlikely in the immediate future. “We are doing our best to get in there but it is a very tough journey,” Russell said.

The tragedy hit a country impoverished and ripped apart by nearly 20 years of warfare. Farhadi represents President Burhanuddin Rabbani’s ousted government, which was driven from the capital of Kabul in September 1996, when it was seized by forces of the militant Islamic Taliban movement.

The Taliban now control about 85 percent of the country, but the United Nations has refused to recognize its government.

The region hit by the quake is controlled by the northern opposition alliance, a fractious coalition of warlords opposed to the Taliban. Some of the fiercest fighting in recent months has occurred just south of there.

Despite assurances, it wasn’t clear whether the warring parties in Afghanistan will cooperate with efforts to help the earthquake victims. Elsewhere in the country, fighting has hampered relief efforts. “If we send a convoy through, it will be looted,” said a relief agency official.

In central Afghanistan, the Taliban have blockaded an area suffering from extreme food shortages, bombing runways and otherwise preventing humanitarian groups from delivering supplies, according to the World Food Program.