Masouma* and her husband were returning home from a morning shopping trip in Zendajan district of Herat province when a severe earthquake hit on Sunday, October 7, 2023. A severe aftershock soon followed. At around 11 a.m. they managed to reach their village of Siaab but only a pile of dirt and rubble stood where their mud house used to be. Their three teenage children had vanished.
Fearing they were under the collapsed house, 55-year-old Masouma began to dig and push away the soil. Among the large group of local men helping rescue efforts, Masouma was the only woman as she dug the earth with her nails and fists. Her black-and-brown veiled body trembled with fear. Sometimes, she urged the others to hurry and save her children.
Many residents had gathered around the collapsed houses in the village. Slowly, the air of the destroyed village filled with the wailing sounds of survivors who, one after the other, let out cries of despair as they discovered the bodies of loved ones.
Still, the hunt for Masouma’s children continued, as people moved objects and fallen bricks from the ruins. Exhausted by her efforts, Masouma stood to one side while her 65-year-old husband, Sufi Habib*, continued to dig. Sometimes Masouma screamed, while other times she just stared at the soil as she kept searching for their children: 19-year-old Hamed* and their two daughters, Banafsha*, 13, and Hameera*, 15.
Finally, after three hours of effort, she heard her husband’s scream: “Oh no!” At that moment, Masouma realized that her children were among the victims. She felt cold taking over her body, and her legs froze momentarily. She knelt on the debris, poured a handful of dirt over her head, and stayed there in stunned silence.
“First, they pulled Hamed’s body from the ground, then Banafsha and Hameera. My children were lifeless, and their heads, faces, and clothes were dirt-covered,” their mother tells Zan times. “My husband didn’t want to show them to me, but I went through the crowd and held my children in my arms.” She and her husband are the only survivors of their family of five.
Taliban forces arrived in Masouma’s village around 5 p.m., six hours after the earthquake struck. They brought bulldozers to clear the debris. Masouma believes their late arrival is one of the main reasons for the high casualty count in the village: “The Taliban came too late. People had found ways to extract the bodies by the time they arrived. If the bulldozers were there from the beginning, maybe my children would have come out alive.”
Due to so many buildings being damaged or destroyed, most of the village’s dead were buried in mass graves without ritual washes. Masouma and her husband buried them separately. “When they wanted to place my martyred children in these large graves, I refused. Together with my husband, we dug graves next to our destroyed home so they could be close to us,” she explains.
Now they contemplate life without their children. Their son, who worked as a carpenter, was the family’s only breadwinner as Sufi Habib can no longer work due to illness and old age. When Zan Times talked to Masouma four days after the earthquake hit, she was sitting in a tent amid the ruins. She feels she’s the most desperate person on earth because nothing remains for her: “I no longer have children, a home, or a breadwinner. What do I do with this life?”
Zendajan district, the earthquake’s epicentre, is located 40 kilometres northwest of the city of Herat. Though a health clinic operates there, many of those injured in the earthquake couldn’t get to hospital in time due to delays in the arrival of emergency vehicles and the long distance to medical facilities.
Zainab* was able to make the long journey to a hospital in Herat after the earthquake. As the middle-aged woman recovers from her injuries, her black Herati chador is still covered in mud and dried blood. Of her four children, two died due to the late arrival of aid to their village of Naib Rafi in Zendajan district, while her two surviving sons are hospitalized with fractures in their arms and legs. She hasn’t slept for three nights, worried that they have nowhere to go after they leave the hospital: “We lost our home, and now I’m worried about where we will go once discharged from the hospital. How can my children and I live under tents with broken arms and legs?”
Another resident of Zendajan district tells Zan Times that he witnessed many injured people either get worse or die on the way to hospital because of the lack of medical services at the site of the incident. Abdullah* is lucky – his sister made it to hospital in Herat after a collapsing house wall fell on her leg. “During the earthquake, only my 16-year-old sister was at home, and the house wall fell on her, breaking her right foot and shoulder. We rescued her ourselves and took her to the regional hospital in Herat,” he explains. “If we had waited, her situation might have worsened.”
Abdullah believes that the Taliban did not properly assess the needs of the earthquake-stricken areas and that they are responsible for delays in debris removal, inadequate medical services, and inefficiency in distributing aid to the survivors. He says there’s a lack of food and necessities for survivors in some hard-hit villages, whereas more aid has been distributed in towns even though their needs aren’t as large.
Based on statistics provided by Taliban authorities, more than 2,500 people died in the earthquake, while close to 10,000 were injured. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimates the number of earthquake victims in just five districts in Herat province to be 12,110 individuals from 1,730 families.
On Tuesday, October 10, OCHA released the following estimates of the the number of families affected by the earthquake: 1,395 families in Zendajan; 150 families in Enjil; 95 families in Ghorian; 60 families in Khosan; and 30 families in Kushk Rabat Sangi. The OCHA report also suggests that 485 residents of Zendajan district, including 191 men and 294 women, are still missing.
In addition, the World Health Organization (WHO) had stated that women and children comprise two-thirds of the earthquake victims and that many are severely injured. In a video report, the WHO’s Dr. Ala Abuzide told Reuters, “Most of the injured and deceased are women and children who were inside their homes at the time.”
*Names have been changed to protect the identity of the interviewee and writer. Farshid Aram is the pseudonym of a Zan Times journalist in Afghanistan.
