Heavy rains in many districts “killed sixty-six people in Faryab” on Saturday evening, government spokesperson Asmatullah Muradi said on Sunday (May 19). “Five people were injured, eight were missing and more than 1,500 homes were damaged,” he said.
In the province of Ghor, in the west of the country, heavy rainfall on Friday May 17 caused fifty-five deaths in this region, according to an official provisional report, while more than 3,000 houses were destroyed. The province of Baghlan (North) experienced extremely devastating flash floods on May 10, causing at least three hundred deaths and leaving many missing.
UN agencies like the Taliban government have indicated that the toll was likely to rise but have not provided any new updated figures for a week. The World Health Organization (WHO) explained that the dysfunction of the Internet still prevented us from knowing the true situation in certain very isolated villages.
“Disaster after disaster”
“Humanitarian organizations continue to experience major problems accessing affected areas due to widespread damage to infrastructure, including roads and bridges,” WHO said. This applies to all the provinces of this country, which is among the poorest in the world and where relief structures suffer from a cruel lack of financial resources.
Afghanistan, a country very exposed to climate change, is experiencing an abnormally rainy spring, after an exceptionally dry winter. “With these erratic weather situations, it has been disaster after disaster, which has pushed the villagers into extreme poverty,” Timothy Anderson, in charge of Afghanistan at the World Food Program, said last Tuesday.
Around 80% of Afghanistan’s 40 million people depend on agriculture for their survival and current rainfall has submerged significant areas of land and destroyed crops.