NURGAL, (Afghanistan): A massive rescue operation was underway in Afghanistan on Monday, after a strong earthquake collapsed homes onto sleeping families in a remote, mountainous region, killing more than 800 people with the toll expected to rise, Taliban authorities said.

The 6.0-magnitude earthquake struck just before midnight, rattling buildings from Kabul to neighbouring Pakistan’s capital Islamabad.

Casualties and destruction swept across at least five provinces and rescuers were still pulling people from destroyed homes and evacuating the injured by helicopter as evening approached.

“The search operation is still going on. Many people are stuck under the rubble of their roofs,” the disaster management head in eastern Kunar province, Ehsanullah Ehsan, told AFP, warning the death toll could rise.

Around 800 people were killed and 2,500 injured in Kunar alone, near the epicentre, Taliban government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said.

Another 12 people were killed and 255 injured in neighbouring Nangarhar province, while 58 people were injured in Laghman province. In Wadir village in Kunar’s Nurgal district, dozens of residents of the surrounding area helped rescuers to pull people from the rubble of flattened homes, sometimes with their bare hands, AFP journalists saw.

Many injured were transported to hospitals in Jalalabad city in Nangarhar province, such as 22-year-old Zafar Khan Gojar, who was evacuated from Nurgal along with his brother whose leg was broken.

“The rooms and walls collapsed... killing some children and injuring others,” he told AFP.

The earthquake epicentre was about 27 kilometres (17 miles) from Jalalabad, according to the USGS, which said it struck about eight kilometres below the Earth’s surface.

Relatively shallow quakes can cause more damage, especially since the majority of Afghans live in low-rise, mud-brick homes vulnerable to collapse.

Some of the most severely impacted villages in Kunar “remain inaccessible due to road blockages”, the UN migration agency warned in a statement to AFP. Roads remained blocked nearly 20 hours after the earthquake, despite resident efforts to clear the way.

“There is a lot of fear and tension... Children and women were screaming. We had never experienced anything like this in our lives,” a member of the agricultural department in Nurgal Ijaz Ulhaq Yaad told AFP.

He said that many living in quake-hit villages were among the more than four million Afghans who have returned to the country from Iran and Pakistan in recent years.—AFP