Up to 4,000 killed in Afghanistan quake (AP, Feb 6)

By ZAHEERUDDIN ABDULLAH, The Associated Press

As many as 4,000 people are believed dead in a powerful earthquake that struck Afghanistan's remote northeast, an Afghan official said Friday in the first casualty reports to emerge, two days after the disaster.

The quake hit the city of Rustaq, 150 miles north of the Afghan capital,

Kabul, destroying 15,000 homes, said Sher Mohammed, a spokesman for the military alliance that controls the sparsely populated, mountainous area.

Tremors of varying intensity rocked the region for hours afterwards, he said, speaking to The Associated Press by satellite telephone.

The U.S. Geological Survey in Golden, Colo., put the magnitude of Wednesday's quake at 6.1.

Mohammed said landslides triggered by the quake caused much of the destruction.

"The hills collapsed into each other, making a huge crater in the earth," he said.

Rubble buried the mud and brick homes perched on the region's hillsides,

he said. Winter snows blanketing the mountain villages were slowing rescue efforts.

News of the devastation in the isolated northern province of Tahkar, which borders Tajikistan, reached Kabul only Friday, and details remained difficult to confirm.

The Taliban's Radio Shariat reported the earthquake in its evening news report, saying that about 3,200 people were killed in the quake. Television reports from neighboring Iran put the combined death and injury toll at around 1,000. The source of their information was not immediately known.

U.N. and Red Cross officials in neighboring Pakistan said they were trying to arrange relief teams to travel to the area, but could not confirm the casualty figures.

Ousted Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who leads the anti-Taliban alliance that controls part of northern Afghanistan, including Tahkar, has appealed for urgent help from the international community, Mohammed said. "President Rabbani also called for a one-day mourning period and asked people across the Afghan nation to pray," Mohammed said.

The Taliban, which controls the remaining 85 percent of Afghanistan, is locked in battles with the northern opposition alliance on at least three different fronts north of Kabul and in western Afghanistan. Compounding the destruction, Mohammed said, Taliban jets dropped cluster bombs on Tahkar's provincial capital of Taloqan Friday, injuring 12 people. The provincial capital is 24 miles south of Rustaq.

Taliban supreme leader Mullah Omar has ordered his troops in neighboring Kunduz province to stop all fighting in the area, Pakistan's state-run news agency reported.

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said his country would mobilize relief supplies for the quake victims.

In 1991, an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.5 killed an estimated 900 people in the remote mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.