A series of violent flash floods, triggered by torrential monsoon rains, has severely hit eastern Afghanistan. In Nuristan province, at least 20 people have been killed, over 80 injured, and more than 100 reported missing, including the mayor of the provincial capital, Parun. On Monday, July 20, 2026, a surge of floodwaters swept away homes, shops, hotels, and bridges. The central market was almost entirely destroyed, while compromised water networks left the population without drinking water. Similar devastation has been recorded in the provinces of Nangarhar and Laghman, the beating heart of eastern Afghanistan, which are economically vital regions thanks to intensive and productive agriculture. Teams from the Afghan Red Crescent Society (ARCS) and local authorities have mobilized for rescue operations and the distribution of food aid. However, Nuristan’s remote, mountainous terrain and destroyed roads make the timely deployment of heavy equipment extremely complex. The fury of the bad weather was not confined to Afghan borders; similar phenomena also hit the neighboring Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province in Pakistan, causing 14 deaths and prompting authorities to declare a state of maximum alert.
The catastrophe highlights Afghanistan’s profound vulnerability to climate change. Several critical structural factors contribute to making the rainfall so destructive: intensive deforestation in recent years has reduced the soil’s absorption capacity, while a chronic shortage of civil engineering works—such as embankments, drainage channels, and retention basins—has left the territory completely defenceless. Added to all this is the total absence of territorial policies by the Taliban regime, which has neglected any measures for environmental prevention and management. Institutional inertia and a lack of investment in emergency plans condemn the population to cyclically suffer avoidable disasters that further exacerbate an already dramatic humanitarian crisis. Beyond the immediate damage to homes and infrastructure, the rushing waters in Nuristan and neighboring provinces have swept away entire harvests and devastated farmland. In a country where the vast majority of the rural population depends strictly on subsistence agriculture, the loss of fields and food reserves risks triggering a long-term crisis, dramatically worsening food insecurity levels across the nation and pushing entire communities toward the specter of famine. For some time, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the World Food Programme (PAM/WFP) have been denouncing the severe funding shortage penalizing humanitarian interventions in Afghanistan—a situation inextricably linked to the geopolitical context. Due to the severe human rights restrictions imposed by the Taliban regime, particularly the systematic ban on women’s education and work, the international community has drastically cut funds earmarked for long-term development. Foreign financing now focuses almost exclusively on immediate emergency management, leaving structural prevention work, reforestation, and territorial security completely unfunded, trapping Afghanistan in a vicious cycle that perpetuates its structural vulnerability to climate crises and emergencies.
Once again, women bear the brunt of these emergencies. International organizations and humanitarian agencies report the existence of systemic barriers that effectively exclude or penalize them within the aid chain. Since rescuers and local authorities are almost exclusively male, the enforcement of current restrictions ends up blocking direct assistance to women who lack a close male relative as an escort (mahram), further limiting their ability to reach safety or distribution centers. Furthermore, in many of the affected areas, the selection of beneficiaries and the distribution of essential goods are subject to local power dynamics that heavily penalize female-headed households. This complex set of structural and cultural restrictions exposes women to total dependence on male family members for survival, leaving them dramatically alone in the face of the catastrophe, with fewer chances of survival and access to life-saving aid.
