In one district, flash floods that ravaged northern Afghanistan claimed more than 200 lives.
The United Nations said on Saturday that flash floods that tore across several Afghan districts claimed the lives of over 200 people. Authorities immediately proclaimed a state of emergency and sprang into action to save those who were hurt.
Strong rains on Friday prompted roaring floods of water and debris to crash through villages and across agricultural land in many areas, especially in northern Baghlan.
According to government figures cited by the UN’s International Organization for Migration, up to 1,500 homes were destroyed or damaged and “more than 100 people died” in one district, Baghlani Jadid. The National Programme Officer overseeing IOM’s emergency response, Mohammad Fahim Safie, said that more than 200 people had died and thousands of houses had been damaged or destroyed in Baghlan alone.
As on Friday night, according to Taliban government officials, 62 people have perished.
In a statement uploaded to X on Saturday, government spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid stated, “Hundreds of our fellow citizens have succumbed to these calamitous floods.”
He told AFP that there had been dozens of deaths, but he did not break out the number of dead and injured.
According to officials, Friday’s rains also severely damaged western Herat, central Ghor province, and northeastern Badakhshan province.
The defense ministry reported that emergency responders were racing to save the wounded and trapped.
Head of the department in charge of managing natural catastrophes in the northern Takhar province, Ahmad Seyar Sajid estimated that 20 people had died in the flooding. “In addition to human casualties, these floods have also caused huge financial losses to the people,” Sajid said.
State of emergency
Several branches were given orders by the ministry of defense “to provide any kind of assistance to the victims of this incident with all available resources”.
As the weather cleared on Saturday, the air force announced that it had begun evacuation operations and that over a hundred injured individuals had been transported to hospitals; however, it did not indicate which regions these individuals were from.
“By announcing the state of emergency in (affected) areas, the Ministry of National Defense has started distributing food, medicine and first aid to the impacted people,” it stated.
Social media users shared video footage from Friday that showed muddy floods saturating roadways and people covered in black and white cloth.
In one video, splintered wood pieces and house rubble can be seen in the floodwaters while a group of guys are seen staring at the weeping youngsters.
According to authorities, since mid-April, flash flooding and other disasters have killed over 100 people in ten provinces across Afghanistan, leaving no area completely unaffected.
In a nation where 80 percent of the more than 40 million people rely on agriculture for their subsistence, farmland has become overpopulated.
Afghanistan is extremely vulnerable to climate change because of its unusually dry winter, which made it harder for the soil to absorb rainfall.
The country is among the poorest in the world and, scientists claim, among the least equipped to deal with the effects of climate change due to the devastation caused by four decades of conflict.
