JAWDARA, Afghanistan — Just a few hundred residents remain in Jawdara, a small village in eastern Afghanistan struggling to survive after Islamic State militants cut off their water supply early this year. With only 70 families hanging on, the cost to this tiny, trapped community was grievous when 73 lives — basically the men of each family — were torn away in an instant.

“The village is ruined,” said Mawlawi Sadaqat, a local religious leader who led prayers as the bodies were buried. “Each house is left with orphans.”

The massacre took place when a suicide bomber walked into Jawdara’s mosque on Friday, where men had gathered for the weekly congregational prayer. In addition to the dead, at least 30 others were seriously wounded. Women desperately worked to dig bodies from the rubble, eventually aided by people who came in from neighboring areas in Nangarhar Province.

This is the lot of Afghanistan’s towns, far from the tenuous security that the main cities provide. As the war has worsened, and with civilian casualties hitting a new level this month, life in places like Jawdara has increasingly come to feel like slow death punctuated by sudden massacre.