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Rescue crews were digging through mud and rubble for the second day in search of survivors after flash floods tore through a remote province in eastern Afghanistan, killing at least 23 people and leaving over 100 missing.
The floods struck Nuristan province on Monday, collapsing an undetermined number of buildings and injuring 80 people, the Afghanistan National Disaster Management Authority said.
Parun, the provincial capital, was among the worst-affected areas and officials said they expected the death toll to rise as rescue reached cut-off villages.
Nuristan is one of Afghanistan’s most isolated provinces, a sparsely populated stretch of steep valleys and forests along the Pakistan border where roads are poor and settlements cling to mountainsides. Its harsh terrain is slowing the arrival of help from the national capital Kabul, leaving residents to join the search alongside emergency teams.
Scores of people gathered in Parun on Tuesday to look for the missing, some using wooden poles and their bare hands, an AFP journalist at the scene reported.
Farid Gul Zaheer, a 34-year-old pharmacist who was hurt while trying to escape up the mountainside, said he had never witnessed such a dangerous flood. "It felt like there was an earthquake, and I heard children and people screaming," he told AFP.
Severe weather was forecast to persist for a few days, with heavy rainfall, thunderstorms, winds carrying dust and sand, and more flash flooding expected in 10 of the country's 34 provinces, the meteorology department said and urged people to stay away from riverbanks and other areas at risk.
Afghanistan sits on the western fringe of the path of the Asian monsoon and although it receives far less rain than India or Pakistan, sudden downpours send water racing down dry riverbeds and narrow valleys with little warning. Homes in rural areas are typically built of mud and stone, offering scant protection when a wall of water and debris arrives.
The country is among the most exposed in the world to disasters of this kind and deaths on this scale occur almost every year.
At least 113 people were killed when Nuristan was hit by flooding in the summer of 2021. More than 300 died in flash floods across several provinces in the spring of 2024, and at least 110 were killed by flooding and landslides earlier this year.
Decades of war, a collapsed economy, widespread deforestation, and the absence of flood defences have deepened the damage each time. Tree cover across the eastern mountains has been stripped for timber and fuel, removing the roots and soil that would otherwise have slowed water running off the slopes.
The emergency response has also been weakened by the state of the country's finances since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, when international donors froze assets and cut development funding.
Aid agencies operating in the country have faced repeated shortfalls and rescue services in remote provinces have little heavy equipment or specialist capacity to draw on.
Scientists have linked the increasing intensity of extreme rainfall in the region to a warming climate allowing the atmosphere to hold more moisture and produce heavier bursts of rain.
Afghanistan contributes a negligible share of global greenhouse gas emissions but ranks among the countries least able to withstand the consequences.
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