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 30-year-old niece was running behind him, carrying her 1-yearold and 3-year-old daughters. At one point, his niece tried to grab his hand to steady her 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 were 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 spokesperson for the province’s governor, though details of the toll there were not immediately available.
Rescue teams were sending food, aid, medical teams and ambulances to the affected areas of Baghlan province, said Sharafat Zaman, a spokesperson 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.