In his house in Jalalabad, approximately 50 kilometers from the epicenter, Dr. Sahak and his wife left their room to find their eight children who are already in the hall.
“I immediately thought of Herat,” the Afghan doctor of about forty years told me, referring to the earthquakes that devastated the western province of the country in 2023. “I realized that the impact would also be huge.”
Born in the Jalalabad area, he knew firsthand what this new disaster would mean for the northeast of the country, where extended families live under the same roof in remote places of difficult access.
In seconds, their houses built with mud and loose stones collapsed. The roads would disappear under the rubble. The families would be buried alive while they slept.
The first calls
Dr. Sahak, who directs the local emergency office of the World Health Organization (WHO), immediately resorted to his WhatsApp health cluster group, a thread that links hospitals, clinics and aid organizations throughout the region.
The reports began to drip from Asadabad, the capital of the neighboring province of Kunar, the most affected area along the Pakistani border. There, the earthquake had felt very strongly, the city’s main hospital informed him. Some residents are likely to be injured.
For 1 in the morning, the calls became more urgent: “We received multiple injuries from different areas and the situation is not good. If possible, they bride support!”
Running the monsoon
Dr. Sahak asked his WHO team to meet him in the organization’s warehouse in Jalalabad. While he and his colleagues led to the dark, the rain began to fall, the monzón that would complicate everything, from helicopter landings to the ambulance, in the early hours of the response.
Soon, the help pipe clicks on its place. A truck was loaded with medical supplies in Who’s Depot, then transferred to Jalalabad airport, five kilometers away, before a helicopter from the Ministry of Defense lifted palettes to the Nurgal district, the epicenter of the earthquake, halfway between Asadabad and Jalalabad.
“Fortunately, we could quickly get to the most affected area,” said Dr. Sahak.
On September 2, 2025, Dr. Abdul Mateen Sahak and his WHO team visited a hospital in the province of Kunar to monitor emergency health services for people affected by the earthquake.
In the district of Nurgal
His initial field team was reduced to only four people: himself, a technical advisor, an emergency focal point and a security assistant.
In a matter of hours, they drawn in Afghan partners from two local NGOs, gathering a force of 18 doctors, nurses and pharmacists: “Six of them were medical and midwives,” he said. That first day, which achieved arelequedad of 23 metric tons of medicine to the district of Nurgal.
Meanwhile, victims figures continued to rise. “There were news that 500, maybe 600 people died. There were thousands of wounds and thousands of destroyed houses,” recalled Dr. Sahak.
Five days later, the official toll is much more bleak: more than 2,200 dead, 3,640 injured and 6,700 damaged houses.
He and his team arrived at the Nurgal district on Monday afternoon aboard a armored vehicle. “Many roads were closed because the big stones were falling from the mountains,” he said. In the lanes that remained open, the crowds were slowing the traffic, thousands of civilians running, most of them on foot, to help the victims.
‘Where is my baby?’
Once there, Dr. Sahak, an experienced humanitarian worker, was not prepared for the devastation scale. “We saw bodies on the street. They were waiting for people to enter to bury them,” he said. Volunteer rescuers flowed from neighboring districts to clear the rubble, take the injured and tend to the dead.
Among the survivors was a 60 -year -old man named Mohammed, whose house had been destroyed.
I couldn’t stand looking at this man in the eye. I was crying
“He had a total of 30 family members living with him … 22 of them had died in the earthquake,” said Dr. Sahak. “This was shocking for me. I couldn’t stand looking at this man in the eye. He was getting broken down.”
In the local clinic, its walls cracked by the tremors, the medical staff treated a number of patients who develop in rapid growth in the tents launched outside.
Dr. Sahak met a woman with multiple injuries: pelvic fracture, head trauma, broken ribs. She fought to breathe and couldn’t stop crying. “She kept saying: ‘Where is my baby! I need my baby! Please bring my baby!'” He recalled. Then he stopped. “No, no, he lost his baby. All his family.”
On September 2, 2025, Dr. Abdul Mateen Sahak and his WHO team visited the Asadabad Regional Hospital in the province of Kunar, to monitor emergency health services for people affected by the earthquake.
Women on the front line
In a country where strict gender rules govern public life, the earthquake briefly broke the barriers.
“In the first days, all, men and women, were rescuing people,” said Dr. Sahak. Doctors and midwives can still work in Afghanistan, but only if a male relative accompanied by hospitals. Nor did he see the patients that care was denied.
In the first days, all, men and women, were rescuing people
The deepest crisis, he added, is the exodus of female professionals since the return of the Taliban in 2021. “Most of the specialists, particularly women, left the country … we have difficulty finding professional staff.”
The impact came to your own home. His eldest daughter had been in her fifth year of Medicine School in Kabul when the new authorities prohibited women in higher education.
“Now unfortunately, she is at home,” he said. “She can’t do anything; there is no possibility that she completes her education.”
The fear of a family
From the beginning, WHO’s task was to keep the clinics in operation by providing technical guidance, medical supplies and clear instructions. It also meant offering words of breath to medical staff. “We told you: ‘You are heroes!'” Dr. Sahak recalled.
While he cheered local doctors, his family in Jalalab had been sick, after the news. He had spent a race by directing hospitals and leading emergency responses in Afghanistan, but this disaster got too close to home.
That first night, when he finally returned with his wife and children, it was his 85 -year -old mother who greeted him first. “She hugged me for more than 10 minutes,” he said.
She scolded him gently and tried to promise him that he would not return to the affected areas. But in the poor eastern districts of Nurgal, Chawkay, Dara–Nur and Alingar, tens of thousands of people trusted the WHO to survive. The next morning, I was back on the road.
On September 2, 2025, Dr. Abdul Mateen Sahak and his WHO team met two women, at the Asadabad Regional Hospital, in the province of Kunar, who had lost all their relatives in the earthquake, on August 31, 2025.
Greater book of life and death
For Friday afternoon, when I talked to him, the figures in Dr. Sahak’s major book told the history of the emergency: 46 metric tons of medical supplies delivered; more than 15,000 bottles of lactate, glucose and sodium chloride distributed, intravenous fluids for trauma and dehydration; and 17 WHO surveillance equipment deployed to track the spread of the disease, which the agency expects soon due to the destruction of drinking water sources and sanitation systems.
Who has asked for $ 4 million to deliver health interventions that save lives and expand mobile health services. Around 800 critical patients had already been transferred to the hospital in Jalalabad. Others were taken to the Regional Hospital in Asadabad, which Dr. Sahak and his team visited on Tuesday.
The words of a mother
Outside the health center, they noticed two survivors driven by the sun to a narrow strip of shadow along a wall: an older woman and her daughter, both recently discharged, both alone.
They were alive, but their remaining 13 relatives were dead
“They were alive, but their 13 remaining family members were dead,” said Dr. Sahak. There was no one to pick them up. The daughter, in her veins, seemed devastated: “I couldn’t speak.” The tears ran on their face.
Moved by their difficult situation, Dr. Sahak asked the hospital to keep them in a bed for a week or two. The director agreed. That night, at home, he told his family the scene. “They all cried, and they could not even have dinner,” he said. By then, even his mother no longer begged him to stay.
“Go there and support people,” he said.
