Over 300 die in Afghanistan flash floods; more missing
Heavy seasonal rains have set off flash floods across Afghanistan, killing more than 300 people in one province and destroying thousands of homes, according to United Nations officials. The floods have displaced thousands of others and engulfed entire villages, Afghan officials say.
The flood’s toll in the northern province of Baghlan, which appeared to have suffered the worst devastation, was likely to rise, said Hedayatullah Hamdard, the director of the provincial disaster management department. Most of the dead there were women and children, he said. At least 2,000 homes have been destroyed, according to the U.N. World Food Program.
Flooding began around 4 p.m. Friday and continued into the evening in Baghlan province. Abdul
Aziz Ayyar, a tribal elder, was in his home in the Baghlan-e-Markazi District when rain began pouring down. He stepped outside and saw a torrent of water rushing down a nearby mountain toward his village.
He grabbed his two children and wife and began sprinting to a different nearby mountain, shouting as he ran to warn the other villagers, he said. His 30year-old niece was running behind him, carrying her 1-year-old and 3-year-old
daughters. At one point, his niece tried to grab his hand to steady herself and her children, he said, but before he could grab her, floodwater crashed over them, carrying them away.
“We returned to the village after midnight to save people, but they were all dead,” Ayyar said Saturday. “Everything was flooded. There are three villages in our area where no houses are left; all have been razed by the flood.”
Flooding also killed at least one person in Badakhshan, a mountainous eastern province, where homes, small dams and bridges were destroyed and 2,000 livestock killed, the provincial disaster management department said.
The provinces of Ghor and Herat, in central and western Afghanistan, were also affected by flooding, according to Taliban authorities. And doctors were being deployed in Parwan province — north of Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital — said Hekmatullah Shamim, the spokesman for the province’s governor, but the toll there was not immediately available.
Rescue teams were moving food, aid, medical aid and ambulances to the affected areas of Baghlan province, said Sharafat Zaman, a spokesman for the Health Ministry.
Images published by the government Saturday showed roads in Baghlan submerged in muddy water, with people trying to move vehicles that had been stuck in the sludge.
Videos from the Burka district of Baghlan province, verified by The New York Times, showed entire villages submerged in muddy floodwater, with debris from destroyed houses and elsewhere piled up on the villages’ edges. The videos also showed women and children, covered head to toe in thick brown mud, crying out on a hilltop as they looked out over the destruction.
Barkatullah Sulaimani, a school principal in the Haji Wakil village of the Burka district, said Saturday that when floodwater began rushing through his village, he ran to a hilltop on its outskirts. By about 11 p.m. Friday, he said, about 100 people from Haji Wakil had made it to safety, but nearly every family was missing some relatives. About 200 people from the village were unaccounted for, Sulaimani said.
Throughout the night, he took calls from people who were not in the village at the time of the flood and were seeking information about missing relatives.
“I told them I don’t see anything but water,” Sulaimani said. “They are not with us here. Maybe they are dead or alive.” Of their village, only some walls of some houses remained, and the rest had been destroyed, he said.