Floodwaters swamp West and Central Africa regions

People walk through a flooded area in Nigeria. Pic/AP

Houses swept away to the very last brick. Inmates frantically fleeing the city’s main prison as its walls got washed away by water rising from an overflowing dam. Corpses of crocodiles and snakes floating among human bodies on main streets.

As torrential rains across Central and West Africa have unleashed the most catastrophic floods in decades, residents of Maiduguri, the capital of the fragile Nigerian state of Borno—which has been at the center of an Islamic extremists’ insurgency—said they have seen it all.

The floods, which have killed more than 1,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands, have worsened existing humanitarian crises in the countries which have been impacted the most: Chad, Nigeria, Mali and Niger. Over 4 million people have been affected by flooding so far this year in West Africa, a threefold increase from last year, according to the UN. With rescue operations still underway, it is impossible to give an accurate count of lives lost in the water. So far, at least 230 were reported dead in Nigeria, 265 in Niger, 487 in Chad and 55 in Mali.

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