June 2022 Afghanistan Earthquake

Before the Tremor

It was a little after one in the morning when the ground, always hard and familiar underfoot, suddenly betrayed the people of rural Paktika and Khost. In the dark silence, families were roused from sleep not by a warning, but by the sharp, rolling violence of an earthquake. There was no time to run. For many, there was nowhere to go.

Afghanistan has always carried the scars of its topography — mountains that shelter and isolate, valleys that confine. But beneath the surface, another kind of threat waits: the slow-motion battle between the Indian and Eurasian Plates. Earthquakes are not strangers here, especially in the east and north. Still, in June 2022, the country was already stretched thin — its people battered by decades of conflict and, most recently, the rapid political turnover and sharp rise in poverty after the Taliban's return. In this new Afghanistan, even the idea of help was fragile.

The Fault Line and the Night

June 22, 2022, began in violence. At 01:24 AM local time, a magnitude 6.0 quake exploded just 10 kilometers under the ground — a shallow depth, enough to turn a tremor into catastrophe. The epicenter sat about 50 kilometers south of Khost city, very near the border with Pakistan and deep in the terrain of clustered villages and dirt roads.

Seismic energy does not care for boundaries. In Khost and Paktika, homes built with mud bricks and wood — beautiful and traditional but heartbreakingly brittle — cracked and caved in. Whole families were buried under their own walls. The shaking reached further: parts of Nangarhar, echoes felt as far as Kabul, and even rattling across the Durand Line into Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Outside, the darkness was broken by the sounds of disaster: splintering timber, the dull collapse of roofs, the desperate shouts of neighbors. Rain had been falling for days, heavy and persistent, and it continued, turning dust to mud and making every task harder.

“All Was Dust and Quiet”

When the sun crested over the low, green hills on June 22, it revealed devastation too vast to quickly understand. In villages like Gayan, Barmal, and Spera, home after home had come down. By daylight, the silence that follows an earthquake set in: people picking through what used to be bedrooms, men digging with bare hands, the stunned hush of those who had survived. At least 1,163 people were dead by official count — men, women, children, entire extended families. Some unofficial estimates feared more. Over 3,600 were injured, many grievously. At least 10,000 homes were rendered uninhabitable. The livestock — critical to rural survival — was gone too, crushed in their shelters.

Access was difficult even before disaster. Now, the few paved roads were obscured by landslides. Where rain hadn’t washed away footpaths, collapsed buildings and debris blocked what remained. Amateur video filtered out through satellite phones and battered cell networks: lines of villagers, grim and determined, sifting the ruins. The weight of what they faced landed with each new list of names, each new casualty discovered.

The Struggle to Respond

If resilience is measured in persistence, Afghanistan’s people have always had it. In the moments following the shake, villagers were the first responders, digging through the rubble for survivors. The tools were basic — shovels, makeshift stretchers, fingers. Many children were found alive hours after the collapse, pressed tightly between beams or protected by the smallest of spaces. But such stories were heartbreakingly scarce.

Official help was limited. The Taliban, now several months into asserting control over a battered country, had scant resources. They dispatched a handful of helicopters and whatever machinery wasn’t already in disrepair. But most who arrived in the quake zone found neither heavy equipment nor relief supplies — just rows of graves being dug by survivors.

International help was not absent but slow and complicated by politics. The United Nations and agencies like the Red Crescent and Médecins Sans Frontières began mobilizing: tents for makeshift shelter, emergency food, clean water, medicine. Crossing the border, Pakistan and Iran sent aid, but sanctions and the lack of international recognition of the Taliban stymied money transfers and slowed the arrival of relief. In field clinics, Afghan and foreign doctors labored around the clock, performing emergency surgeries, setting broken bones, and trying to stave off infections in the hot, dust-laden air.

Difficult terrain worked against everyone. Helicopters, when available, ferried supplies over mud-churned roads. Villagers in outlying hamlets sometimes waited days to be reached by any aid at all.

Loss in the Margins

Numbers can blur into abstraction, but in the earthquake zone, loss was personal and relentless. In Barmal, Husna, a survivor, told a visiting aid worker, "Everything was gone. All was dust and quiet." With her entire home destroyed, she, like thousands of others, spent nights under scraps of canvas and the shell of her former house.

For rural Afghan families, a home is built slowly — each wall packed and shaped by hand across generations. When these houses fell, it wasn't just shelter that was lost, but inheritance, memory, stability. Among the ruins, children picked through broken teacups and battered family Qurans, hoping to salvage what could still give comfort.

Livestock, for many, was everything: food, income, the investment for a daughter’s wedding, the hope for a better winter. The earthquake swept away hundreds of sheep, goats, and cattle, compounding the sense of defeat.

Relief and Its Limits

As June gave way to July, tents bloomed like pale flowers across old farmlands and the riverbanks. Aid trucks delivered what they could over crumbling tracks: rice, beans, medical kits. Yet, need always outpaced supply.

Medical teams worried about outbreaks of disease — cholera, especially, in the absence of clean water and adequate sanitation, and measles among children already weakened by hunger. Relief organizations raced to vaccinate, to distribute soap, to reinforce the temporary shelters with plastic sheeting.

The international spotlight wavered, turned sometimes by other world crises. But for the survivors, each day started and ended in the tight sphere of what could be rebuilt or mourned. Local authorities made promises to rebuild, to study stronger building methods, but old habits and economic paralysis slowed real progress.

The disaster started discussions about Afghanistan’s urgent need for disaster preparedness — earthquake early warning, stronger building codes, better coordination between government and relief agencies. Still, change was slow and uneven; with so much infrastructure damaged or absent and resources still scarce, even well-intentioned plans struggled to take root.

Living With the Fault

By the winter of 2022, some villagers — those with money or relatives overseas — had managed to rebuild in rougher, sturdier ways. Most, however, faced the cold in canvas tents or homes cobbled together from whatever could be salvaged. Entire villages had been erased or forever changed. Many families simply left; others rebuilt on the same ground, with the same risks.

In the outside world, the quake became one more chapter in Afghanistan’s long, hard history. But in Gayan and Barmal, boys and girls grew up a little faster, carrying water down paths cut by aftershock fissures, learning how quickly the earth can shift beneath their feet.

The Lingering Shadow

As of 2024, the scars remain. Across Paktika and Khost, families still live in shelters built from tarps and scavenged tin. Access to clean water and stable food supplies is a daily anxiety. Reconstruction is halting — slowed by sanctions, lack of funding, and the simple exhaustion of communities already ground down by years of loss.

International organizations have pressed for more robust disaster planning and, perhaps most crucially, investment in earthquake-resistant rebuilding. But progress stumbles in the face of persistent poverty and uncertainty. In Afghanistan’s southeast, the earthquake is not just a tragedy to be remembered; it is a continuing state of emergency.

What Endures

The June 2022 Afghanistan earthquake is one of the deadliest calamities in the region in decades. It revealed the limits of a country’s endurance — how disaster, when it comes, compounds all that came before it. But it also revealed, in quiet ways, the truth of survival: families sharing what little food arrived, neighbors forming search lines in muddy alleys, strangers opening their arms to orphans or widows made homeless overnight.

If you travel there now, you won’t see the disaster on the surface. What remains is quieter — a slower rhythm, a landscape pockmarked by ruin but still alive with stubborn, ordinary hope. In the end, the fault line runs not just through the ground beneath Afghanistan, but through the story of a country familiar with hardship, still reaching, day by day, for the promise of recovery.