At least 622 people have died and more than 1,500 have been injured in eastern Afghanistan, which was hit overnight Sunday by a magnitude 6 earthquake, followed by at least five aftershocks felt hundreds of kilometers away.

The earthquake's epicenter, just eight kilometers deep, was located 27 kilometers from Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar province, on the edge of neighboring Kunar province, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

It is in this last province that the death toll is highest and it is towards this region that the rescue helicopters dispatched by the Taliban authorities are heading on Monday morning.

Since their return to power in 2021, they have already faced another major earthquake: in 2023, in Herat, at the other end of the country, in the west bordering Iran, more than 1,500 people were killed and more than 63,000 homes were destroyed.

This time, a still provisional toll indicates "610 dead and 1,300 injured in the province of Kunar as well as 12 dead and 255 injured in the province of Nangarhar", the spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior in Kabul, Abdul Mateen Qani, told AFP.

Afghan officials, who have repeatedly said that the death toll will change as searches continue in these remote and rugged areas, say the damage in Kunar is "very significant."

- "I've never experienced anything like it" -

"We had never experienced anything like this," Ijaz Ulhaq Yaad, a senior civil servant in the Nourgal district of Kunar province, told AFP overnight. "It was terrifying, children and women were screaming," he said by phone, a connection that appeared to still be holding several hours after the earthquake.

Most of these families, he continued, had just returned to Afghanistan, driven from their Pakistani or Iranian exile by the recent waves of expulsions from the two neighboring countries, which together have sent back nearly four million Afghans.

"There were about 2,000 refugee families who had returned and were planning to rebuild their homes" in this agricultural region bordering Pakistan, he explained.

For fear of aftershocks, "everyone is staying outside" even though "the three large villages in the Nourgal district have already been completely destroyed, according to our information," he said.

However, it is difficult for authorities, emergency services and the media to access villages and hamlets, as landslides have cut off roads.

- Felt in Islamabad -

Afghanistan is frequently hit by earthquakes, particularly in the Hindu Kush mountain range, near the junction of the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates.

But the one that occurred in the middle of the night -- and followed by five aftershocks, including one of 5.2 -- was particularly violent.

AFP journalists felt the tremors in Kabul for several seconds, as well as in Islamabad, Pakistan, 370 km away as the crow flies.

The UN mission in Afghanistan, one of the last safety nets in a country that has been hit hard by recent drastic cuts in international humanitarian aid, said it was "deeply saddened by a devastating earthquake that has left hundreds of people dead."

"Our teams are on the ground providing emergency aid," she added.

Nangarhar province was already hit by flash floods last week, killing five people and causing damage, destroying farmland and residential areas.

In October 2023, the magnitude 6.3 earthquake in Herat, followed by eight aftershocks, was the deadliest earthquake to hit the country, one of the poorest in the world, in more than 25 years.

According to the World Bank, nearly half of Afghanistan's population lives in poverty.