Pakistan flood crisis ‘daunting’ warns UN

PAKISTAN battled to contain flooding in its rich agricultural south yesterday, evacuating half a million people from risk areas as the UN warned of the “daunting” scale of the crisis.

The nearly two-week-old disaster has affected 4.5 million across the largely impoverished country hard hit by Taliban-linked violence, after floods washed away entire villages and killed at least 1,600, according to UN estimates.

Authorities in the densely populated southern province of Sindh were busy evacuating villagers, warning that major floods in the next 48 hours threatened hundreds of communities in the fertile basin along the swollen Indus river.