Mass of Mud Slows Recovery Efforts in Afghanistan --- Hundreds Feared Dead After Landslides Triggered by Heavy Rains in Northeastern Region -- KABUL—Humanitarian workers said Saturday there is little hope of finding survivors among the hundreds of people who are still missing after devastating landslides buried part of a village in northeast Afghanistan. -- Heavy rainfall caused the mountain to slide over the village of Aab Barik in Badakhshan province on Friday, covering an area where some 300 families lived. A second landslide then swallowed hundreds of volunteers who rushed to their rescue, trapping them under 10 to 30 meters of jumbled earth. What is left of their homes is now hard to distinguish from the wall of mud that engulfed them. Most of the homes were made of mud bricks. -- The village's remote location made it difficult to deploy heavy machinery to the site of the mudslide before Saturday, when roads were cleared. The initial search effort was largely manual, with rescue workers removing the earth with shovels or with their hands. -- The scale of destruction is such that most humanitarian workers have all but given up hope of finding survivors in the areas worst-hit by the landslide. -- "They are very much leaving it as it is," said Aidan O'Leary, who heads the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Afghanistan. "The major focus at the moment is on the living—those who survived or who have been displaced." - An accurate death toll is hard to pin down. Government officials in Badakhshan initially estimated that as many as 2,500 people were missing. On Saturday, the central government said 400 people were confirmed dead. -- "I don't think people are going to be able to verify it one way or another," said Mr. O'Leary. -- "It's very difficult to give exact figures," added Sediq Sediqqi, the spokesman for Afghanistan's ministry of interior, who estimated there were 300 people still missing. -- Relief efforts are under way to assist the over 4,000 people displaced by the landslides. U.N. agencies, nongovernmental organizations, Afghan security forces and volunteers are delivering medical care, food, tents, blankets and other household supplies to the victims. -- "Unfortunately, for the people who are buried under the mud there is little chance of a miracle," says Claude Jibidar, who heads the Afghanistan mission of the World Food Program, a U.N. agency that is delivering biscuits, wheat and other food products to those displaced. -- "We are concentrating on the 700 households that have not been directly affected but whose inhabitants have been asked to leave," he said. -- This is also a priority for the International Organization for Migration, a U.N. affiliate that is helping with the rescue mission. "The question now is what to do with the people whose homes were destroyed or with those who will move because of fears another hillside will collapse," said Richard Danziger, who heads the IOM mission in Afghanistan. -- Some Afghan officials are still hopeful rescue workers will be able to extract survivors from the mud. -- "We don't think all those trapped under the mud are necessarily dead," said Tawab Ghurzang, a spokesman for the Independent Directorate of Local Governance, a central government agency that oversees local administrations. "We are doing our best to rescue as many as we can." - WSJ