Afghanistan quake deadliest in decades, killing over 2,200

Afghanistan Quake Deadliest in Decades, Killing Over 2,200 – A Shock Felt Even in Malta’s Living Rooms
By Sarah Vella | Hot Malta

The first jolt hit Baghlan Province at 11:11 am local time, but the after-shock rippled through Maltese WhatsApp groups just minutes later. By sunset, the death toll had climbed past 2,200 – the worst earthquake Afghanistan has seen in forty years – and Valletta’s open-air cafés were already buzzing with the same stunned question: “Kemm nistgħu nagħmlu biex ngħinu?” (“How can we help?”)

For many Maltese, Afghanistan is not merely a headline on TVM’s nightly bulletin. It is the dusty road that Jesuit Refugee Service worker Fr. Dionysius Mintoff walked in 2003 to set up a mobile clinic near Herat. It is the classroom at St Aloysius College where former Afghan refugee Ali Reza, now a Maltese citizen, teaches Year 9 students Pashto phrases in exchange for Maltese tongue-twisters. It is the memory of 13 Maltese soldiers who served under ISAF and returned home with stories of pomegranate orchards and bullet-scarred schoolhouses. Saturday’s 6.3-magnitude quake, therefore, landed in Malta not as an abstract foreign tragedy but as a punch to a collective gut that still aches for places we have touched, however briefly.

Within hours, Malta’s tight-knit Afghan diaspora—roughly 320 people, mostly clustered in Ħamrun and Marsa—began mobilising. WhatsApp groups morphed from recipe swaps into crisis command centres. At the Ħamrun parish hall, 40 volunteers packed 200 cartons of baby formula, thermal blankets and women’s sanitary kits donated by local supermarkets. “We are sending what a Maltese mother would want for her own child,” said organiser Sana Rahimi, who arrived in Malta by NGO vessel in 2019. By Monday, the first pallet was already on a Turkish Airlines cargo flight to Kabul, sponsored by the Maltese-owned freight company Express Trailers.

The government moved equally fast. Foreign Minister Ian Borg announced €500,000 in emergency aid channelled through the World Food Programme and confirmed that Malta would fast-track family-reunification visas for Afghan relatives of Maltese residents. Meanwhile, the Malta Red Cross launched a 24-hour helpline in English, Maltese and Dari; by Tuesday evening 1,400 callers had pledged everything from €5 SMS donations to spare rooms for evacuees.

But the quake’s cultural resonance runs deeper than logistics. On Sunday, the Greek-Melkite Church in Valletta held a trilingual vigil—English, Maltese and Pashto—drawing a standing-room-only crowd of 300. Fr. Joseph Mizzi read from the Gospel of Matthew in which Jesus says, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me,” then invited Ali Reza to light a candle for each Afghan province affected. The hush that fell over the baroque interior was broken only by the sniffles of schoolchildren clutching hand-drawn condolence cards addressed to “the kids who lost their schools.”

Even Malta’s summer festa circuit felt the tremor. In Qormi, the St George band club cancelled its traditional Monday-night marċ ta’ filgħaxija, donating the €3,000 saved on fireworks to the Afghan relief fund. “We celebrate saints who protected villages from disaster,” explained band president Etienne Bezzina. “This year, we extend that protection across continents.”

Perhaps the most poignant Maltese response came from the island’s hobbyist map-makers. On Reddit’s r/Malta, user “PawluP” posted a stylised map of Afghanistan shaded in Maltese cross patterns, with the caption: “L-ikbar għadu tal-bniedem m’huwiex l-art li tiċċaqlaq, imma qalbna li ma tiċċaqlaqx.” (“Man’s greatest enemy is not the shaking earth, but the unshaken heart.”) The post was shared 12,000 times in 24 hours and turned into a sticker now plastered on laptops in university canteens from Msida to Marsaxlokk.

As Malta wakes up to another cloudless morning, the earthquake’s rubble is 4,500 kilometres away, yet its tremors are etched into our own limestone balconies. They remind us that the Mediterranean has always been a crossroads, not a cul-de-sac. Today, a child in Baghlan sleeps under canvas stitched in Żebbuġ; a Maltese mother tucks her son into a Paw Patrol duvet knowing another mother has none. The distance collapses, and what remains is the simplest Maltese lesson: “Min jgħix bejn il-bahar jaf li l-ħajja tgħaddi mill-idejn tal-ieħor.” (“Those who live by the sea know life passes through the hands of others.”)