A powerful earthquake has killed at least 300 people and left many more injured in Afghanistan, according to the country's supreme leader. Pictures show landslides and ruined mud-built homes in eastern Paktika province, where rescuers are scrambling to treat the injured. In remote areas, helicopters have been ferrying victims to hospitals. Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada said hundreds of houses were destroyed and the death toll was likely to rise. "Unfortunately 300 civilians have been martyred and more than 500 injured," he added. Another Taliban official, deputy minister of disaster management, told a news conference that the death toll was as high as 920. The quake struck about 44km (27 miles) from the south-eastern city of Khost shortly after 01:30 local time (21:00 Tuesday GMT), when many people were at home, asleep in their beds. Earthquakes tend to cause significant damage in Afghanistan, where there are many rural areas where dwellings are unstable or poorly built. Taliban officials called for aid agencies to rush to the affected areas in the nation's east. Decades of conflict have made it difficult for the impoverished country to improve its protections against earthquakes and other natural disasters - despite efforts by aid agencies to reinforce some buildings over the years. Even before the Taliban takeover, Afghanistan's emergency services were stretched to deal with natural disasters - with few aircraft and helicopters available to rescuers. Information remained scarce on the magnitude 6 quake that struck Paktika province, but it will likely complicate any relief efforts that the international community has largely left Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover of the country last year, and the chaotic withdrawal of the US military and NATO forces. The state-run Bakhtar news agency said rescuers were arriving by helicopter. The news agency's director-general, Abdul Wahid Rayan, wrote on Twitter that 90 houses have been destroyed in Paktika and dozens of people are believed trapped under the rubble. Most of the casualties so far were in the Gayan and Barmal districts in Paktika, a local doctor told the BBC. Local media site Etilaat-e Roz reported a whole village in Gayan had been destroyed. Footage from Paktika province near the Pakistan border showed victims being carried into helicopters to be airlifted from the area. Images widely circulating online from the province showed destroyed stone houses, with residents picking through clay bricks and other rubble. Tremors were felt across more than 500km of Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. Witnesses reported feeling the quake in Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, as well as Pakistan's capital, Islamabad. However, there have been no immediate reports of casualties, and the earthquake caused little damage in Pakistan, according to BBC Urdu. Afghanistan is prone to quakes, as it's located in a tectonically active region, over a number of fault lines including the Chaman fault, the Hari Rud fault, the Central Badakhshan fault and the Darvaz fault. The earthquake was magnitude 6.1 at a depth of some 51km, according to seismologists. Mountainous Afghanistan and the larger region of South Asia along the Hindu Kush mountains, where the Indian tectonic plate collides with the Eurasian plate to the north, has long been vulnerable to devastating earthquakes. Poor construction for homes, hospitals and other buildings put them at risk of collapse in earthquakes, while landslides remain common across the mountains of Afghanistan. In the past 10 years, more than 7,000 people have been killed in earthquakes in the country, the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports. There are an average of 560 deaths a year from earthquakes. In 2015, a major earthquake that struck the country's northeast killed over 200 people in Afghanistan and neighboring northern Pakistan. A similar 6.1 earthquake in 2002 killed about 1,000 people in northern Afghanistan. And in 1998, a 6.1-magnitude earthquake and subsequent tremors in Afghanistan's remote northeast killed at least 4,500 people. — Agencies
