CHARIKAR, Afghanistan – Hamid Agha’s family was sleeping outside when the rain began. He had previously witnessed rain in his two years living in Charikar, a city along the foothills of the Hindu Kush in northern Afghanistan, and thought badly of it. Yet when the 13-year-old family woke up on Wednesday when they moved into their oppressively hot three-bedroom house at night, it was for the sound of floodwaters.
Mr Hamid Agha, 50, was fainted in the dark. His wife and nine other family members were killed or are missing. Their livelihood, a graying green station wagon he used as a taxi, was driven half a mile away, mangled, with water leaking from the interior nearly 36 hours later.
As of Thursday morning, flash floods in Charikar had killed at least 92 people and injured 108 others, adding to the misery of a raging war and a coronavirus pandemic that has overcome a health system that depends on aid organizations even for some of their most basic services.
Floods in northern and eastern Afghanistan are frequent this time of year. But the devastation in Charikar, where side streets were transformed into side rivers that swept much of the city of 200,000 people, is striking. The toll of the floods, local officials say, is likely to increase as more bodies are discovered.
Floods have been reported in the last several days across a dozen provinces, with more than 150 dead and 200 others injured, the Afghan ministry said was responsible for disaster response. Parwan province, of which Charikar is the capital, was hit hardest.
Shortly after news of the devastation in the city, President Ashraf Ghani sent his ministers of defense and health to the area, with military troops assisting in the search-and-rescue operations.
The Taliban offered condolences to the victims and ordered their fighters to help. But the group also attacked outposts in the area, even as bodies were still lost under rubble, a continuation of violence that has escalated in northern provinces in recent months, including some areas now affected by the floods.
Abdul Shokoor, the governor of the Bagram district in Parwan, said the insurgents had attacked an outpost in the area in the pre-dawn hours and that civilians fleeing floods in the neighboring Kapisa province were crossfire. fongen. The Taliban thought a vehicle passing through the area brought support to the Afghan outpost and opened fire, killing four civilians and injuring three others, according to the governor.
Abdullah Abdullah, who is leading the Afghan peace process for the government and who visited the area, laments that the insurgents did not cease fire even after the floods.
“In some areas, providing assistance was not possible because of the fighting,” he said.
Yet the disaster in Charikar was making years.
Many of the destroyed houses were recently built or bought along flood routes, where the land was cheap. Afghans living in the outskirts of the city as farmers moved to Charikar when the Taliban tightened their grip on the countryside and dried up the ground after a drought in 2018.
That was the case for Mr. Hamid Agha, who grew wheat before moving to Charikar to avoid the uprising and the reduced return on his crop. He spent all his savings on his now-buried home, he said, the only evidence of which he died Thursday morning, shouting quietly and surrounded by neighbors when an excavator removed debris from the room where he killed his wife the day before found.
“The flood took everything I had and where I heard,” said Mr Hamid Agha.
“I was the only child in my family that I always wanted to have a big family,” he added. “But now I have lost everyone. Only my two sons remain. ”
Similar stories echoed across the city as residents walked among the wreckage of destroyed houses, inverted rocks and newly formed streets cut by the water. Some houses were torn in half, others almost completely demolished. Construction equipment from non-profit organizations and the Afghan government made their way inside the city as daily life tried to go on.
Abdul Baqi, 38, looked at the entrance of his grocery store. Its customers, mostly the poorer residents of the city who bought land in the flood zones, were mostly nowhere to be found.
“I blame the people who sold these people the land,” Baqi said. “They would have to tell them how dangerous it was.”
In Afghanistan, poor governance with little official oversight often means that urban planning is ignored.
Gul Bebe, 70, and her family, like Mr Hamid Agha’s, had bought a house in the flood zone because it was cheaper, she said, as she balanced her way across the newly formed plateaus of rocks and detritus that formerly part of a neighborhood. She said she had no idea of the risks.
“Now we’ve lost everything here,” she said.
At the hospital in Charikar, a combination of squat buildings at the base of the city, where the floodwaters had pounded down from the hills above, dozens of patients were stretched out, beaten and bleeding with cuts and broken bones.
Some had suffered electrocutions. Several patients with head trauma were evacuated to Kabul, said Khalil Haidari, the hospital’s chief physician.
Outside the main building, Samir, a 10-year-old man wearing a white bandage, recalled a hit on his head and his uncles on tow, Wednesday morning’s incident.
“It didn’t rain much in the city, but then there was this big flood,” Samir said. “I climbed to the wall and jumped to my neighbor’s house, and my parents handed over my other siblings, but they were both caught in the flood with my sister.”
“My sister is still missing,” he said, “and they found my parents’ bodies.”
Mujib Mashal and Najim Rahim contributed reports from Kabul, Afghanistan.
