Afghanistan mudslide: 'it was so fast that people didn't have a chance' --- One minute there was a hill behind his picturesque village, and the next Ataullah watched helplessly as tonnes of mud split away and tumbled down towards the home where his children were playing and his wife was preparing lunch. -- He never saw them again, nor his parents, seven of the hundreds killed in a mudslide that obliterated half of Aab Barik village in Afghanistan's remote north on Friday. It was the worst natural disaster there in nearly two decades, killing more people than all the flooding, earthquakes, avalanches and other catastrophes of last year put together. -- "The mud was jumping down the mountain – it was terrifying. And when I rushed back and saw my house was entirely gone, I couldn't bear to go close," he said. Ataullah, who is 25 and like many Afghans uses only one name, had forced himself to return the next morning. Red-eyed with grief he set to work on metres of mud with a simple shovel, like everyone else searching for their dead in an impoverished area an hour's drive from the nearest road. -- He got an hour's help from a mini-excavator sent by the government but it unearthed only beams and blankets – no trace of any people swept away in the sudden cataclysm. -- "The mud came down like a knife," said Abdul Khalleeq, who watched in horror from his home further up the hill as more than two dozen of his relatives were buried alive. "It was so fast that people down there didn't have a chance." -- The torrent hit about 20 minutes after a much smaller first landslide, so in addition to people in homes and mosques, it swept away dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people who had rushed to help salvage homes and rescue people trapped. -- The bigger collapse affected almost half of the steep hill facing the village. Loosened by days of torrential rain, a huge section dozens of metres wide broke away, cutting a gaping brown cliff into the side of the rolling green landscape and sending tonnes of earth and stone crashing down on unsuspecting people below. -- Among those wiped out were an entire wedding party, with bride, groom, both sets of parents and all their relatives and friends lost under the new gash of soil. None of their bodies have been found. - More, Emma Graham-Harrison, Guardian, at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/04/afghanistan-mudslide-hundreds-killed-disaster