JABLA, India, 10 October 2005 — Sixteen-year-old Tauseef Ahmed managed to escape from his collapsing house when Saturday’s quake destroyed this isolated village in Indian Kashmir, but he could only watch helpless as his father disappeared under the falling debris.
“We were inside our house when the horror struck. In no time it started crumbling,” Ahmed said, standing by the ruins.
“My father pushed all of us out hurriedly, but he couldn’t make it himself,” he sobbed.
“He was quickly buried under the rubble. We managed to dig out his body after three hours,” said Ahmed’s uncle Shah Zaman.
The death leaves Ahmed to shoulder the responsibility of supporting the eight surviving members of his family.
Jabla straddles the ridges of a pine-tree covered mountain close to the de facto border dividing Kashmir between India and Pakistan.
Some 1,300 people lived here in 300 corrugated tin-roofed homes made of brick, mud and stone, scattered over a wide area.
The quake flattened the entire village.
Pari Jan, 43, was in her kitchen when the tremor brought the roof down. “All the elders managed to rush out but my sister’s two sons were trapped in the debris and died of suffocation,” she said, sitting under a walnut tree close to her smashed house.
She said Shakeel Ahmed, 10, and Nayaar Ahmed, eight, were preparing to go to school when their own house turned into a grave for them.
The village had seen no government help by yesterday afternoon.
“We slept in the open fields last night. There were no tents, no food,” said Shahnaz Banu, 13. “Everything is gone, but we were lucky to leave the house in time,” she said of her seven relatives.
Residents said they pulled out two dozen dead from under the rubble since Saturday morning, sent many more to hospitals and were still digging to look for “many missing.”
All along the zigzagging road to Jabla, 110 km north of Indian Kashmir’s summer capital Srinagar, scores of houses had crumbled. Local people, mostly farmers harvesting maize, rice and walnuts, were still rummaging through the devastation to try to salvage some of their belongings.
Quake victims have complained that Indian authorities have been slow to offer help. Many people were standing on mountain roads desperately trying to flag down vehicles to take the injured to hospital.
“Because we are Kashmiris, no one cares for us,” said Khawja Riaz, a 26-year-old, standing in front of a badly damaged mosque in Garkote, its tin roof supported only by a damaged brick column.
Nearly all houses in Garkote village, perched on a hillside 5 km from the Pakistani frontier, have been damaged or destroyed by the quake.
More than 24 hours after the deadly tremors, no aid or relief had reached the village, a story echoed in many other settlements across the badly-hit Uri administrative region.
Thousands of people whose homes were destroyed slept on roads and hillsides on Saturday night, braving overnight showers.
Munera, a middle-aged woman in Garkote, was one of them. She slept outdoors with many family members, including a mentally handicapped nephew, shivering from aftershocks and in Kashmir’s autumn chill.
“Government? We have given up on it. Now it is up to God to save us,” she said, drawing a brown Kashmiri shawl tightly around her.
In Uri town, doctors were trying to cope with the scores of injured being brought in from surrounding villages, a task made more difficult with the hospital itself badly damaged.
“We are getting many people with multiple fractures and head injuries due to house collapses,” Dr. Abdul Karim said as the injured kept arriving at a cricket ground converted into a relief camp.
“We are being overwhelmed,” he said as military helicopters whirled overhead, bringing wounded to a nearby military hospital.
Officials said they have already treated hundreds of people but expect the number to soar as rescuers and doctors reach more remote villages, sometimes trekking across inhospitable terrain.
Many people were still in shock. One of them, Mir Hussain, a farmer, was giving his injured wife water with a bottle cap as she lay on a cot at a makeshift relief camp in Uri town. “I thought the world had ended,” he said, describing how he pulled his wife out of the rubble after the wall of their house collapsed, trapping her legs.
Others were angry. “Why can’t the army cut down their counter-insurgency patrols and help more in rescue operations?” asked Riaz.
