Mujib Ur Rehman Hamdard, the head of Save the Children Afghanistan's Kunar Field Office, shares his experience of the Afghanistan earthquake and the initial response one month on from the 6.0 magnitude earthquake which devastated parts of eastern Afghanistan, including Kunar and Nangarhar provinces, on the 1st September 2025.
I was in a deep sleep at home with my family when the earthquake struck. I was woken up by a huge sound. Everything was shaking, and I could hear children crying. My brothers and their families also live with me, so we collected everyone and ran outside. The children were trembling with fear. There were constant aftershocks.
At around 2am I started seeing messages on social media and realised that the impact of the earthquake was massive in Kunar, especially in two remote districts where houses had collapsed and people were trapped in the rubble. Our security officer and I called our staff and their families to make sure they were all safe. Everyone was ok, but terrified.
The provincial Director of Public Health told me that people needed urgent medical treatment and asked me for Save the Children’s help. One of our teams was already in one of the earthquake-affected districts, but we had so little information about the scale of the destruction as communications had been cut off in large areas.
Rockfalls had blocked many of the roads to the remote, mountainous areas, making it very difficult for vehicles to get through, but there was also a fear of walking as rocks were still falling from the mountains.
Despite this, one of our mobile health teams treated more than 50 injured people on that first day, walking for about four hours between villages, taking casualties to our vehicles and then transferring them to ambulances. This medical team was the first to reach one area and was on the ground from 6am – about six hours after the earthquake struck. The team leader wasn’t with them that day because he had lost some relatives in the disaster. There were areas they still needed to reach, but they were another two to three hours away on foot. The de facto authorities sent helicopters to reach these remote areas.
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We also set up a health clinic in an area where people were coming down from their ruined villages, in co-ordination with the de-facto authorities. The numbers of injured people kept increasing as they walked for hours to get help.
At the clinic I met a young man. He told me his whole family had been killed. I will never forget him – how young he was, how lonely he was. His story shocked me. Another person had lost 17 members of their family and only three had survived.
I met so many people at that clinic who had suffered so much loss. People whose entire families had died. We feel so much pain in our hearts.
People in Kunar have lost everything – their relatives, their livestock, their homes. Winter is coming and the tents that are now their homes will not protect them from the cold. They will not be able to return to their villages before the snow comes. Villages in the upper mountains will be completely cut off. We are here to support them now and, in the months ahead.
Kunar is one of the most remote and inaccessible provinces in Afghanistan – about 80% of it is covered with mountains. One in five people were already experiencing high levels of food insecurity in Kunar before the disaster, according to the IPC, and now the UN estimates that 400,000 people will need help to get sufficient, nutritious food. Livelihoods have been decimated. Families were reliant on livestock and agriculture for income - around 7000 animals died in the earthquake.
Mujib Ur Rehman Hamdard, Head of Kunar Field Office, and Rachel Thompson, Global Media Manager with Save the Children’s mobile medical teams working in one of the most severely affected districts in Kunar province, Afghanistan. Save the Children
Our health, child protection and water and sanitation teams have been leaving home at 6am every day and not returning until 10pm as it takes four to five hours each way from our office to the earthquake-devastated areas.
We are all working round the clock. Our health teams on the ground are working 24/7. They are all afraid of rockfalls and aftershocks. They all have families who are terrified of further earthquakes.
On that first day, I came home to find all my children sleeping outside our house. My daughter asked me repeatedly to stay home and not leave the family, but I told her that there are so many injured people who need our help. We are all committed to our work.
Afghanistan's children have endured decades of conflict and suffering. Four years since the Taliban regained control in Afghanistan, conditions for children and their families are even more catastrophic.
A perfect storm of climate disasters, a severe economic crisis and the collapse of essential services have led to one of the worst food crises ever recorded. Now, the recent earthquake presents a crisis on top of a crisis.
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