More than 90 percent of the people killed by a 6.3-magnitude earthquake in western Afghanistan last weekend were women and children, UN officials reported Thursday.
Taliban officials said Saturday’s earthquake killed more than 2,000 people of all ages and genders across Herat province. The epicenter was in Zenda Jan district, where 1,294 people died, 1,688 were injured and every home was destroyed, according to UN figures.
Women and children were more likely to have been at home when the quake struck in the morning, said Siddig Ibrahim, the chief of the UNICEF field office in Herat, said. The Afghanistan representative for the United Nations Population Fund, Jaime Nadal, said there would have been no “gender dimension” to the death toll if the quake had happened at night.
The initial quake, numerous aftershocks and a second 6.3-magnitude quake on Wednesday flattened entire villages, destroying hundreds of mud-brick homes that could not withstand such force. Schools, health clinics, and other village facilities also collapsed.
The disproportionate impact of the quake on women has left children without mothers—their primary caregivers—raising questions about who will raise them or how to reunite them with fathers who might be out of the province or Afghanistan.
Women may be at risk of not getting information on earthquake preparedness because of Taliban edicts curtailing their mobility and rights, and restrictions imposed on female humanitarian workers, a UN report has warned.
Read more here.
