The death toll of children in last week’s devastating earthquake in southeastern Afghanistan has risen to at least 155, the UN said as the scope of the deadliest quake to hit the impoverished country in two decades comes into focus.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on Sunday said that another 250 children were injured in the magnitude 6 temblor that struck the mountainous villages in the Paktika and Khost provinces, flattening homes and triggering landslides.
Most of the children died in Paktika’s hard-hit Gayan District, which remains a scene of life in ruins, days after the earthquake.
Photo: AP
Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers have put the total death toll from the quake at 1,150, with hundreds more injured, while the UN has offered a slightly lower estimate of 770, although the world body has said that the figure could still rise.
The quake has also left an estimated 65 children orphaned or unaccompanied, the UN added.
The disaster — the latest to convulse Afghanistan after decades of war, hunger, poverty and an economic crash — has become a test of the Taliban’s capacity to govern and the international community’s willingness to help.
Photo: Reuters
When the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan as the US and its NATO allies were withdrawing their forces in August last year, foreign aid stopped practically overnight.
World governments piled on sanctions, halted bank transfers and froze billions more of Afghanistan’s currency reserves, refusing to recognize the Taliban government and demanding that they allow a more inclusive rule and respect human rights.
The former insurgents have resisted the pressure, imposing restrictions on the freedoms of women and girls that recall their first time in power in the late 1990s, triggering a Western backlash.
Aware of their limitations, the Taliban have appealed for foreign aid.
The UN and an array of overstretched aid agencies in the country, which have been trying to keep Afghanistan from the brink of starvation, have swung into action. Despite funding and access constraints, convoys of aid have trickled into the remote provinces.
The UN Children’s Fund yesterday said it was working to reunite children that had been separated from their families in the chaos of the quake, and has set up clinics to offer mental health and psychological support to children in Gayan traumatized by the disaster.
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