Taliban

When the ground heaved from last week's earthquake in Afghanistan, Nahim Gul's stone-and-mud house collapsed on top of him.

He clawed through the rubble in the predawn darkness, choking on dust as he searched for his father and two sisters. He doesn't know how many hours of digging passed before he caught a glimpse of their bodies under the ruins. They were dead.

Desperate rescuers battled against the clock and heavy rain on June 24 to reach cut-off areas in eastern Afghanistan after a powerful earthquake killed at least 1,000 people and left thousands more homeless.

The quake had a magnitude of 6.1 on the Richter scale, and the final number of victims and injured is still unknown because it is not known how many people were buried in the rubble. Therefore, it is feared that the total number of victims could be significantly higher, reports the BBC.

Survivors dug by hand Thursday through villages in eastern Afghanistan reduced to rubble by a powerful earthquake that killed at least 1,000 people, as the Taliban and the international community that fled their takeover struggled to aid the disaster's victims.

Most of the victims were registered in Paktika, where 100 people were killed and 250 injured, said Muhammad Nazim Haqqani, head of the Taliban's emergency services.
He said there were casualties in the eastern provinces of Nangarhar and Khost.

Afghanistan's state-run news agency says at least 255 people have killed in an earthquake that struck the country's eastern Paktika province.

The state-run Bakhtar news agency reported the death toll Wednesday and said rescuers were arriving by helicopter.

Gunmen stormed a Sikh temple in the Afghan capital on June 18, lobbing at least one grenade and wounding two people, the interior ministry and witnesses said.

While the number of bombings has dropped across the country since the Taliban seized power in August, several fatal attacks have rocked the country in recent months.

UN Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees Kelly T. Clements has called on the Taliban to discuss the plight of Afghan refugees and their return to the soil as many of them flee the war-torn nation when it seized power in Afghanistan last year.

Afghanistan's Taliban rulers are maintaining close ties with al-Qaida as they consolidate control over the country, and their main military threat is coming from the ISIL extremist group and guerrilla-style attacks by former Afghan government security personnel, U.N. experts said in a new report.

The Taliban members who killed her activist husband offered Zahra Husseini a deal: Marry one of us, and you'll be safe.

Husseini, 31, decided to flee. Through swaths of lawless flatlands she and her two small children trekked by foot, motorcycle and truck until reaching Iran.