With villages swept away and Pakistan’s largest city assailed by monsoon floods, climate change has brought a catastrophic new normal to the country.
The funeral for Abdul Samad’s mother in Beshonai, a village in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa region of Pakistan, on Monday.
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By Zia ur-Rehman and Elian PeltierVisuals by Asim Hafeez
Zia ur-Rehman and Asim Hafeez reported from Beshonai, in northern Pakistan, and Elian Peltier from Islamabad, the country’s capital.
Aug. 19, 2025
Walking to his local mosque in northern Pakistan, Abdul Samad cast worried looks at a stream he had never seen so agitated and choked with debris. When he stepped outside again 10 minutes later, the mountain village that was his lifelong home had been nearly erased.
Swollen by pummeling rainfall, the stream had turned into a roaring torrent that swept mud, rocks and fallen trees through the village of Beshonai on Friday, crushing, burying or washing away everything in its path. Out of 210 homes, only 25 remain standing, according to local officials.
“Houses, fields of maize, everything was gone. All I saw were boulders upon boulders,” said Mr. Samad, an imam in his mid 40s. His wife and daughter were swept away with the family home and killed. His mother’s body was not found until Monday, three miles downstream.
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The Indus River, swollen far beyond its banks, near the Swabi district of the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province.
The monsoon season, once revered as a source of life and renewal, has brought death and devastation across large parts of Pakistan, a South Asian nation of 250 million people. Monsoons have killed more than 700 people nationwide since the season began in late June. This increasingly frequent pattern is forcing Pakistan to reckon with a new reality: Destruction brought by extreme weather has become the norm, not the exception.
In northern Pakistan, floods cascaded down mountain slopes last week, eradicating entire villages. Boulders and pine trees smashed through houses. Mud swallowed whole families.
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Deadly Flash Floods Lash Northern Pakistan
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Torrential rains continued pouring on dozens of villages in northern Pakistan, triggering flash floods that have wiped out houses and killed hundreds.
ImageA man stands near a destroyed building.
A view of the destruction caused by monsoon flooding in Beshonai on Tuesday.
“What we were used to in Pakistan has changed, and for now it is too much,” said Dr. Maryam Ibrahim, an environmental expert and professor of environmental studies at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. “This phenomenon of streams or rivers gradually swelling, in a slow process that would give time for people to evacuate, is gone.”
Mr. Samad said he survived only because the mosque had been built on higher ground. His son and his nephew were pulled to safety by neighbors.
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A stream in the village of Beshonai, seen here Tuesday, turned into a roaring torrent that swept mud, rocks and fallen trees through the village last week.
As he led mourning prayers on Monday and paid a last tribute to his mother, he implored God to have mercy on the community.
Beshonai, in Buner district, is one of dozens of northern villages devastated by rains so heavy and sudden that flash flooding caught officials and communities off guard.
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Men wearing tunics and masks use tools to dig through piles of mud.
Residents and disaster recovery workers dug through mud at a damaged house in the village of Qadir Nagar on Tuesday.
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Muslim men at prayer stand in a row, their eyes closed and their arms clasped in front of them.
Imam Abdul Samad leading prayers at a service on Monday.
The highest toll has been recorded in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a province bordering Afghanistan, where flooding has killed at least 365 people since last Thursday. Buner district suffered the worst devastation, with at least 225 confirmed deaths.
Pakistan’s troubles redoubled on Tuesday, as floodwaters flowed southward, inundating more areas. The port city of Karachi, the country’s economic hub with more than 20 million people, was paralyzed, as residents waded through water that was shoulder-deep in some streets.
The floods are the most devastating Pakistan has endured since 2022, when record monsoon rains killed 1,700 people and submerged a third of the country.
Map locates Beshonai in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan.
Beshonai
Kabul
AFGHANISTAN
KHYBER
PAKHTUNKHWA
Quetta
PAKISTAN
IRAN
INDIA
Karachi
Arabian Sea
200 MILES
By The New York Times
Since then, Pakistan’s successive governments have campaigned for better access to international climate finance, as the country contributes less than 1 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions but is one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change. The World Bank has estimated that Pakistan needs $43 billion on average every year until 2030 to mitigate the effects of global warming.
But in recent days, the country’s authorities have also faced growing criticism for not doing enough to save lives. Critics say they have let deforestation go unchecked, worsening the impact of floods, and have failed to create effective early warning systems.
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Flooded streets in the bazaar in Pacha Kalay, in the hard-hit Buner district, on Tuesday.
Aisha Khan, the executive director at the Civil Society Coalition for Climate Change, a Pakistani nonprofit, said the worsening floods could have severe social and political consequences.
“If extreme weather keeps being an annual event, if it keeps hitting people so strongly and trapping them in a circle of perpetual poverty and misery, there will be upheaval,” she said.
Pakistan’s disaster management officials said they sent all the early warnings they could, including through a national app and communications to provincial authorities. But many areas have scant access to the internet, and in Beshonai and other places, people said the warnings from local mosques and police stations came late.
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A man rides a motorcycle through flood water.
A motorcyclist riding through floodwaters in Qadir Nagar.
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A man standing in the doorway of a storefront dumps mud from a wheelbarrow. Another man uses an implement to dig the mud out.
Taking mud out of the office of a travel agency in the Pacha Kalay bazaar.
Officials also said that nothing could have prepared the country for what was unleashed on villages like Beshonai.
Watching a video of a cascade of mud devastating a northern village, Muhammad Idriss, an official at the national disaster management agency, asked, “What can the government do against this?”
At the agency’s operation center in Islamabad, the capital, on Tuesday, dozens of weather analysts and officials raced to assess the latest data and issue warnings of more rainfall. Surrounding them in a huge octagonal room, screens displaying videos and maps showed a country assailed by extreme weather — not only floods, but also extreme heat and wildfires.
A week ago, Beshonai, which has become a symbol of Pakistan’s suffering, had 4,000 people, many of them relying on money sent by relatives working abroad.
The few businesses that sustained the other residents are gone.
“This was once a bustling village,” said Shiraz Ali, a college student who was helping with rescue operations on Monday.
“How can anyone be normal in a place like this?”
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A mud-stained clock on a wall.
A clock in a flood-damaged house in Beshonai.
Elian Peltier is an international correspondent for The Times, covering Afghanistan and Pakistan.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/worl ... e9677ea768
