Afghanistan’s Ministry for Refugees said on Sunday that the death toll from flooding in northern Afghanistan has reached 315, with more than 1,600 people injured.
The toll was announced on Sunday, a day after the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) said over 300 people were killed and many others remained missing, with authorities scrambling to rescue the injured.
The number of dead is rising quickly, as Afghan’s Ministry of Interior Affairs said earlier Saturday that some 150 people were killed in the floods.
WFP said the worst-hit province was Baghlan, where more than 1,000 homes have been destroyed.
The UN agency said it was distributing fortified biscuits to the survivors of one of the many floods that hit the country over the past few weeks.
Heavy rains on Friday led to flooding in several areas of the country.
Zabihullah Mujahid, the chief spokesman for the Taliban government, said in a social media post on Saturday that “hundreds have succumbed to these calamitous floods, while a substantial number have sustained injuries.”.
Apart from Baghlan, the provinces of Badakhshan in the northeast, central Ghor and western Herat were also heavily affected, he wrote on X, adding that “the extensive devastation” had resulted in “significant financial losses.”
The UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) told the media on Saturday that more than 200 people were killed and thousands of homes were destroyed or damaged in Baghlan alone.
The air force had started evacuating people and moved more than 100 injured people to military hospitals, the Taliban Ministry of Defense said on Saturday, without mentioning from which provinces.
Residents were unprepared for the sudden rush of water set off by the heavy downpour in recent days. Emergency personnel were “searching for any possible victims under the mud and rubble, with the help of security forces from the national army and police.
Since mid-April, floods have killed about 100 people in 10 of Afghanistan’s provinces, with no region entirely spared.
Farmlands have been submerged in a country where 80 percent of the more than 40 million people depend on agriculture to survive.