Ten Days of Rain, a Lifetime of Loss: Asia's Flood Season Turns Deadly

From Afghan mountain villages to Taiwan's coast, extreme rainfall is outpacing what old houses and old roads can survive

By Ingrid "Shortwave" Frost

Anar Gul had never seen rain like it. "It rained for 10 days and 10 nights, non-stop," the construction worker in Afghanistan's remote Dur Baba district told the Guardian. His kitchen collapsed under the deluge. Down the road, his neighbor Sayed Afsar Sadat watched a large part of his own house go down with it.

The stone-and-mud homes common across that part of eastern Afghanistan were never built for this. "Rains like this are coming heavier and earlier each year," Sadat said. "They are destroying the roads and washing away our crops. It's impacting us directly."

Afghanistan is not alone. The Guardian's reporting describes a wave of flash floods and typhoons stretching from Afghanistan to Taiwan this season, which it frames as part of a broader pattern of climate breakdown hitting vulnerable, often poorly built infrastructure hardest. The specific toll — in lives, homes and crops — across the wider region was not detailed in full in the material available for this report, and readers should treat the Afghanistan case as illustrative rather than a full accounting of the continent's flood damage.

What is clear from the ground-level accounts: for families in places like Dur Baba, the danger isn't abstract. It's a kitchen wall, a season's crop, a road to market — gone in the space of ten days. And residents say the pattern is worsening year over year, not easing.

— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.

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