ACEH TAMIANG: Almost two weeks on from devastating floods, Muslim worshippers in Indonesia’s Sumatra who gathered at their local mosque on Friday for prayers were blocked from entering by a huge pile of thousands of uprooted trees.

The deadly torrential rains had inundated vast tracts of rainforest nearby, leaving residents of the Darul Mukhlisin mosque and Islamic boarding school to search elsewhere for places of worship that had been less damaged.

“We have no idea where all this wood came from,” said Angga, 37, from the nearby village of Tanjung Karang.

Before the disaster, the mosque bustled with worshippers — locals and students alike — attending daily and Friday prayers.

“Now it’s impossible to use. The mosque used to stand near a river,” said Angga. “But the river is gone — it’s turned into dead land.”

Village residents said the structure likely absorbed much of the impact of trees and logs carried by the torrents, preventing even greater destruction downstream.

The mosque is encircled by a massive heap of timber — a mix of uprooted trees and felled logs, likely from nearby forests.

By Friday, the death toll from one of northern Sumatra’s worst recent disasters — including in Aceh, where a tsunami wreaked havoc in 2004 — had reached 995 people, with 226 still missing and almost 890,000 displaced, according to the National Disaster Mitigation Agency.

Published in Dawn, December 13th, 2025