"The wells are full of mud," said Nawroz, a resident of Dasht-e Fulool in Baghlan province, one of the hardest hit by flash flooding in early May.
Families in the village collect gallons of dirty water from the stream near where several lonely walls jut out like crooked teeth from the barren dirt where homes used to be.
"We pour the filthy water into buckets and let it sit for a while so the dirt settles to the bottom and then we use it. Other than that, we don't have drinking water," the 46-year-old told AFP.
After unusually heavy spring rainfalls unleashed torrents of muddy water that swept away loved ones and livelihoods across multiple Afghan provinces last month, it is clean water that the hardest hit communities need now, residents and UN agencies said.
At least 480 people were killed by flash floods across Afghanistan's north and west, according to World Health Organization (WHO) figures from May 25, with some 60,000 people impacted in three northeastern provinces alone.
The floods damaged or destroyed thousands of houses, submerged thousands of hectares of land, and killed thousands of livestock, according to UN agencies and Taliban authorities.
Water sources were not spared.
"The most serious problems are the lack of water and shelter," Sher Agha Shahrani, a resident of Fulool village in Burka, told AFP over the phone.
He said the village had a reservoir and a network of water pipes, "but all have been washed away and destroyed by the floods".
"So far, we haven't seen any practical step toward a permanent solution for this problem," he added.
An official with the Baghlan Directorate of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, Waseem Wahedi, recently told local news outlet Salam Watandar that 14 water supply networks and some 300 water sources had been damaged or destroyed in the province.
The lack of water in flood-hit areas exacerbates a pervasive problem in the country ravaged by four decades of war and struggling with economic, humanitarian and climate crises, where nearly 80 percent of the more than 40 million inhabitants do not have adequate access to clean water, according to the UN.
- Hygiene, contamination, disease risks -
Water access is "the biggest part of the emergency at the moment", said Daniel Timme of the UN children's agency UNICEF, which has been trucking in 500,000 litres of water per day to the worst affected areas.
Need for emergency water provision is common after natural disasters, Timme noted, adding that the concern in the flooding aftermath is contamination.
"The problem in the flooding disaster is that you have not only the physical damage, but also the contamination of existing wells," he told AFP.
While efforts are underway to clear livestock carcasses, UN agencies warn of threats of disease.
"The hygiene situation is really disastrous," said Timme, after visiting Baghlan.
"Everything is covered with mud and waste and decomposing animals."
Forty-five-year-old Barakatullah from Dasht-e Fulool said children were already suffering from diarrhoea, which when acute can turn deadly for young children.
"If no attention is paid to the drinking water problem, it's possible there will be another crisis and disease will spread," he told AFP.
"There are a lot of dead animals here, the smell is unbearable."
The WHO warned that clean water "remains a critical need" in a report for May 24-29, adding that the shortage could worsen the spread of waterborne diseases and strain "the already overwhelmed healthcare infrastructure".
Rahim Abdul Jamil, a teacher in the village of Gul Dara Shikha in flood-hit Ghor province, said many children in his area had fallen ill in the weeks since the disaster.
"The lack of drinking water is causing people a lot of problems," he told AFP.
"Already my child and those of the neighbours are sick" with fever and breathing problems, he said.
The UNICEF tankers bring water, he added, but "sometimes it's enough and sometimes it's not".
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