Landslide causes numerous deaths in Afghanistan

Hundreds of people have been killed and more than 2,000 are missing after a landslide smashed into a village in a mountainous area of north Afghanistan on Friday, and rescue teams were struggling to reach the remote area.

Villagers dug with their bare hands to try to find survivors under the mountain of mud, but officials said there was little hope of finding anyone alive given the scale of the disaster.

Triggered by heavy rain, the side of a mountain collapsed into the village in Argo district at around 11 a.m. as people were trying to recover their belongings and livestock after a smaller landslip hit their homes a few hours earlier.

“As the part of the mountain which collapsed is so big, we don’t believe anyone would survive. The government and locals from surrounding villagers are helping with the rescue, and so far they have recovered more then a hundred bodies.”

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) put the number of fatalities at 350. At least 100 people were being treated for injuries, according to Colonel Abdul Qadeer Sayad, a deputy police chief of Badakhshan, which borders Tajikistan. Hundreds of mudbrick homes were crushed and hundreds more damaged, he said.

Denisha Sahadevan