Landslides Salts Kashmiri Wounds

Cut from the outside world for days, thousands of stranded, homeless and hungry Kashmiris have been fearful over the new landslides that added to their misery after the region’s worst floods in 50 years, making the task of rescuers even harder.

“Almost every second family has one or two missing members,” Syed Munir Quadri, who has been looking for his father for three days in Srinagar, a city of some 1.2 million now facing an acute shortage of fuel, food and medicines, told Reuters on Friday, September 12.
Indian media said that more than 40 people were killed by a landslide at a village further south.
“The entire village slid down in a matter of minutes, burying all houses under tons of rock and mud. The villagers had no time to run to safety,” the CNN-IBN TV channel said on its news website.
“The army rushed in 200 of its soldiers to assist with rescue operations being carried out by the civil administration.”
Both the Indian and Pakistan sides of the disputed Himalayan territory have been hit by extensive flooding since the Jhelum river, swollen by unusually heavy rain, surged last week.
The river flows from Indian Kashmir to the Pakistan side, and then down into Pakistan’s lower Indus river basin.
On the Pakistani side, officials put the death toll at 264 on Friday and said that more than one million people had been affected by floodwaters now cresting in the densely populated province of Punjab.
In New Delhi, Home Minister Rajnath Singh said about 200 Indians had been killed and around 130,000 rescued.
Pakistan and India suffer widespread flooding each year during the monsoon season, which runs from June through September.
The 2010 floods killed about 2,000 people and made 11 million homeless in one of Pakistan’s worst natural disasters.
Kashmir is divided between India and Pakistan, but claimed in its entirety by both countries.

Source: OnIslam