Nepal's Flood-Rescue Plight

"There are too many challenges. There are no roads, they have all been washed away, and many areas are just not accessible."

"It is very difficult for my men. The area is still flooded, and elsewhere it is all marshland."

"Once my men are dropped, they have to roam over large distances to conduct search and rescue. But the helicopters have to return because there are not enough of them."

"For example, an area that was dry yesterday is completely flooded today [as the swollen river changes course]."

"It is unpredictable. Floods can come at any time."

E. Hawadi, Nepali police coordinator of rescue efforts, Nuwakot district 

 

"This is the Himalayas."

"We have to be very careful when starting any rescue operation or relief operation."

"The gorges are very deep and steep, so that's the difficulty."

Nepali Foreign Ministry spokesman Lok Bahadur Poudel Chhetri  

Structures partially submerged in mud brought in by flash floods stand at the banks of the Trishuli river in Nepal's Nuwakot district, Thursday, Sept. 3, 2026. (AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh)

 

More than a week after catastrophic flooding killed over 1,200 people in Nepal when an unstable glacier broke off and plugged a river to swell into a lake, then went on to cause massive flooding near the border between Nepal and Tibet, rescue work is continuing, with the fading hope of finding some of the 4,471 estimated missing still alive. 

 

Teams of rescuers face treacherous marshlands and an unpredictable river as they search for survivors. Nepal has suffered the majority of deaths and those missing, while Tibet saw 15 dead and 546 people missing, according to Chinese state media.

 

The fate of hundreds of missing hydropower project workers where the full force of the torrent occurred stands at 639 people unaccounted for. According to the Nepalese disaster agency, there remain 3,333 missing citizens. Among them are 45 Nepali army soldiers, 38 police officers, and 18 customs and immigration officers.  

 

Another project the floods hit, the Upper Trishuli 3A facility took rescue workers six days to locate the tunnels encased in the thick mud. Roughly 30 to 40 people stuck in the tunnels there are believed to be alive. "We are expecting survivors in there because we are told there is a dry space inside. We are trying to break into the tunnel now", a Nepali army spokesperson explained. 

A week after the flash-flood hit the Nepal-Tibet border, some officials believe trapped workers at the Rasuwagadhi hydropower plant could still be alive. Photograph: Naveen Srivastava/X/Reuters

 

Where floodwaters have receded, the ground has been transformed into deep, slippery mud whose effect complicates rescue operations, slowing down movement. In other areas floodwaters remain high. Families have been left homeless in heavy rain as entire communities were swept away. Some have found shelter in temporary facilities. Mass graves are receiving unidentified bodies.  

Rescuers, as a result of the difficult conditions they face in the remote settlements, must rely on helicopters presenting as the sole means of reaching those stranded communities. 40 bridges have been washed away in the floodwaters. Teams are dispersed across the sprawling disaster zone, with reinforcements being brought into the small town of Bidur on the banks of the Trishuli River. The problem of supplies reaching those who need them rests in the town, now the main hub for rescue operations.

An aerial view shows vehicles lying amid debris at Timure Bazar following the deadly flash floods and mudslides in Rasuwa, Nepal, Sept. 3, 2026.   Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters

Some 93,000 people are felt to have been affected by the floods, according to the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent. Declaring that "many homes have been destroyed or severely damaged".  Both India and China are sending quickly-assembled prefabricated Bailey bridges where no heavy equipment is required.

The UN World Food Programme is shipping in 2.4 tonnes of high-energy biscuits to sustain homeless families lacking the capacity to cook food. "Damage to roads, bridges, settlements, and critical infrastructure has severely disrupted access to affected communities, creating significant challenges for relief operations", they explained. 

 

The swollen river responsible for widespread destruction changes course from time to time, and rescuers are forced to reassess their plans, while struggling with a lack of adequate equipment. Flotation devices are required to safely operate in floodwaters. Nighttime operations have been made impossibly hazardous in many areas, resulting from that unpredictability, while pressure to accelerate the search continues.

 

Nepal army personnel prepare to construct a bridge across Trishuli river at Devighat in Nepal's Nuwakot district on Sept. 3, 2026.    Arun Sankar/AFP via Getty Images

 

 

Sudan's Darfur Deadly Landslide

"Initial information indicates the death of all village residents, estimated at more than 1,000 individuals, with only one survivor."

"[The landslide is] massive and devastating." 

"This is beyond our capacity. Masses of mud fell onto the village. Our humanitarian teams and local residents are trying to retrieve the bodies, but the scale of the disaster is far greater than the resources available to us."

Abdulwahid al-Nur, leader, Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM) faction 

 

"We do not have helicopters, everything goes in vehicles on very bumpy roads."

"It takes time and it is the rainy season — sometimes we have to wait hours, maybe a day or two to cross a valley... bringing in trucks with commodities will be a challenge." 

Antoine Gérard, the UN's deputy humanitarian co-ordinator for Sudan  

Aftermath of earthquake in Western Sudan  Credit: Sudan Liberation Movement/Army/AFP via Getty

 

Sudan has been in the throes of a deadly civil war for a number of years. The conflict sees the Sudanese military warring with the rival Rapid Support Forces (RSF), once an ally of the government's military. During the Darfur conflict years earlier, government forces and the-then Arab Muslim Janjaweed horsemen raided black Darfurian farming villages, used helicopter gunships on the villagers, driving them from their homes and into nearby forests. Thousands were killed; an estimated 150,000 Darfurians lost their lives in the brutal war which displaced 12 million people. The Janjaweed represented herders, the Darfurians pastoralist farmers.

 

On Tuesday, more misfortune for Sudan's Darfur region when a landslide devastated an entire community, burying a town that held 1,000 people The village of Tarasin in the Jebel Marra range, under control of the rebel Sudan Liberation Movement Army saw a deluge of heavy rain triggering the disaster.

 

Sudan was urged by the African Union to "silence the guns" and in the process permit aid delivery to the deadly landslide's victims. "In these painful circumstances the chairperson of the Commission ... calls on all Sudanese stakeholders to silence the guns and unite in facilitating the swift and effective delivery of emergency humanitarian assistance to those in need", the bloc stated. 

 

Debris-covered ground in the wake of the deadly landslide. Credit: Sudan Liberation Movement/Army/AFP via Getty

 

 On its website, the SLM published images showing huge sections of a mountainside collapsed, the village buried under thick muck and uprooted trees. Footage revealed people standing on jagged rocks, searching for people buried under the mud. Parts of the Jebel Marra range is controlled by the SLM where the conflict has not penetrated, while hundreds of thousands of people fled there, to escape the civil war violence into SLM-held territory.

 

The geological area is that of a rugged volcanic range that stretches roughly 150 kilometres south-west of North Darfur's state capital El-Fasher, itself under fire, besieged for more than a year, as the RSF strains to capture it. An area particularly susceptible to landslides, in particular during the August rainy season, peaking at this time. 

 

Both factions in the power struggle, between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan where the internationally recognized government is based in Port Sudan, and his former deputy, RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan Dagio, although rivals, have responded to the disaster that struck Sunday. Burhan's Transitional Sovereignty Council pledged to mobilize all available resources in support of those affected in the region by the landslide.  

"Initial information indicates the death of all the villagers, estimated at more than a thousand people, and only one person survived."

"[The entire area was] completely leveled to the ground [in the landslide]."

"We therefore appeal to the United Nations, regional and international organizations, and the living human conscience to help us recover the bodies of the dead from under the soil, whose number is estimated at more than a thousand people, men, women and children."

SLM statement  

Afghanistan Earthquake : "Children are Under the Rubble"

"Children are under the rubble. The elderly are under the rubble. Young people are under the rubble."

"We need help here. We need people to come here and join us. Let us pull out the people who are buried."

"There is no one who can come and remove dead bodies from under the rubble."

Nurgal district resident

 

"I was half-buried and unable to get out."

"My wife and two sons are dead, and my father is injured and in hospital with me."

"We were  trapped for three to four hours until people from other areas arrived and pulled me out."

Sadiqullah, resident of Maza Dara area, Nurgal

 

"[The death toll had risen to at least 800 with more than 3,500 injured; most casualties were in Kunar]."

"Helicopters reached some areas but road travel was difficult]."

"There are some villages where the injured and dead haven't been recovered from the rubble, so that's why the numbers may increase."

Zabihullah Mujahid, chief spokesman, Taliban 

Residents walk by a house destroyed by the earthquake in Maza Dara, Kunar province, Afghanistan. Photograph: Wahidullah Kakar/AP

By Tuesday, following the Sunday tremblor, the death toll from a major earthquake in eastern Afghanistan passed 1,400 on Tuesday, with over 3,000 people injured. "We cannot afford to forget the people of Afghanistan who are facing multiple crises, multiple shocks, and the resilience of the communities has been saturated," said Indrika Ratwatte, the UN's resident co-ordinator for Afghanistan, urging the international community to step forward. "These are life and death decisions while we race against time to reach people." 

 

In desperate times of natural disasters, people living remotely in areas where access is difficult and made more so by conditions wrought by an earth upheaval, people are left to their desperate attempts to give aid to those among them unfortunate enough to be caught in the destruction of a shallow earthquake. Eastern Afghanistan teetered under the shock of a 6.0 magnitude quake, late Sunday. Before outside rescue assistance could arrive, locals were frantically trying to dig victims out from the rubble, moving it by hand.

 

According to one resident in Nurgal district where the quake hit villages in Kunar province not far from the city of Jalalabad, his entire village had been destroyed. The quake, hitting before midnight, was centred 27 kilometers east-north-east of Jalalabad, at an eight-kilometre depth. More damage tends to ensue with quakes of shallow depth. Aftershocks that followed the original quake, add to the panic and fear and ongoing danger and damage. 

 

An earthquake of magnitude 5.5 shook southeastern Afghanistan on Tuesday, sparking fears of further destruction almost two days after a large quake in the same region killed more than 1,400 people and injured thousands more. CBC News

 

Rescuers were seen in footage, taking injured people from collapsed buildings on stretchers, placing them into helicopters. Most casualties from the quake were located, according to the Taliban government's spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, in Kunar. Pakistan felt the quake as far as its capital, Islamabad, although no reports of casualties or damage have come out of Pakistan. 

 

Eastern Afghanistan communities are located in remote areas, within the mountainous landscape. Roads have been blocked and people are unable to communicate, while aid workers are forced to walk four or five hours before reaching  survivors. Rescue flights have operated out of Nangarhar Airport to  transport the rescued injured to hospitals for emergency care.

 

Low-rise constructions, of concrete and brick are hugely susceptible to earthquake damage, as are the homes constructed with mud bricks and wood. That they are poorly built, makes them more susceptible to damage. Homes were seen to collapse by one survivors, accompanied by the sounds of people screaming for help. Sadiqullah described being wakened by a deep boom he took for the warning signals of an approaching storm.

 

Once awake, he rushed to his children's sleeping quarters and was able to bring three of them to safety. On the cusp of returning to bring the remainder of his family out of danger, the room he was in collapsed on top of him. It felt, he explained, as though the entire mountain was shaking. Medical teams from Kunar, Nangarhar and the national capital Kabul, arrived in the area finally. 

 

A health ministry spokesman, Sharafat Zaman, explained further that many areas had been unable to report casualty figures, and "the numbers were expected to change as deaths and injuries are  reported".  Sherine Ibraham, country director for the aid agency, described entire roads and communities cut off from accessing nearby towns or hospital. "Although we have been able to act fast, we are profoundly fearful for the additional strain this will have on the overall humanitarian response in Afghanistan", he stated. 

 

 

A deadly earthquake in northeastern Afghanistan has killed more than 1,400 people and injured at least 3,000, according to the Taliban. Afghan volunteers and Taliban security personnel transfer the injured to a military helicopter in the Mazar Dara village of Nurgal, a district of Kunar province on Monday. (Wakil Kohsar/AFP/Getty Images)

 

In a statement by the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, immediate needs include search and rescue support, emergency health care and medical supplies, food, clean water, and restoration of road access to reach isolated communities. In October of 2023 a magnitude 6.3 earthquake had hit Afghanistan, with strong aftershocks following. An estimated 4,000 people died in that quake, according to the Taliban.

 

Now, according to the International Rescue Committee, Sunday's earthquake in Afghanistan was expected to "dwarf the scale of the humanitarian needs" that the 2023 disaster had caused. 

 

Civil defense workers, locals, and army soldiers prepare to evacuate injured victims of an earthquake that killed hundreds and destroyed numerous villages in eastern Afghanistan, in Mazar Dara, Kunar province, Monday, Sept. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Hedayat Shah)