Flash floods that have ripped through northern Afghanistan left more than 200 people dead in a single province, the UN said yesterday.
More than 200 people were killed and thousands of houses were destroyed or damaged in Baghlan Province when heavy rains on Friday sparked massive flooding, the UN International Organization for Migration (IOM) said.
In Baghlani Jadid District alone, up to 1,500 homes were damaged or destroyed and “more than 100 people died,” an IOM emergency response lead said, citing figures from the Afghanistan National Disaster Management Authority.
Photo: AFP
Taliban government officials said that 62 people had died as of Friday night.
“Hundreds of our fellow citizens have succumbed to these calamitous floods” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid wrote on X yesterday, without differentiating the numbers of dead and injured, although he told Agence France-Presse that dozens had been killed.
He said that authorities would provide support to those impacted by the flooding across the country.
The government “expresses its deep sympathy with the families of dead and wounded, and instructs the ministry of natural disaster management, ministries of defense and interior, and provincial authorities to spare no resource in rescue efforts,” he said.
Multiple provinces across Afghanistan saw flash flooding, with officials in northern Takhar Province reporting 20 dead yesterday.
Rains on Friday also caused heavy damage in northeastern Badakhshan Province, central Ghor Province and Herat in the west, officials said.
Emergency personnel have been deployed to the affected areas and were rushing to rescue injured and stranded people, the Afghanistan Ministry of Defense said.
Video footage on social media showed huge torrents of muddy water swamping roads and bodies shrouded in white and black cloth.
In one video clip, children are heard crying and a group of men are looking at floodwaters, in which bits of broken wood and debris from homes can be seen.
Since the middle of last month, previous flash flooding and other floods left about 100 people dead in 10 of Afghanistan’s provinces, with no region entirely spared, according to authorities.
Farmland has been swamped in a country where 80 percent of the more than 40 million people depend on agriculture to survive.
Afghanistan — which had a relatively dry winter, making it more difficult for the soil to absorb rainfall — is highly vulnerable to climate change.
Ravaged by four decades of war, it is one of the poorest in the world and, according to scientists, one of the worst prepared to face the consequences of global warming.
Afghanistan, which is responsible for only 0.06 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, ranks sixth on the list of countries most at risk from climate change, experts say.
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