• Entire villages washed away in rainforest-cloaked Aceh Tamiang region
• Nearly 900 others killed as natural disasters also strike Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam

BANDA ACEH: Ruinous floods and landslides have killed more than 900 people on Indonesia’s island of Sumatra, the country’s disaster management agency said Saturday, with fears that starvation could send the toll even higher.

A chain of tropical storms and monsoonal rains has pummelled Southeast and South Asia, triggering landslides and flash floods from the Sumatran rainforest to the highland plantations of Sri Lanka.

Nearly 900 others have been killed in natural disasters unfolding across Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam over the past week.

Disaster-hit Sri Lanka has unveiled a major compensation package to rebuild homes damaged by a deadly cyclone, even as the island prepared on Saturday for further landslides and flooding.

The government has confirmed 607 deaths, with another 214 people missing and feared dead, in what President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has called the country’s most challenging natural disaster.

More than two million people — nearly 10 percent of the population — have been affected.

In Indonesia’s provinces of Aceh and North Sumatra, floods have swept away roads, smothered houses in silt, and cut off supplies.

Aceh governor Muzakir Manaf said response teams were still searching for bodies in “waist-deep” mud.

Entire villages washed away in rainforest-cloaked Aceh Tamiang region

However, starvation was one of the gravest threats now hanging over remote and inaccessible villages.

“Many people need basic necessities. Many areas remain untouched in the remote areas of Aceh,” he told reporters. “People are not dying from the flood, but from starvation. That’s how it is.”

Entire villages had been washed away in the rainforest-cloaked Aceh Tamiang region, Muzakir said. “The Aceh Tamiang region is completely destroyed, from the top to the bottom, down to the roads and down to the sea. “Many villages and sub-districts are now just names,” he said.

Aceh Tamiang flood victim Fachrul Rozi said he had spent the past week crammed into an old shop building with others who had fled the rising waters.

“We ate whatever was available, helping each other with the little supplies each resident had brought,” he said. “We slept crammed together.”

Aceh resident Munawar Liza Zainal said he felt “betrayed” by the Indonesian government, which has so far shrugged off pressure to declare a national disaster.

“This is an extraordinary disaster that must be faced with extraordinary measures,” he said, echoing frustrations voiced by other flood victims.

“If national disaster status is only declared later, what’s the point?” Declaring a national disaster would free up resources and help government agencies coordinate their response.

Indonesia’s government this week insisted it could handle the fallout.

The scale of devastation has only just become clear in other parts of Sumatra as engorged rivers shrink and floodwaters recede.

Photos showed muddy villagers salvaging silt-encrusted furniture from flooded houses in Aek Ngadol, North Sumatra.

Humanitarian groups worry that the scale of the calamity could be unprecedented, even for a nation prone to natural disasters.

Indonesia’s death toll rose to 908 on Saturday, according to the disaster management agency, with 410 people missing.

Thailand has reported 276 deaths and Malaysia two, while at least two people were killed in Vietnam after heavy rains triggered a series of landslides.

Seasonal monsoon rains are a feature of life in Southeast Asia, flooding rice fields and nourishing the growth of other key crops.

However, climate change is making the phenomenon more erratic, unpredictable and deadly throughout the region.

Published in Dawn, December 7th, 2025