INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
The death toll from monsoon flooding in Pakistan has reached 1,061 since June, the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) said on
Monday, with 28 more people having died in the past 24 hours.A huge relief operation was under way on Monday and international aid began
trickling in.The final toll could be higher as hundreds of villages in the mountainous north have been cut off by flood-swollen rivers
washing away roads and bridges, AFP reported.Authorities were still trying to reach cut-off villages in the mountainous north, even as the
flooded southern Sindh province braced on Sunday for a fresh deluge from swollen rivers in the north.The Indus river that courses through
Pakistan&s second-most populous region is fed by dozens of mountain tributaries to the north, but many have burst their banks following
record rains and glacier melt.Torrents of water are expected to reach Sindh in the next few days, adding misery to the millions already
affected by the floods.Right now, Indus is in high flood,& said Aziz Soomro, the supervisor of Sukkur Barrage, a massive colonial-era
construction that regulates the river&s flow and redirects water to a vast system of canals.Pakistan needs financial help to deal with the
floods, Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari told Reuters on Sunday.He hoped financial institutions such as the IMF would take the
economic fallout into account.I haven''t seen destruction of this scale, I find it very difficult to put into words … it is overwhelming,&
Bhutto-Zardari said, adding many crops that provided much of the population&s livelihoods had been wiped out.Obviously this will have an
effect on the overall economic situation,& he said.The IMF board will decide this week on whether to release $1.2 billion as part of the
seventh and eighth tranches of Pakistan&s bailout programme, which it entered in 2019.Going forward, I would expect not only the IMF, but
the international community and international agencies to truly grasp the level of devastation,& he said.The post Huge relief operation
underway as Pakistan buckles under ongoing floods first appeared on Ariana News.
