Rescuers battle to help Afghan flood victims as death toll hits 81
Print Edition
RESCUERS scrambled yesterday to deliver food and medical supplies to Afghan families marooned on mountaintops after flash floods killed 81 people in a remote northern district, washing away hundreds of homes and forcing thousands to flee.
The death toll was expected to rise, with scores of people said to be missing in the mountainous district of Baghlan province after torrential rains unleashed the floods on Friday.
The floods come a month after a landslide triggered by heavy rains buried a village and killed 300 people in a nearby northeastern Badakhshan province bordering China, displacing some 700 families.
The twin disasters highlight the challenges facing underdeveloped Afghanistan’s next leader as the country heads into the second round of the presidential election on June 14.
The flood destroyed some 850 houses across several villages and damaged more than 1,000, leaving thousands of people in need of shelter, food, water and medicine, Lieutenant Fazel Rahman, the police chief in the Guzirga i-Nur district of Baghlan province, said.
Police officer and local resident Sahib Nazar openly wept while recounting his own family’s losses.
“I have lost everything, my parents, my wife and five children,” he said. “I have buried my mother, wife and three of my children, but still looking for my father and two other children’s bodies.”
Nazar said he received a phone call late Friday afternoon about the heavy rain and flooding. He said he left his sick son at a hospital and tried to come home, but couldn’t as all roads were destroyed.
By the time he reached home the next morning, there was nothing left.
“All the village was gone,” he said.
Defense Ministry spokesman General Mohammad Zahir Azimi said army helicopters assisted in relief efforts in the remote district, which is just 140 kilometers north of the provincial capital, Puli Khumri, but is an eight-to-nine-hour drive because of the rugged terrain.
Rahman said local authorities had received around 100 tents, several hundred blankets and some food, but that more supplies were urgently needed.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has appointed a high-ranking government commission to accelerate emergency aid to the affected villages and expressed his “deep condolences” to those who lost loved ones, the palace said in a statement yesterday.
Abdullah Abdullah, the front runner in Afghanistan’s June 14 presidential runoff election, also visited the area yesterday.
A landslide in Baghlan province in 2012 killed 71 people. After days of digging unearthed only five bodies, authorities gave up on the recovery effort and turned the area into a memorial.
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