The United States Geological Survey recorded a Magnitude 6.3 Earthquake at a depth of 28 km, roughly 22 km to the southwest of the town of Kholm in Samangan Province, northern Afghanistan, slightly before 1.00 am local time on Monday 3 November 2025 (slightly before 8.30 pm on Sunday 2 November GMT). The event is known to have killed at least 20 people, with that number likely to rise. A further 640 people are known to have been injured, with 25 described as being in critical conditions, with thousands of homes destroyed or damaged across the region. The Earthquake was felt across much of northern Afghanistan, as well as neighbouring areas of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
The boundary between the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates runs close to northern Afghanistan. The Indian Plate is moving northward relative to the Eurasian Plate, causing folding and uplift along this boundary, which has led to the formation of the Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan, the Himalayas and the other mountain ranges of Central Asia., and which makes the nations in this boundary zone prone to Earthquakes.
While the occurrence of Earthquakes in Afghanistan is inevitable, the situation is made far worse by the country's weak infrastructure, with few buildings having any form of Earthquake-proofing. Homes are typically made from concrete and brick in urban areas, and wood and mud brick in rural areas, with little in the way of building regulations, and neither material help nor advice available to people who might want to invest in improving the resilience of their properties. Previous natural disasters in Afghanistan have seen many people displaced internally by the loss of both homes and infrastructure as well as shortages of drinkable water, and local hospitals and medical centres struggling to cope due to shortages of medicines, equipment, and staff (in particular female staff).
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