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, roughly 320 kilometers (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.
Badakhshan province borders Tajikistan to the north and China and Pakistan to the east.
“Badakhshan is a remote, mountainous region of Afghanistan, which has seen many natural disasters,” said the head of the IOM's Afghanistan office, Richard Danziger. “But the scale of this landslide is absolutely devastating, with an entire village practically wiped away. Hundreds of families have lost everything.”
In addition to the wars and fighting that have plagued Afghanistan for roughly three decades, the country has been subject to repeated natural disasters including landslides and avalanches. A landslide in 2012 killed 71 people. Authorities were not able to recover the vast majority of bodies and ended up declaring the site a massive grave.
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