At about 1:24 a.m. on 22 June 2022, a magnitude 5.9 earthquake struck the mountainous Gayan district of Paktika province in south-eastern Afghanistan, close to the border with Pakistan, at a shallow depth of around 10 km. Though modest in magnitude, the quake hit one of the country's most remote and least monitored regions.
Afghan authorities reported more than 1,000 people killed and over 1,500 injured, mostly in Paktika and neighbouring Khost province. Nearly every home in the hardest-hit villages was built from stone and mud brick without any seismic reinforcement, so entire settlements collapsed in seconds, and landslides triggered by the shaking then blocked the mountain roads rescue teams needed to reach survivors.
The disaster struck at a uniquely difficult moment: less than a year after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, most international aid organisations had scaled back operations and the country's healthcare and disaster-response systems were already severely weakened. The isolation of the region and lack of heavy equipment meant many survivors dug through rubble with their bare hands for days.
NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) lists the 2022 Paktika earthquake in its Significant Earthquake Database with an estimated maximum Modified Mercalli intensity of VIII near the epicentre. It ranks among Afghanistan's deadliest earthquakes of the past two decades, second only to the 2023 Herat earthquake sequence, and reflects the same underlying hazard: Afghanistan straddles a seismically active collision zone between the Indian and Eurasian plates, yet has some of the least earthquake-resistant housing stock in the world.