SHEIKH JALAL, Afghanistan: Emergency aid and rescue teams struggled on Sunday to reach areas of northern Afghanistan hardest hit by flash floods that killed hundreds, AFP journalists saw. Heavy rains caused flash flooding in several provinces in Afghanistan on Friday.
Jawed’s whole life was ripped away when flash floods tore through Afghanistan’s Baghlan province, drowning every member of his family except a young son who clung to a tree above the churning mud.
Only Jawed, 38, and his nine-year-old son—his eldest—survived the flooding that carried away his wife and four other young children, some of the hundreds who died in Baghlan from the flooding that devastated the province Friday, according to the United Nations. At work when he heard of the surging waters, Jawed tried to race home but found the roads impassable.
When he finally reached his house, he saw only the stoop remained. "There was nothing left. My whole house and life had been washed away,” Jawed told AFP. His family’s bodies had been strewn across the area, carried by the force of the rushing water.
"They were all washed away,” he repeated, weeping over the phone from Pul-e Khumri, the provincial capital. He found his wife, two sons and two daughters one by one, searching through the mud and debris, their bodies now wrapped in white sheets and laid out next to each other, ready for burial.
"One of my children, a baby, was in his mother’s arms. They drowned together,” Jawed said. "My life sank, I was ruined, I don’t want anything from this life anymore.” Fresh graves were dug in communities across Baghlan, the province hardest hit by flooding that impacted multiple provinces.
In Baghlan-e-Markazi district, people prayed next to their relatives’ graves under a stormy sky on the same hill where women and children had fled to higher ground during the deluge. Some residents gathered on the hillsides overlooking their swamped homes and land. Others tried to clear debris from buildings, wading ankle deep in mud to shovel thick layers out of their homes marked with brown stains showing the water had climbed high up the walls. In Pul-e Khumri, a government employee who did not want to use his real name, going by Burhanudin, said most of the more than 1,000 homes in his area had been devastated. "The walls of our house were destroyed, our water wells were swamped and our area is damaged,” he told AFP.
He and his eight family members survived, having quickly fled their home when it started to rain heavily. But, he added, "my house, my neighbour’s house, shops, they are all damaged”. Before the rains came down on Friday afternoon in Pul-e Khumri, Lailoma was putting her baby to sleep when the sky went "completely dark”.
"I thought it was a solar eclipse,” she said. She shuttered her home against the rain but realizing the storm was too strong, she grabbed her children and ran "with tears in (her) eyes”. All of her seven children survived, but she lost everything she owned and her home was "washed away”. "I was very poor. I had a cow and I used to sell its milk and feed my children, but the cow was carried away,” said the 36-year-old, whose husband is unemployed.
"Since yesterday I haven’t had anything to eat,” she said. "I gave only bread and water to my children, I don’t know what to do.” Northern Baghlan was the worst impacted, with efforts to deliver aid hampered by destruction to roads and bridges wrought when the floods ripped through the province. In Sheikh Jalal, about a two-hour drive from Burka, one of the most devastated areas, AFP journalists saw aid trucks full of food, military vehicles, rescue workers and local residents stuck where roads had been completely washed out. The military was using heavy machinery to pave the way, as well as to free aid trucks stuck in the mud.
Mohammad Ali Aryanfar, part of a team from the Turkish Hak Humanitarian Relief Association trying to deliver food to Burka, said they had been on the road since early morning Sunday but were blocked in Sheikh Jalal. "Our compatriots there (in Burka) need assistance and we pray that the road opens and we reach the area,” he told AFP.
"People’s houses have been destroyed and they don’t have anything, they don’t have shelters,” he added. The United Nations World Food Programme shared a photo on social media site X of WFP-stamped bags of flour strapped to donkeys’ backs, saying it had to "resort to every alternative to get food to the survivors who lost everything” in Baghlan, as most of the affected areas were "inaccessible by trucks”.
The Taleban government refugees ministry said on Sunday that 315 people had been killed and more than 1,600 people were injured in the flooding in Baghlan. More than 2,600 homes have been damaged or destroyed and 1,000 cattle killed, it added. Farmland has also been swamped in the poverty-wracked nation where 80 percent of its more than 40 million people depend on agriculture to survive. WFP confirmed a toll of more than 300 dead in Baghlan to AFP on Saturday.
Taleban authorities and non-governmental groups warned that the death toll could rise. About 600,000 people live in the five most severely impacted districts in Baghlan, according to NGO Save the Children. So far this year, "nearly 13,000 people in Afghanistan have been impacted by disasters caused by extreme weather, including floods and landslides”, it said in a statement. The country, ravaged by four decades of war, is one of the world’s poorest and, according to scientists, one of the worst prepared to face the consequences of global warming. – AFP