PINGLA HARIDAL: Noor Haider Shah had a comfortable life by Kashmiri standards. A good job with the Indian state government, a nice home, a happy family. Now his daughters, hair matted with dirt, are begging for food and scavenging scraps from the rubble of their village.

“I never thought I would live to see the day my daughters became beggars,” the 45-year-old civil servant with dyed red hair said at Pingla Haridal, a remote mountain hamlet in a valley 4 km from Pakistani Kashmir. “It is a father’s misfortune.”

Nearby, eight-year-old Shiraz Bibi, one of his six daughters, munches on a dust-covered scrap of dry bread found in the rubble.

Their house destroyed, they have been living in the open, the night air already chilly with winter around the corner, since Saturday’s earthquake that killed tens of thousands in Pakistan and India.

No help has come, still.

To the more than 1,000 people in this village, northwest of occupied Kashmir’s main city, Srinagar, it seems they have been forgotten.

Many of the residents are lying or sitting injured outside their razed homes.

“The world has forgotten we exist,” said Fiza Hussain, a 20-year-old father of two. “You are the first people here asking about us besides some soldiers who pulled out bodies on the first day,” he told Reuters. “We want people to remember we exist.”

Even at the best of times, Pingla Haridal is one of the most isolated places in occupied Kashmir. Srinagar, 210 km away along a mountain road, is the nearest big town.

Of course Azad Kashmir is a walk away, but the world’s most heavily militarised frontier lies in between.

More than 26 people have died in the village. It is dotted with shallow graves covered by pieces of tin sheet to stop the bodies from being uncovered by rain.

Four days after the quake struck, the failure to deliver almost any help is fuelling anger and violence.

Mobs of exhausted men are stopping cars and jeeps with sticks and rowing of stones, demanding help for their communities.—Reuters

SRINAGAR: Indian troops on Wednesday were fighting a race against time to deliver aid to thousands of earthquake survivors as rain and snow played havoc with the relief efforts in Kashmir, officials said.

Rescuers and soldiers scoured the devastated mountainous region to deliver tents, food, medicines and blankets as the full extent of the damage to homes in the area emerged and forecasters warned of more rain.

An army spokesman, meanwhile, said six soldiers carrying relief aid were killed in a landslide in the devastated Kashmiri district of Tangdhar.

“The six were carrying relief when they were killed,” Colonel K. Sehgal told AFP.

Indian Kashmir’s Chief Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed said Saturday’s 7.6-magnitude quake had razed 40,720 homes in two districts of the state.

Rescuers had yet to reach 10 outlying villages, Sayeed told a news conference, adding that 73,450 houses, mostly made of timber and mud, were also partially damaged.

“Our engineers will assess the partially damaged homes to see if they are habitable or not,” he said.

“The damage is more in Uri where 95 villages comprising of 120,000 inhabitants have been affected,” he said, adding that in Tangdhar, 23,000 people in 42 villages have been hit.—AFP

HONG KONG: Those who survived the deadly earthquake in South Asia are at risk of severe mental trauma from the horrors they experienced and may not recover enough to rebuild their lives, experts say.

“Always with these situations, there is the potential for large numbers of adults and children to remain dysfunctional for large periods of time,” said Prof Ian Hickie from Australia’s Brain and Mind Research Institute.

Hickie said there was concerns about thousands of children orphaned by Saturday’s earthquake, which killed as many as 40,000 people in Pakistan and left an estimated 2.5 million homeless.

“Children have survived to find they have no parents or they have no community left to help them,” he said, adding that feeling abandoned could harm their long-term mental development.

For many families left destitute, such trauma has been delayed as they focused on finding enough food and proper shelter to survive the freezing temperatures and wet weather.

But the memories of death and destruction could return to haunt them in coming days and weeks.

A range of emotions could hit them, said Sandy McFarlane professor of psychiatry at the University of Adelaide in Australia, who has studied trauma from natural disasters.

“The triggers for this trauma are varied. Any sort of rumbling, like a truck driving down the street, will trigger terrifying flashbacks,” he said.

McFarlane cited numbness from shock, and uncontrollable crying or fits of anger, that could eventually lead to severe depression and mental breakdown, as they relived their experiences or realised the magnitude of their losses.

“Getting on trains or other transport, the vibrations could be a problem for them. It’s these ongoing triggers that bring back the trauma,” he said.

“Or any kind of screams. Once an earthquake ceases, there is deadly silence, because the noise from the environment is gone. But then the screaming and the crying starts. So any sort of scream in the future could trigger trauma.”

Some, particularly in conflict-ridden Kashmir, are more vulnerable than survivors of other natural disasters because they were living in poverty before the earthquake, McFarlane said.

“These communities are much more fragile. Many were already struggling for their daily survival so their ability to cope mentally is diminished.”

—AFP