GENEVA: The UN on Tuesday said the earthquake in eastern Afghanistan that has killed more than 900 people could impact “hundreds of thousands,” and warned of an “exponential” rise in casualties.
“We think potentially the impacted individuals would go up to almost into the hundreds of thousands,” Indrika Ratwatte, the UN humanitarian coordinator in Afghanistan, told reporters in Geneva, speaking from Kabul.
Already, more than 900 people are known to have been killed and thousands injured in the 6.0-magnitude earthquake, which hit remote areas in mountainous provinces near the border with Pakistan around midnight Sunday, followed by at least five aftershocks.
“The numbers are definitely going to increase,” Ratwatte said, adding there was “no question that the casualty rate is going to be rather exponential.”
The earthquake’s epicenter was about 27 kilometers (17 miles) from the city of Jalalabad, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS), which said it struck around eight kilometers below the Earth’s surface.
Such relatively shallow quakes can cause more damage, especially since the majority of Afghans live in low-rise, mud-brick homes vulnerable to collapse.
Ratwatte said homes in the affected region were largely “mud and wooden roof structures, so when the walls collapse the roof is what basically for the individuals kills them or suffocates them.”
“It’s a low (population) density, but since this happened in the night, everybody was sleeping so I think (the casualty figure) is going to be much higher.”
He added that the quake had set off “lots of landslides, rockfalls, etc., and access has been very limited. This has posed a huge challenge.”
“The biggest challenge is to reach these remote areas with the road access extremely damaged,” he said, stressing the need for helicopters to reach those in need, evacuate the injured and deploy search and rescue and medical teams.
After decades of conflict, Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, facing a protracted humanitarian crisis and the influx of millions of Afghans forced back to the country by neighbors Pakistan and Iran in recent years.
Ratwatte urged countries to show solidarity with the people of Afghanistan “facing multiple crises, multiple shocks.”
He lamented that an appeal for $2.8 billion to provide desperately needed aid to Afghans this year was so far only 28-percent funded.

MEXICO CITY: More than 14,000 mainly Venezuelan migrants who hoped to reach the United States have reversed course and turned south since US President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown began, according to a report published Friday by the governments of Colombia, Panama and Costa Rica.
The phenomenon, known as “reverse flow” migration, is largely made up of Venezuelan migrants who fled their country’s long-running economic, social and political crises only to encounter US immigration policy no longer open to asylum-seekers.
Migration through the treacherous Darien Gap on the border of Colombia and Panama peaked in 2023 when more than half a million migrants crossed. That flow slowed somewhat in 2024, but dried up almost completely early this year.
Friday’s report, published with support of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that northward migration had dropped 97 percent this year.
Migrants traveling south interviewed in Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia by those countries’ ombudsmen offices were almost all Venezuelans (97 percent) and about half of them said they planned to return to Venezuela, according to the report. Nearly all said they were returning because they could no longer legally reach the US
Since 2017, around 8 million people have fled the crisis in Venezuela. For years, those migrants flocked to other South American nations, including Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Chile and more.
That changed in 2021, when hundreds of thousands of people set out for the US, braving the Darien Gap along the way.
A US government smartphone app became the main way for asylum-seekers to enter the US under the Biden administration. Then thousands of migrants became stranded in Mexico when Trump ended the use of the app on his first day in office.
Now, those migrants who were still trying to reach the US when Trump entered and changed border policies have reversed course, traveling back to South America. Around a quarter of those interviewed planned to go to neighboring Colombia, previously the epicenter of the mass migration from Venezuela. Others said they didn’t know where they were going.
Colombia and other South American nations spent years pleading for aid from the international community to cope with the brunt of Venezuela’s migratory crisis, before many of those same migrants began moving toward the United States. Today, Venezuela’s political and economic turmoil rages on.
Migrants, most of whom trekked days across the Darien Gap on their way north, are even more vulnerable as they make their way back. They have fewer funds to finance their journey and few prospects for work when they get back. Migrants are dropped into regions with a heavy presence of criminal groups that increasingly prey upon them, the report said.
“Most of these people are already victims of human rights abuses,” Scott Campbell, a UN human rights representative in Colombia, said in a statement. “We urge authorities to aid people in this reverse migration to prevent them from being exploited or falling into trafficking networks run by illegal armed groups.”
The shift marks a radical reversal in one of the biggest mass migrations in the world.
Migrants bus south through Mexico and other Central American nations until they arrive in the center of Panama. From there, migrants pay between $260 and $280 to ride on precarious boats packed with people back to Colombia.
They take two different routes. Most island hop north of Panama through the Caribbean Sea, landing in the small town of Necocli, Colombia, where many started their journeys through the Darien.
Others travel south by sea along a jungled swath of Panama and Colombia through the Pacific Ocean, where they are dropped off in remote towns or the Colombian city of Buenaventura. Colombia’s Ombudsman’s Office estimates around 450 people have taken the perilous route, and the UN documented migrants getting scammed and stranded, facing boat accidents and arriving beaten down and vulnerable from their journey.
The region is one of the most violent in Colombia, and lack of state presence is filled by warring armed groups.