In the remote district of Dur Baba in eastern Afghanistan, construction worker Anar Gul watched ten days and ten nights of unbroken rain dissolve the stone-and-mud walls his community had always called home. His kitchen collapsed. His neighbour, Sayed Afsar Sadat, lost a large section of his house entirely. "Rains like this are coming heavier and earlier each year," Sadat said.

"They are destroying the roads and washing away our crops." Last week alone, flash floods across Afghanistan killed at least 31 people and left hundreds more unaccounted for — a toll that has become almost routine across the wider region. The same weather system stretched far beyond Afghanistan's borders. In Bangladesh, the port city of Chattogram recorded a staggering 412.

3 mm of rainfall in a single 24-hour period in early July — a national record. That deluge sent floodwaters surging through the Banshkhali district, where Jesmin Akter lived beside a canal with her six children. Overnight, the family lost their poultry, their paddy field, their repaired house, and every possession inside it: school bags, books, clothes, kitchen pots. Akter carried her children through chest-deep water to her mother's house, where the family sheltered in overcrowded conditions for more than a week.

India and Pakistan reported similarly erratic, sudden downpours in the same period, suggesting a pattern rather than a coincidence. Weeks later, Akter's family has returned to the ruins.