Libya Flood Survivors Endure Unbearable Wait for Missing Relatives

This picture taken on September 19, 2023 shows a view of mud-covered furniture in the house of Mohamed Badr, 23, a survivor of the flooding who lost his brother and whose house was engulfed with mud in the recent deadly flash floods in Libya's eastern city of Derna. (AFP)
This picture taken on September 19, 2023 shows a view of mud-covered furniture in the house of Mohamed Badr, 23, a survivor of the flooding who lost his brother and whose house was engulfed with mud in the recent deadly flash floods in Libya's eastern city of Derna. (AFP)
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Libya Flood Survivors Endure Unbearable Wait for Missing Relatives

This picture taken on September 19, 2023 shows a view of mud-covered furniture in the house of Mohamed Badr, 23, a survivor of the flooding who lost his brother and whose house was engulfed with mud in the recent deadly flash floods in Libya's eastern city of Derna. (AFP)
This picture taken on September 19, 2023 shows a view of mud-covered furniture in the house of Mohamed Badr, 23, a survivor of the flooding who lost his brother and whose house was engulfed with mud in the recent deadly flash floods in Libya's eastern city of Derna. (AFP)

In Libya's flood-hit city of Derna, the Mediterranean Sea breeze mixes with the nauseating stench of human remains buried under the mud-caked rubble.

Ten days after a tsunami-scale flash flood ripped through the coastal city, razing entire neighborhoods, many of the traumatized survivors are still waiting to learn the fate of missing relatives.

Few of them have any hope of seeing their loved ones alive.

Bodies are still trapped inside shattered buildings and below the mountains of mud now turning into choking dust, as emergency response crews keep up their grim search.

Untold numbers of people were swept away by the raging waters and into the sea when two upstream dams burst late at night after Storm Daniel's torrential rains lashed the area on September 10.

Hundreds of bodies have since washed back onto the shores.

The official death toll stands at more than 3,300 -- but the eventual count is expected to be far higher, with international aid groups giving estimates of up to 10,000 people missing.

Entire families have vanished, said Derna resident Mohamad Badr as he was clearing his house of mud and trying to salvage what furniture and household items he could.

"The Bouzid family, the Fachiani family, the Khalidi family, these are entire families," the 23-year-old man told AFP, his hands and clothes stained with mud.

"There is no one left."

'Neighbors screamed'

On the flat roof of his house, he and five other workers have placed sofas, cushions, curtains, clothes, an exercise treadmill and electrical equipment.

"God knows if they still work," Badr said.

Emotion overtook him when he recounted how he survived the flood night that brought him "more than one nightmare".

"I heard a lot of screaming," he said. "It was neighbors who screamed until they died."

"It was dark and there was no one" to help them, he said.

When the muddy waters came crashing into the family home, Badr clung to an air conditioner fixed just below the ceiling.

Very quickly he could barely keep his head above water, and then the A/C unit broke off the wall.

Badr was able to cling onto a floating couch for the next few hours, until the waters gradually receded.

"My brother died after bleeding for hours from an arm injury," said Badr.

His parents, three children and sister-in-law survived, but he has had no news of his uncles and their families.

Thirty-two of his relatives are missing after their building was reduced to rubble that remains inaccessible.

"Maybe their bodies were found and no one was able to identify them," said Badr.

Mass graves

In the first days after the disaster, rescue teams and volunteers hastily buried hundreds of unidentified bodies in mass graves.

DNA samples were taken in the hopes they could be identified later, authorities said.

Elsewhere in the shattered city, Mahmud Erqiq, 50, has been offering drinking water and refreshments to the rescue workers.

With misty eyes, he also listed the names of neighboring families of whom he has had no news.

"The Karaz family, the Bou Chatila family, the Ghariani family, the Snidel family, the Tashani family..."

The day after the floods, he said, "I recovered 20 bodies in my neighborhood".

Erqiq's apartment, located on an upper floor, was spared, but he lost the metal workshop that was his livelihood.

Standing nearby was Miloud Boussertia, still visibly in shock after losing 25 family members.

"Our building collapsed. There were 25 people inside and they all died," said the 40-year-old who happened to be away from home when the disaster struck.

Boussertia said he lost "up to 70" members of his extended family in the city.

He has stuck close to the rescue teams. "As soon as they find a body, we come and open the body bag," he said.

But even this no longer brings certainty, added Boussertia, because at this stage often "the features are no longer recognizable".



Scotland Awaits Famous Son as Trump Visits Mother’s Homeland 

A general view of the Trump Turnberry hotel and golf resort in Turnberry, on the west coast of Scotland, on July 21, 2025. (AFP)
A general view of the Trump Turnberry hotel and golf resort in Turnberry, on the west coast of Scotland, on July 21, 2025. (AFP)
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Scotland Awaits Famous Son as Trump Visits Mother’s Homeland 

A general view of the Trump Turnberry hotel and golf resort in Turnberry, on the west coast of Scotland, on July 21, 2025. (AFP)
A general view of the Trump Turnberry hotel and golf resort in Turnberry, on the west coast of Scotland, on July 21, 2025. (AFP)

Donald Trump will fly into Scotland on Friday for a private visit to the land where his mother was born and spent her childhood on the remote Isle of Lewis.

"It's great to be home, this was the home of my mother," he said when he arrived on his last visit in 2023.

Born Mary Anne MacLeod, Trump's mum emigrated to the United States when she was 18. She then met and married Fred Trump, kickstarting the family's meteoric rise that has led their son, Donald, all the way to the White House.

During his visit the current US president, who is six months into his second term, plans to officially open his latest golf course in northeastern Aberdeen -- making him the owner of three such links in Scotland.

Although Donald Trump has talked openly about his father Fred -- a self-made millionaire and property developer whose own father emigrated from Germany -- he remains more discreet about his mother, who died in 2000 at the age of 88.

She was born in 1912 on Lewis, the largest island in the Outer Hebrides in northwest Scotland, and grew up in the small town of Tong.

Trump visited the humble family home in 2008, pausing for a photo in front of the two-storey house. He has cousins who still live in the house, which has been modernized since Mary Anne MacLeod's time but remains modest, standing just around 200 meters (650 feet) from the sea.

Its slate roof and grey walls are a world away from Trump's luxury Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, or his gold-adorned apartment in Trump Tower, New York.

According to the British press, which based its reports on local documents, Trump's grandfather was a fisherman.

MacLeod was the 10th and last child of the family, and her first language was Gaelic before she learnt English at school.

Life was tough on Lewis after World War I, which claimed the lives of many of the island's young men. Following in the footsteps of her older sister, and so many other Scots over the decades, she decided to emigrate to the United States.

MacLeod boarded the SS Transylvania from Glasgow in 1930, bound for New York.

- Pink Rolls-Royce -

On her immigration papers she wrote she was a "domestic" when asked about her profession. One of Trump's sisters recalled that MacLeod had worked as a nanny in a wealthy family.

But a few years later her life turned around when she reportedly met Fred Trump at an evening dance. They were married in 1936 in Manhattan's wealthy Upper East Side, and MacLeod became a US citizen in 1942.

As Fred Trump built and expanded his property empire in the city by constructing middle-class homes in districts such as Queens and Brooklyn, Mary Anne devoted herself to charitable works.

"Even in old age, rich and respected and with her hair arranged in a dynamic orange swirl, she would drive a rose-colored Rolls-Royce to collect coins from laundry machines in apartment blocks that belonged to the Trumps," the Times wrote this month.

Photos of her hobnobbing with New York high society show her with her blonde hair swept up in a bun, reminiscent of her son's distinctive side-swept coiffure.

She was "a great beauty", Donald Trump has gushed in one of his rare comments about his mother, adding she was also "one of the most honest and charitable people I have ever known".

And on X he has pointed to "great advice from my mother: 'Trust in God and be true to yourself'".

In 2018 then-British prime minister Theresa May presented Trump with his family tree tracing his Scottish ancestors.

Less than 20,000 people live on Lewis, and MacLeod is a common surname.

Residents tell how Mary Anne MacLeod regularly returned to her roots until her death, while one of the president's sisters won over the locals by making a large donation to a retirement home.

But Donald Trump has not impressed everyone in Scotland, and protests against his visit are planned on Saturday in Aberdeen and Edinburgh.

Earlier this year in April a banner fluttered from a shop in the port of Stornoway, the island's largest town. "Shame on you Donald John," it proclaimed.

Local authorities have asked for the banner to be taken down, but it is due to tour the island this summer with residents invited to sign it.