“It was terrifying”
“We were in our offices when the building suddenly started shaking and the wall coverings fell off. The walls cracked, and part of the building collapsed,” Bashir Ahmad, 45, told AFP.
“I can’t contact my family, network connections no longer work. I'm too anxious and scared, it was terrifying,” he added.
Groups of women and children stood away from tall buildings on the streets of Herat after the earthquake and its aftershocks, which occurred within the next hour.
In June 2022, a magnitude 5.9 earthquake, the deadliest in Afghanistan in nearly 25 years, caused more than a thousand dead and tens of thousands homeless in the poor province of Paktika.
And last March, a 6.5 magnitude earthquake killed 13 people in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, near the town of Jurm, in the northeast of the country.
Afghanistan frequently experiences earthquakes, particularly in the Hindu Kush mountain range, close to the junction point between the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates.
The country is already in the grip of a severe humanitarian crisis, since the return to power of the Taliban in 2021 and the subsequent withdrawal of international aid.