For some agonising minutes after the wall collapsed, Mohibullah Niazi could hear their screams. Then there was silence. Eight members of a refugee family, who had returned to Afghanistan just a fortnight ago from war-hit Iran, were killed when a 5.8-magnitude earthquake struck near Kabul late on Friday night.
The tremor toppled a rain-softened wall directly onto the tent where they slept.
The sole survivor was a boy around three years old, identified as Aarash, who was pulled injured from the rubble and rushed to hospital in Kabul.
The Taliban regime's health ministry spokesman Sharafat Zaman, who visited the child on Saturday, said he was being treated for a severe head injury.
Niazi, a neighbour who joined the rescue effort, told news agency AP that the family had arrived only 15 days earlier and were living in a makeshift tent on a plot of land adjoining his home in the village of Ittefaq, on the eastern outskirts of the Afghan capital.
The family's head, a man of around 50 named Najibullah, had no other shelter, Niazi said, "He was a very poor person."
'Asked them to come inside'
{{/usCountry}}The family's head, a man of around 50 named Najibullah, had no other shelter, Niazi said, "He was a very poor person."
'Asked them to come inside'
{{/usCountry}}Half an hour before the earthquake struck, Niazi had urged the family to come inside and spend the night in his guest room, out of the cold and the rain. "But they did not come with me," he said.
When the quake hit, the family were sheltering beside a wall separating their plot from Niazi's home on higher ground. Weakened by days of heavy rainfall that had left the earth sodden, the wall gave way. "My daughter shouted to me that a wall had fallen on them. The whole family ran, but there were so many big rocks," Niazi recounted on Saturday, standing amid the wreckage.
"We tried our best," he said.
Neighbours rushed to help, digging through mud and rubble with spades and their bare hands, while the local Taliban police checkpoint sent rescuers and ambulances.
But for the rest of the family — the father and mother, four daughters aged between 12 and 23, and two sons — it was too late. Rescuers could only recover their bodies.
"For about three minutes, I could hear the voices of these people," Niazi said, "But we couldn't do anything. There were two or three of us, but this was not the work of three people."
By Saturday morning, little remained at the site but piles of bricks and mud, alongside salvaged blankets, cooking utensils and other belongings heaped in a pile.
Damage across country
Five homes were destroyed and another 33 significantly damaged, affecting 40 families in the provinces of Kabul, Panjshir, Logar, Nangarhar, Laghman and Nuristan.
The family was among the millions of Afghan refugees who have returned from Iran and Pakistan in recent years, after both countries launched crackdowns in 2023 on undocumented foreigners, particularly Afghans. The return of this family came at a time when Iran is seeing attacks from the US and Israel.
Afghanistan's deputy government spokesman Hamdullah Fitrat on Saturday put the overall death toll from the earthquake at 12, with a further four people injured.
The quake's epicentre was in the Hindu Kush mountain range, approximately 150 kilometres east of the northern city of Kunduz and roughly 290 kilometres north-east of Kabul, according to the Euro-Mediterranean Seismological Centre and the US Geological Survey .
Afghanistan sits in one of the most seismically active regions on earth. Last August, a 6-magnitude earthquake in eastern Afghanistan killed more than 2,200 people, with most casualties in Kunar province. In October 2023, a 6.3-magnitude quake followed by powerful aftershocks in the west of the country also killed hundreds.