Mohammad said on Sunday that he found the bodies of his wife and two sons late Friday night on the outskirt of Puli Khumri, the capital of Baghlan province.

“I hope someone has found my daughters alive,” he said, holding back tears. “Just in the blink of an eye, I lost everything: family, home, belongings, now nothing is left to me.”

Among the dead are 51 children, according to UNICEF, one of several international aid groups sending relief teams, medicines, blankets and other supplies. The World Health Organization said it delivered 7 tons of medicines and emergency kits.

Aid group Save the Children said about 600,000 people, half of them children, live in the five districts in Baghlan that have been severely impacted by the floods. The group said it sent a “clinic on wheels” with mobile health and child protection teams to support children and their families.

“Lives and livelihoods have been washed away,” said Arshad Malik, country director for the aid organisation. “The flash floods tore through villages, sweeping away homes and killing livestock. Children have lost everything. Families who are still reeling from the economic impacts of three years of drought urgently need assistance.”

Survivors picked through muddy, debris-littered streets and damaged buildings, an Agence France-Presse journalist saw, as authorities and non-governmental groups deployed rescuers and aid, warning that some areas had been cut off by the flooding.

Save the Children said Afghanistan was a country least prepared to cope with climate change patterns, such as the heavier seasonal rains, and needs help from the international community.

Northern Baghlan province was one of the hardest hit, with more than 300 people killed there alone, officials said.

“On current information: in Baghlan province there are 311 fatalities, 2,011 houses destroyed and 2,800 houses damaged,” said Rana Deraz, a UN communications officer in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is prone to natural disasters and is considered by the UN to be one of countries most vulnerable to climate change. There were disparities between the death tolls provided by the government and humanitarian agencies.

The Taliban-run ministry for refugees said on Sunday the death toll was 315 with more than 1,600 people injured. The UN migration agency, the International Organization for Migration, said there were 218 deaths in Baghlan.

Abdul Mateen Qani, spokesman for the interior ministry, said 131 people had been killed in Baghlan, but that the government toll could rise. “Many people are still missing,” he said.

Another 20 people were reported dead in northern Takhar province and two in neighbouring Badakhshan, he added. Government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said, “hundreds of our fellow citizens have succumbed to these calamitous floods”, in a statement on X on Saturday.

“My house and my whole life was swept away by the flood,” said Jan Mohammad Din Mohammad, a resident of Baghlan provincial capital Pol-e-Khomri.

His family had managed to flee to higher ground but when the weather cleared and they returned home, “there was nothing left, all my belongings and my house had been destroyed”, he said.

“I don’t know where to take my family … I don’t know what to do.”

Emergency personnel were rushing to rescue injured and stranded people, according to the defence ministry.

The ministry ordered multiple branches of the military “to provide any kind of assistance to the victims of this incident with all available resources”.

The air force said it had started evacuation operations as the weather cleared on Saturday, adding that more than a hundred injured people had been transferred to hospital, without specifying from which provinces.

“By announcing the state of emergency in [affected] areas, the Ministry of National Defence has started distributing food, medicine and first aid to the impacted people,” it said.

An Agence France-Presse journalist saw a vehicle laden with food and water in Baghlan’s Baghlan-i-Markazi district, as well as others carrying the dead to be buried.

Since mid-April, flash flooding and other floods ha lveeft about 100 people dead in 10 of Afghanistan’s provinces, with no region entirely spared, according to authorities.

Farmland has been swamped in a country where 80 per cent of the more than 40 million people depend on agriculture to survive.

Afghanistan had a relatively dry winter, making it more difficult for the soil to absorb rainfall.

The nation, ravaged by four decades of war, is one of the poorest in the world and, according to scientists, one of the worst prepared to face the consequences of global warming.

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The UN Special Rapporteur for human rights in Afghanistan, Richard Bennett, said on X the floods were “a stark reminder of Afghanistan’s vulnerability to the #climatecrisis”.

Afghanistan has faced an aid shortfall after the Taliban took over as foreign forces withdrew in 2021, and development aid that formed the backbone of government finances was cut.

That has worsened in subsequent years as foreign governments face global competing crises and due to condemnation of Taliban restrictions on Afghan women from aid work.

Additional reporting by Reuters, Associated Press