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NURGAL, Afghanistan: Four nights and days since the earth shook and levelled his home in eastern Afghanistan, Khan Zaman Hanafi thought he had endured the worst, until the rain came.

The 35-year-old farmer says his village has “been forgotten by the government and aid groups.”

“It’s raining and we’re being left to live in the open,” he told AFP from a cornfield where he has been sleeping with his family, away from the wreckage of their village, Shelt.

In these valleys — once known as smuggling routes and corridors for fighters moving to and from Pakistan before the Taliban returned to power — mud houses are built into the mountainsides, stacked one above another.

On Sunday night, when the magnitude 6.0 quake struck, the homes collapsed in a giant domino effect.

Kunar province, famous for its forests, was the hardest hit by the quake — one of the deadliest in the country’s history, having already claimed over 2,200 lives.

’IT’S CHAOS’

“In Shelt, there were 350 houses and 300 in Mama Gol, and we heard only 68 tents were distributed,” said Hanafi, adding he has yet to see one.

“This place is unlivable, but we have no choice,” he said. “We are poor. We want the government and aid groups to help us rebuild our homes.”

But the Taliban authorities have already admitted they cannot cope alone.

For their part, the United Nations and NGOs say their resources are already overstretched, as they face a sharp drop in international aid and the return of millions of migrants expelled from neighboring countries.

For now, authorities are sending bulldozers onto Kunar’s steep slopes to clear the few narrow, winding roads as quickly as possible.

Khan Saeed Deshmash was spared from the rough roads, his injuries meaning he was flown by helicopter, along with a dozen injured relatives, from his village of Minjegale, to a hospital in Jalalabad, the capital of neighboring Nangarhar province.

The 47-year-old grain farmer lost six family members in the quake, along with all his cows and sheep.

“Everyone is traumatized, it’s chaos — we can’t even think straight anymore,” he said.

EVERY HOUSE DESTROYED 

Only one thing is certain now, Deshmash said: “It’s no longer possible to live in these villages. There are still aftershocks, every house is destroyed, and we need to be relocated elsewhere.”

But Abdul Alam Nezami, 35, said he wants to stay in his village of Massoud, where he inherited his father’s cornfields.

He would be starting from zero to repair everything that was brought down in the quake or damaged by landslides and rockfall, in a country where around 85 percent of people already live on a dollar a day according to the UN.

Work is underway to clear the blocked roads, but “the irrigation canals and water reservoirs also need to be rebuilt so the harvests are not completely lost,” Nezami said.

For now, he is focused on his immediate living situation.

“There is only one tent for two to three families, and some leak when it rains,” he said.

And the rain has not stopped, with downpours “last night and again this morning.”

In Mazar Dara too, the tarpaulins salvaged from the rubble to create makeshift shelters “have holes” and “don’t protect us from the rain,” said 48-year-old farmer Zahir Khan Safi.

“We keep them for the children,” he told AFP, but they still end up in wet clothes. “And have nothing to change into.”

QUITO: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is expected to discuss bolstering security cooperation Thursday in violence-swept Ecuador, as he champions a shoot-first crackdown on the region’s criminal groups.
Rubio will meet Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa, who has deployed troops to combat violence that has transformed the country from one of Latin America’s safest to one of its most dangerous.
The stop comes two days after US forces said they blew up an alleged drug-running boat from a gang tied to Venezuela’s leftist government, in an operation President Donald Trump said killed 11 people.
In Noboa, a businessman who has consolidated power since his surprise 2023 victory, Rubio could find a new ally in his campaign to strengthen security-minded right-wing leaders across Latin America.
For Rubio, a Cuban-American and vociferous critic of the region’s leftists, Noboa could follow in the steps of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, whose iron-fisted clampdown on crime has drawn complaints from rights groups but made him popular at home and a darling of the Trump administration.
Rubio, speaking Wednesday in Mexico on the first stop of his two-country tour, vowed no mercy against criminal groups.
He warned of more US attacks like the one in the Caribbean, a dramatic escalation by the United States after decades of routine policing work to seize drugs.
Rubio said that such interdictions did not work as they were not costly enough to gangs.
The United States “blew it up and it’ll happen again. Maybe it’s happening right now,” Rubio told a news conference Wednesday.
AFP has not been able to verify independently the details of the attack presented by the United States.
Trump said the boat belonged to Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang he has designated as a terrorist organization, although the group is not known primarily for narcotics trafficking.
Venezuela’s Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello accused the United States of committing extrajudicial killings, saying “they murdered 11 people without due process.”

- Ecuador eyes agreements -

Ecuador’s Interior Minister John Reimberg said he expected greater cooperation with the United States on combatting violence.
The United States “is a country that has maintained constant assistance in various issues,” Reimberg told the Teleamazonas channel.
“We will see many more agreements that are fundamental to the security of our country.”
Located between Colombia and Peru, the world’s largest producers of cocaine, Ecuador is the departure point for 70 percent of the world’s cocaine, nearly half of which goes to the United States, according to official data.
For years, the United States operated a military base at the Pacific port of Manta, and the Drug Enforcement Administration had a sizeable footprint in the country.
The base was closed in 2009, after leftist then-president Rafael Correa refused to renew the lease.
Noboa has moved to allow US forces to return, although a US official downplayed the possibility of any imminent return of a military presence.
The official said that Rubio will also present Ecuador as a cautionary tale after it amassed billions of dollars in debt to China.
The United States sees China as its top global adversary and has moved aggressively to combat its influence, but Beijing has eyed headway as the United States under Trump retreats from global aid.