Noor Ahmad didn’t know where else to look. For days after a powerful earthquake leveled his village in Afghanistan, he scoured the district for his family. He dug under the rubble that was once their home. He combed through the trauma rooms in the regional hospital. He searched every body bag at the morgue, twice.

He found his wife and his five young daughters — all crushed to death. But his 5-year-old son, Sardar, was nowhere to be found. Now, lying by a makeshift tent outside what was once his home, Mr. Ahmad, 40, was torn between the incomprehensible pain of losing his family and the tiny spark of hope that somewhere, somehow, his son might still be alive.

“I am just begging with God,” he said.

Sardar is one of hundreds of people who are still missing more than a week after the first in a series of devastating earthquakes rocked northwestern Afghanistan. Families desperate for answers have been left in an agonizing limbo, yearning to find a way forward.

The temblors — the deadliest in Afghanistan in decades — killed roughly 1,300 people and injured 1,700 more, most of whom lived in only a few villages tucked in a stretch of desert along the Iran border. What were once clusters of mud-brick homes nestled between hillsides have been transformed into heaps of dust, makeshift tents and freshly dug graves.

Like Mr. Ahmad, many men in these villages had been in Iran, working as day laborers, when the quakes struck. Rushing back home, they found their families and neighbors scattered. Some remained in the area to dig through the rubble, while the injured were rushed to hospitals and clinics. Others were seeking refuge in relatives’ homes nearby.

It took days for many of the men to be reunited with their families. But more than a week since the first quake, Mr. Ahmad and scores of others were still desperately searching. Here there are no fingerprints and DNA tests to help families find their missing loved ones. Instead, they are largely on their own.

For many, the inability to answer a question so basic as whether their loved ones were alive or dead has only amplified the sense of powerlessness they felt when the earth shook violently beneath them.

“It’s worse for those people than if they knew their relatives are dead,” said Freshta Yaqoobi, managing director of the Organization for Sustainable Aid in Afghanistan, an aid group helping families affected by the quakes. “If you don’t know the fate of your loved ones it feels like you’re dying every second, you have a wound that can’t heal.”

Mr. Ahmad has spent his entire life in Seya Aab village. He went to primary school nearby and then started going to Iran for work when he was 16, or as he put it, “Before I even had a beard.” He joined dozens of men from the village for two or three months at a time, collecting and then selling scrap metal on the outskirts of Tehran, he said. He earned around $200 a month.

When he was 18, he married his wife, Fatima, whom he had known since childhood. She was his rock, able to soothe Mr. Ahmad when he was stressed about money or aching with the pain from an old injury from a car crash.

“Whenever I was not feeling relaxed, she would come up and massage my shoulders,” he said. “In the past 22 years, she never complained. Not once.”

He hated leaving her and their children, but there was no work in the village or the surrounding area. Going to Iran allowed him to ensure they had just enough to eat and to go to the hospital if necessary, he said.

Every time he returned home he was met with sheer joy. Farahnaz and Shukria, his two most rambunctious daughters, jumped all over him, smothering him in kisses. His 65-year-old mother always circled him three times, inspecting his lean frame to make sure he had not lost any weight.

“I would say, ‘You’re my mother, I should be the one checking on you,’” Mr. Ahmad said.

It was a tiring but stable life. Then just over a week ago, on the outskirts of Tehran, he received a call from another man from Seya Aab who told him a major earthquake had hit the village. He rushed to find a car to take him back across the border to Afghanistan. He called Fatima dozens of times. She did not pick up.

Mr. Ahmad arrived at the village in the late afternoon the next day, as the sun hung low over the hilltops. The village was no more.

He started frantically digging near where his home had stood. He called his neighbors to get an excavator to help him. He asked everyone: Where was Fatima? Where were his children? He got only blank stares in response. After hours of digging, he thought perhaps they had been rescued and set off for the nearest hospital, in Herat City.

There he went room to room, checking the ICU, the children’s ward and the maternity wing. Then, with a pit deep in his stomach, he went to the morgue.

And there he found Farahnaz, 14. Her face was pristine, almost as if she were sleeping, but the life had left her auburn eyes — the ones he always thought looked like his own.

“I started kissing her. I thought, thank God, at least she didn’t suffer,” Mr. Ahmad said.

Next, he found 6-year-old Shukria. Then 12-year-old Shahnaz. He didn’t recognize her battered face until his cousin pointed out her two front teeth, which hung longer than the rest.

After Shahnaz, came Zhina, 10. His wife. His mother. And his youngest, 9-month-old Amina, her life so short he had barely gotten to know her.

The grief was more than overwhelming. Standing in that morgue, it felt as if his world had ended.

Then he remembered: Sardar, his son. The skinny 5-year-old boy who was always doted on by his older sisters.

Mr. Ahmad inspected the bodies again. He ran back through the hospital. He asked his surviving neighbors to dig further into the ground where his home stood and check nearby clinics. His mind turned to questions that now consume him.

Had Sardar somehow survived? Was he sitting under the fluorescent white lights of a different hospital, wondering where his father was? Had someone taken his body mistakenly, thinking it was their own young boy, and buried him in another village somewhere? Or had he, unclaimed by anyone, been thrown into a mass grave?

Nearly a week since he first visited the morgue, Mr. Ahmad is still searching for answers. Until he finds Sardar, he said, he will be stuck in this state of suspension, as if caught himself between the living and the dead.

“I don’t know if my son is alive or dead,” he said. “I don’t know my future. I don’t know anything at all.”

Two powerful earthquakes struck Herat Province in northwestern Afghanistan early on Sunday, jolting a region already hit by three major quakes over the past eight days that have killed more than 1,000 people.

The magnitude-6.3 and magnitude-5.4 temblors struck the province just after 8 a.m. local time at a depth of about six miles, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The epicenter of the quakes was around 20 miles northwest of Herat City, the provincial capital and a major economic hub near the country’s border with Iran.

At least two people died and more than 150 people were injured in Sunday’s quakes, according to Masoud Danish, the director of the Herat governor’s office.

The episode on Sunday capped an already devastating week in Herat. It began last on Oct. 7, when two major earthquakes hit the region, killing around 1,300 people and injuring about 1,700 more in the country’s deadliest natural disaster in decades, according to the United Nations.

Days later, another magnitude-6.3 quake hit just outside the city, injuring around 120 people and rattling Herat residents who were already on edge after the initial quakes. Thousands of people left their homes to live in makeshift tents scattered across the city, terrified of another tremor that they feared could bring buildings crashing down around them.

Then, early Sunday, those fears were realized.

Mohammad Ghaznawi, 30, had been sleeping in a tent with his wife and two children in a park on the outskirts of the city after the first quakes struck. On Sunday morning, they woke up shivering from the biting wind and decided to return to their third-floor apartment, thinking that the temblors were finally over.

But as his wife put on a kettle for tea, the apartment building began to shake around them. Mr. Ghaznawi saw his iPad fall from the table, its screen smashing on the ground. Small pieces of white concrete from their ceiling crashed to the floor. He and his wife grabbed their son and daughter and rushed outside.

When the shaking finally ended, Mr. Ghaznawi decided he had had enough. He’s planning on taking his family to a relative’s home in Ghazni Province — around 500 miles from Herat in southeast Afghanistan — on Sunday afternoon until they feel it’s safe to return.

“I’m full of stress, I just want to leave Herat,” said Mr. Ghaznawi, who owns a handicraft shop in the city.

Around 20 minutes after the quake struck, ambulances began arriving at Herat’s regional public hospital, ferrying injured people from the outskirts of the city. One man was pulled onto a stretcher, his head and face coated in blood, according to Nazif Padshah, 27, who was at the hospital pharmacy when the quake struck.

Across the city, fresh cracks snaked up the walls of apartment buildings and people’s homes, photos from residents show. Toilet paper, boxes of tissues and small containers of hand sanitizer were strewn across the floor of one grocery store, next to shattered bottles of ketchup and cooking oil.

Like Mr. Ghaznawi, some residents who had been sleeping outside now plan to leave the province entirely, shaken by the seemingly relentless wave of quakes. Others are at a loss for what to do.

Hussain Karimi, 34, had been sleeping in a makeshift tent in the alley outside his home along with his wife, 4-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter.

On Sunday morning, they went inside their home to make tea and breakfast. A glass of tea was in his hand when suddenly the ground began to tremble beneath him. He dropped the glass, grabbed his daughter and ran to an alleyway opposite their home.

“The quake made me dizzy,” he said. “Both my legs are shaking even now.”

Now, he says, he does not know where to go to keep his family safe.

“We can’t sleep outside because of the cold. We can’t stay in our home because of the fear,” Mr. Karimi said. “I don’t know what to do.”

A suicide attack by the Islamic State at a Shiite mosque in northern Afghanistan killed at least 17 people on Friday, according to hospital officials and eyewitnesses, in a bloody reminder of the insecurity that remains in the country and has spread to Pakistan two years after the end of the U.S.-led war.

The attack occurred around 1:30 p.m., just as hundreds had gathered at the mosque for Friday prayers in Pul-i-Khumri, the capital of Baghlan Province, a coal-rich and mountainous stretch of northern Afghanistan.

The blast hit the Imam Zaman Mosque, the largest Shiite mosque in the city, and witnesses and Taliban officials said they believe the assault was carried out by a single suicide attacker.

“The explosion occurred in the midst of a crowd of worshipers,” said Mustafa Hashemi, the director of the province’s department for information and culture.

Disputing the death toll provided by hospital staff, Taliban officials said that only seven people were killed in the blast. Eyewitnesses who spoke to The New York Times said that dozens of people were injured in the attack.

Sayed Mujtaba Hashemi, whose father is the imam of the mosque, was kneeling in the last row of worshipers as his father was finishing his sermon, he said. Then, as prayers were about to begin, he heard a loud sound and was thrown to the ground.

When he opened his eyes, he saw people’s bodies splayed across the carpeted floor. Screams and wails filled the air. Some people began stumbling out of the building, many limping from injuries they had sustained in the blast.

“As everyone left, one thought crossed my mind: Where is my father?” he said. He rushed to the pulpit and saw him, alive but with pieces of metal lodged into his neck and hand.

Videos and photos of the attack’s aftermath on social media show the emerald green walls of the mosque splattered with red blood. Pieces of the white concrete ceiling were scattered across the floor, much of its red carpet shredded to pieces.

Hours later, the Islamic State affiliate in the region, known as the Islamic State Khorasan or ISIS-K, took responsibility for the attack, according to SITE Intelligence Group, which tracks extremist organizations.

ISIS-K is a Sunni extremist group that was founded in 2015 and has targeted Shiite Muslims in Afghanistan, particularly those from the predominantly Shiite Hazara ethnic minority. Shiites make up around 10 percent of Afghanistan’s population, the vast majority of which is Sunni.

After the Taliban seized power in 2021, ISIS-K stepped up its attacks in Afghanistan, reaching into parts of the country that had previously been spared its violence and were far from the group’s stronghold in the east along Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan.

ISIS-K has been antagonistic toward the Taliban administration, claiming it is not implementing true Shariah law, the legal code of Islam, and carrying out hit-and-run attacks on Taliban security forces.

The violence has drawn a heavy-handed response by the Taliban, which has carried out a brutal crackdown on the group over the past two years. That offensive has pushed some ISIS-K fighters into Pakistan, where the group has carried out a string of major attacks in recent months.

Since the beginning of the year, the Taliban have killed eight high-ranking Islamic State officials, according to American officials. In that time, Afghanistan has been spared the spate of high-profile blasts on Shiite mosques and education centers in predominantly Shiite neighborhoods that rocked the country in the first year of Taliban rule.

But the attack on Friday offered a heartbreaking reminder that Afghanistan had not yet shaken free from the threat posed by the terrorist group.

“We thought the situation had improved,” said Bezhan Timory, 22, a worshiper at the mosque. “But now the targeting of the Shia community has started again. This is very worrying for us. I am really worried.”

Wails echoed across what was left of the village when the ambulance arrived. Inside was the body of a 12-year-old girl, Roqia. She had died in a nearby hospital Tuesday morning, days after a devastating earthquake hit this stretch of northwestern Afghanistan and sent her mud-brick home crashing down on top of her.

The vehicle drove to the top of a nearby hill where mounds of dirt marked around 70 freshly dug graves. A crowd of men gathered and opened its back door, gently pulling out the girl, whose small frame was wrapped in a thick, white blanket.

Seeing her, her uncle, Shir Ahmad, stumbled backward. “Oh God, oh God,” he cried, gasping for breath. A man slipped his arms around his back to steady him as he sank to the ground in sobs.

“I lost four relatives,” the man said. “Don’t cry.”

Since Saturday, when the deadliest earthquakes to strike Afghanistan in decades occurred, hundreds of Afghans in one of the worst-hit districts, Zinda Jan, have been struggling to come to terms with the almost unfathomable destruction.

In a matter of minutes, a handful of entire villages — once clusters of mud-brick homes, their thick, beige walls blending into the endless desert — were transformed into mounds of dust. Nearly everyone in the area lost at least one relative when their homes crumbled. Many have lost most, if not all, of their immediate family.

The district is little more than a stretch of desert punctuated by villages where people live hand-to-mouth along Afghanistan’s western border. Most families survive by growing wheat, corn and figs in modest gardens and shepherding small livestock herds. Many men work as day laborers in neighboring Iran, earning only a few hundred dollars a month.

By Tuesday, the death toll from two 6.3-magnitude quakes had climbed to at least 1,053 people, according to the United Nations, while Taliban officials have said the true figure could be closer to 2,000. The vast majority of those dead belonged to only 11 villages, some of which lost a quarter or more of their populations in the quake. Early Wednesday, another 6.3-magnitude earthquake hit near Herat City, sending people running out of their homes for the second time in five days.

Across the hamlets struck by the earlier disasters, the grief and loss are palpable. The air is tinged with the smell of rotting flesh — whether from victims whose bodies have yet to be recovered or from livestock that were crushed under rubble, no one is quite sure. Rows upon rows of dirt mounds marking mass graves now outline the edges of villages that have been decimated. Sporadic screams and sobs pierce the quiet as waves of anguish overwhelm the few survivors.

In Seya Aab village, moments after the men lowered Roqia’s body into a grave on Tuesday afternoon, a young man whose mother had also been killed collapsed on top of her grave in tears. “Oh God, oh God, please help me,” he yelled.

Farther down the hill, now a newly dug cemetery, a grandfather let out a cry and dropped to his knees, drawing a crowd around him. Minutes later, another man howled in tears and screamed: “They are all of us! They are all of us!”

In Nayeb Rafi, a nearby village, the only building to survive the quake was a concrete school built by an aid group. Every single mud-brick home was destroyed. Residents told a visiting team of journalists from The New York Times that they estimate that of the roughly 2,000 people living there, 750 were killed.

At the edge of the hamlet, a man in his 70s sat on the edge of a pile of mud brick — what was once his home — in a daze. He had wrapped a hefty brown blanket dug from the rubble around his shoulders to protect himself from the chilly morning air. Behind him, black smoke from a small fire another survivor had lit for warmth clouded the sky.

The man, who goes by one name, Zarin, said he had just slaughtered a sheep for his family to eat on Saturday when the earth beneath him began to shake violently, throwing him to the ground. When the convulsions finally ended, he was up to his chest in crumbled mud brick. He could hear a child’s voice crying for help but could barely see anything amid clouds of white dust, he said.

When he finally pried himself free from the rubble, he began frantically digging with his hands where his house once stood. He and another villager pulled out his granddaughter, alive, then turned their attention to where they heard two women’s voices shouting for help.

“I could hear them crying: ‘Father! Uncle! Brother! Help me! I’m still alive!’” Zarin recalled. They managed to dig out one woman who was pregnant. She was bloodied and coughing up dust, but alive, he said. By the time they found the other woman, it was too late.

“Everything is gone,” he said.

Nearby, a teenage boy sat outside a bright blue makeshift tent, decorated with waves and palm trees, that an aid organization had given him the day prior. He had been walking in a nearby pasture with his family’s eight sheep when the quake struck. He abandoned the livestock and ran to his home, only to find a pile of dust — and silence. Beneath it, his mother, his father, his younger sister and two brothers had all died.

“I don’t even know what happened to the sheep,” the boy, Khan Mohammad, 18, said, staring blankly at the horizon.

Hours after the quake hit on Saturday, volunteers from the nearby Herat City and government workers made their way through the desert dunes and rough roads to the village, helping residents pull their loved ones from the rubble and shuttling injured people to a nearby hospital.

But by Tuesday, efforts to rescue people had ended. Instead, volunteer crews armed with shovels and excavators knew their task had become more somber: Recovering the remains of those missing, any hope they might still be alive gone.

One man, Sirajuddin, 45, worked alongside his brother and uncle with a shovel and pickax to recover what they could: a bag of flour here, a pan there.

“Where is Wais?” he asked his uncle, Naeem, 58, who had just returned from visiting injured relatives in the hospital in Herat City that morning.

“He was with his daughter, she’s OK,” he replied.

“What about Zahra?” Sirajuddin, who goes by one name, asked. Naeem shrugged, the cousin’s fate unknown.

Explaining what was once their close-knit community, the men rattled off the names of their neighbors, and the loss each one of them just incurred.

There was Jan Mohammad, a farmer, whose wife and two daughters died. Next door to him was Nazar, a man in his 60s who died alongside his 5-year-old and 2-year-old grandsons. Further down was Gafar, whose daughter was killed; Sataar, whose brother and two sons were killed; and a widow, Maryam, whose 18-year-old daughter died. And then there was Ahmad’s family of five. Only his daughter and son survived.

As Sirajuddin dug, a forest green police vehicle roared through town, an officer calling through its loudspeaker for people to go to the edge of the city to help improve a mass gravesite where around 300 people were buried the night before.

There, hundreds of men — mostly volunteers from villages across the province — picked up shovels and began tossing dirt on top of six rows of graves. Every two or three feet they placed a stone, an imprecise but symbolic way to differentiate each person buried in the ditches.

One volunteer, Abdi Mohammadi, 45, paused to look over the gravesite. Then he shook his head.

“This place has seen the wrath of God,” he said.