At least 10 people, including several children, were killed by flash floods triggered by heavy rainfall in the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand, Taliban officials said Tuesday.

In Kandahar, the Taliban's disaster management office reported that three girls drowned in a sudden flood in the Shorandam area of the province's fifth district. A fourth child also died in the same area.

Meanwhile, in Helmand, a house collapsed in the Shahzadi area of Sangin district, killing two children, according to Hafiz Rasheed Helmandi, the Taliban's director of information and culture in the province.

In another incident, six people were injured when lightning struck a house in the Nawzad Rud area of Gereshk district, Helmandi said.

The latest fatalities add to the rising death toll from severe weather in Afghanistan. Last week, 21 people, including women and children, were killed in flash floods in the western province of Farah.

Heavy rains and extreme weather have increasingly devastated parts of Afghanistan in recent months, raising concerns over the country's preparedness for natural disasters.

The death toll from recent heavy rain and hail in three Afghan provinces has risen by 10 to 39, disaster management officials said on Wednesday.

Flash floods ripped through the western border province of Farah on Tuesday, washing away 21 people, while three more were killed when a hail storm caused their house to collapse.

"The flood was strong, it destroyed my farm, it destroyed everything... all the lands were flooded away," Nasrullah, a 50-year-old farmer, told AFP.

"In my sixty years of life I had never seen such wind, rain, and storm," said another farmer, Mohammad Ibrahim. He said the storm was so strong it "threw the fences 30-35 metres away" and blew away everything made of wood.

The district governor, Mohammed Sadeq Jehadmal, told AFP that 50 houses and 60 shops were damaged, while "between 2,000 up to 2,500 solar panels were destroyed".

Further east, six people were killed in Helmand province, including a child struck by lightning, and nine in Kandahar province.

Officials said the deadly downpours may however help improve long-term drought conditions in several provinces, including flood-hit Farah.

"It's constantly raining and snowing in most of the provinces, which has reduced the drought," said Abdullah Jan Sayeq, spokesman for Afghanistan's National Disaster Management Authority.

"This will enrich the water infrastructure. Agriculture will be improved and will have positive effects on livestock."

French authorities said Saturday that at least four people died in Cyclone Garance's devastating crossing of the Indian Ocean island of La Reunion.

The body of a man was found trapped under one of thousands of trees ripped up by winds of up to 230 kilometres (143 miles) per hour that tore across the island of some 900,000 people on Friday, authorities said giving the new toll.

The other victims, two women and a man, were carried away by flash floods, trapped in a mudslide or killed by an electrical fire sparked by the storm, according to the prefecture.

More than 180,000 people were left without electricity and more than 170,000 without water, authorities said.

The island's international airport was to reopen late Saturday.

The nearby tourist island of Mauritius shut its main airport on Wednesday, while Reunion shut down to flights on Thursday.