ABI BARIK, Afghanistan – Afghan rescuers and volunteers armed with shovels and little more than their bare hands dug through the mud Saturday after a massive landslide swept through a village the day before, turning it into an earthen tomb holding hundreds of bodies, officials said.
“That will be their cemetery,” said Mohammad Karim Khalili, one of the country’s two vice presidents, who visited the scene Saturday. “It is not possible to bring out any bodies.”
Though figures on the death toll varied, residents knew the toll the tragedy had taken on their own families.
From atop a muddy hill, Begam Nesar pointed to the torrent of earth below that had wiped out much of her village.
“Thirteen of my family members are under the mud,” she said, including her mother, father, brothers, sisters and children. She said she had been visiting relatives at a nearby village when the disaster struck.
Part of the confusion in the death toll lay in the fact that no one knew how many people were home when the landslide struck. The United Nations said Friday at least 350 people died, and the provincial governor said as many as 2,000 people were feared missing. On Saturday, the International Organization of Migration said information they gathered indicated 2,700 people were dead or missing.
At least 255 people were confirmed dead, Khalili said. Most of those were people who had rushed to the scene to help after a previous, smaller landslide. When a bigger landslide hit, those people along with about 300 homes were wiped out. But because no one knows how many people were in those homes, counting the dead is difficult, Khalili said.
Mohammad Aslam Seyas, deputy director of the Natural Disaster Management Authority, said fears of new landslides had slowed the operation.
The ground on a hill overlooking the village was soaked from recent heavy rainfalls that officials believe triggered the slide. About a half-mile away, government and aid groups set up tents for those displaced.
Few had time to flee before the mud wall caved in.
Sunatullah, a local farmer, was outside when he felt the earth start to move. He ran to his house, grabbed his wife and children and then ran to the top of a nearby hill. Minutes later, he said, part of the hill collapsed.
“The houses were just covered in mud,” he said, adding that he had lost 10 members of his extended family, his house and his livestock.
Authorities distributed food and water to survivors, said Abdullah Homayun Dehqan, the head of Badakhshan province’s National Disaster Department.
But residents were worried about more natural disasters to come.
“There are four valleys from where water can flow in here. If water flows in, the whole village would be under water,” said Jaan Mohammed.
Rescuers have struggled to reach the remote area, about 200 miles from the capital, Kabul. There is little development or infrastructure. Even getting heavy equipment such as bulldozers to the site – accessible only by narrow and bumpy dirt roads – was difficult. Most residents live in single-story mud houses that were no match to the rush of earth.
A spokesman for the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force said they have not received any requests to help out with the disaster.
