The Debrief: Covering Afghanistan’s earthquake in the dark

The ripple effect of the Taliban dismantling systems servicing the country, including news media, had widespread consequences, including obscuring lifesaving support in the aftermath of the Aug. 31 earthquake.

More than an hour after a magnitude 6.0 earthquake brought down entire villages north of Jalalabad, Afghanistan, on August 31, local media confirmed two deaths, despite reports from locals emerging on social media of dozens killed and even more injured. The earthquake struck thirteen minutes before midnight, burying thousands of people. The ensuing chaos, fueled by systemic dysfunction and limited light, delayed news of the first significant tolls from state media of 250 people killed and 500 injured for some seven hours.

It took another three and a half days for the Taliban government to report an estimated 2,200 people had died. Two weeks after that, the U.N. and its humanitarian partners revised the toll to 1,992 following re-verification efforts.

The early information vacuum and later confusion were symptoms of severe challenges inhibiting access to information and aid in Afghanistan that were exacerbated by the Taliban takeover in 2021. The situation further worsened when the former militant group disconnected the entire country from internet and mobile phone data on September 29, the move even impacting telephone services.

“The entirely changing landscape has made covering any type of news very difficult,” Factal Editor Awais Ahmad said. “A lot of the international or major news outlets with bureaus in the country shut down operations in the aftermath of the Taliban takeover … and then when you add the infrastructure troubles and lack of access post the earthquake, all of those things just make it a perfect recipe of disaster for there being a block in terms of information available.”

Aid agencies, which described the situation in the earthquake-hit areas as “devastating,” said there are still “countless” missing. The country last held a partial census in 1979, meaning population estimates for the regions hit — and for the entire country — are in question.

“I don’t know if we’ve even been given an estimate of how many people are missing,” Ahmad said. “The aftershocks made any type of recovery effort very difficult because of landslides … blocking all these roads. Entire villages were disconnected, so it was really difficult to get any sort of estimate as to what kind of scale we were looking at.”

Though the earthquake impacted Nangarhar and Laghman provinces as well, the largely rural Kunar province appears to have been hit the worst. The immense destruction in its Nurgal and Chawlay districts was compounded by a magnitude 5.2 aftershock on Sept. 2 and a magnitude 5.6 aftershock on Sept. 4; both measured higher by the Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences.

The scale of damage was again unclear at first as the lack of investment in sustainable infrastructure meant aid workers had to walk miles to reach the villagers trapped under rubble. Locals later described the area as a graveyard, where decomposing human and animal remains marked the air and the survivors were struggling under the elements in tents supplied by the UN and aid agencies hamstrung by the Taliban’s ban against women employees.

More than 400 villages were affected across Kunar, Nangarhar and Laghman by the earthquake, which destroyed or damaged more than 8,400 homes and displaced thousands of people across inhospitable terrain, mostly in Kunar. More than 7,700 displaced people are sheltering in open spaces, according to the U.N., with limited access to food or sanitation, making access to information even more limited.

“If there are less people covering the news, there is less information, and that has a really, really big impact.”

“You already had areas that received very little service, where people rely on radio because there is no cell service, and then, the existing infrastructure for telecommunications just collapsed because of the intensity and the magnitude of the earthquake,” Ahmad said.

The information gap in the hours following the earthquake was not unexpected, given that Afghanistan remains vastly rural with informal construction, poor connectivity and limited access to nearly all forms of telecommunications, including landlines, internet and cellular networks.

According to some estimates, nearly half the country does not have access to active cellular connections, and two-thirds to the internet. Afghans’ access to connectivity is even more precarious than ever, given arbitrary internet bans linked to the Taliban’s perception of morality. The recent internet blackout started on September 17 with a fiber optic internet ban in Balkh before it was extended across Afghanistan. The ban impacts all, including airports, government offices, hospitals, anyone who has people in Afghanistan, and local and international media.

“Kunar province is a very mountainous area; it was already hard to access, it was already very disconnected,” Ahmad said. “There were a lot of physical barriers in terms of getting to people, a lot of areas had been completely blocked off, and the Taliban were trying to carry out rescue operations through helicopter flights.”

Another block to information, Ahmad points out, is the flow of news through the Taliban, which was quick to crack down on journalists after taking over the country to control messaging. Shortly after seizing power, the Taliban government issued broad edicts against reporting and detained journalists who described custodial abuse. The crackdown has since widened in scope, forcing more than two-thirds of 12,000 journalists present in Afghanistan in 2021 out of the profession, according to Reporters Without Borders. Those who continue to work risk retaliation by the Taliban, not limited to arbitrary detention and violence.

“Hundreds of news organizations shut down operations, citing censorship or harassment from government officials after the Taliban takeover,” Ahmad said. “The media landscape has shifted so drastically since the Taliban takeover, because it was already restricted. If there are less people covering the news, there is less information, and that has a really, really big impact.“

“The Taliban have also been reported to spread misinformation to control public opinion”

According to Ahmad, the remaining news organizations working in Afghanistan are also running on limited resources and can no longer afford to send journalists to affected areas, instead relying on reports from local sources.

These would be citizens, Afghans willing to speak to the media, who are now also under threat of being tracked down by the government. The Taliban Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice said earlier in May this year that it was monitoring social media for “improper use,” and, while there are workarounds to not being tracked, Afghans in rural areas have limited means to receive or send out information.

“These people face a lot of risk just by talking to [news] organizations,” Ahmad said. “It has created this environment where people are often, for lack of better word, scared to post on social media about any of the things going on because they’ll face harassment or worse even.”

With more than half of the country’s news outlets shut down as of April 2025 and limited information flowing through a bottleneck of a few chosen spokespersons, Afghanistan’s information vacuum has only worsened.

“Under the previous government, you had different ministries regularly providing updates on security incidents, disseminated through official press releases or briefings, but since the Taliban takeover … things come in very slowly, or we often don’t get confirmation on security incidents at all,” Ahmad said. “The Taliban have also been reported to spread misinformation to control public opinion, so it’s not just that they’re slow or tight-lipped, it’s that when they share, it’s hard to know what information to trust and what information to verify more.”

As news of the earthquake broke that night, news organizations around the world relied on a patchwork of international and local journalists and aid organizations to bring information to light.

“There are workarounds, and people have come up with creative ways to get some sense of what’s happening on the ground in Afghanistan since the takeover of the Taliban, like relying on networks of relatives to share information with diasporas,” Ahmad said. “But local media has either reduced operation significantly or changed how they cover news … It does make coverage difficult, because oftentimes you’ll see varying or a slow trickle of information, so we end up having to rely a lot on notes from editors, sharing what we are seeing and what we are not seeing, and providing as much transparency to our audience.“

Written by Halima Mansoor. Edited by Jillian Stampher.

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