The first major UN food convoy headed for Baghdad yesterday as aid agencies warned that poor security was now seriously hampering their work.
The World Food Programme convoy of 50 trucks, carrying 1 400 tons of wheat flour, drove out from Jordan and was due to reach the capital last night. WFP officials have warned that most Iraqis have only enough food left to last them two weeks.
”Our estimate is that as early as the beginning of May problems will start to occur,” said Maarten Roest, a WFP spokesperson in Amman.
But security concerns mean that the flour will have to be stockpiled in warehouses as the capital is still not safe enough to allow food parcels to be handed out.
In Baghdad WFP staff are trying to find the 9 000 Iraqis who worked with the former regime to distribute the government’s monthly rations, on which more than half the population relied.
Each district in the city has warehouses and established shops where food rations were handed out and which could form the basis for a new aid distribution network.
Despite aid agencies’ usual reluctance to work with the military, Roest said the drivers of the convoy may have agreed to accept a US military escort for the journey to Baghdad. ”Our mission is delivering humanitarian aid,” he said.
Another 30 UN aid workers who were trying to travel to the Kurdish regions of northern Iraq have been held up at Larnaca, in Cyprus, because the US military refused to give their flight security clearance.
”It is too long a process to return to an area where direct conflict did not occur,” said Veronique Taveau, who is a spokesperson for the UN Office of the Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq. Other aid agencies have also complained that the US military is not giving them permission to bring flights into Iraq because of continued instability.
Save the Children has been trying to fly a plane into Irbil, in the Kurdish region, with enough medical supplies to treat 40 000 people as well as emergency food stocks. But US military officials have refused permission for aid flights.
”The doctors we are trying to help in Mosul have been struggling against the odds for weeks to continue saving lives, but now the help we have promised them is being endlessly delayed,” said Rob MacGillivray, the group’s emergency programme manager.
In the Kurdish regions in northern Iraq it has been easier to deliver food by road. A convoy of 100 WFP trucks crossed from Turkey on Thursday bringing food.
Since the first convoy arrived in the north two weeks ago around 10 000 tons of wheat flour has been distributed, enough to feed around 600 000 people for a month.
The British aid agency Oxfam, which is working in southern Iraq, has warned that access to clean water may be a more serious problem in the short term than food shortages. ”At the moment it is looking much more urgent than food,” said Zahra Akkerhuys, a spokesperson for Oxfam in Amman.
Its engineers have found that water treatment plants in the south and even a chlorine factory in the town of Zubayr have been badly looted.
”Even the very basic parts have been stolen, which means the plants don’t work. We know the situation will get worse in the next two months because the temperature is going to start rising,” said Akkerhuys.
An Ilyushin-7 transport aircraft was due to fly today to Kuwait for Oxfam bringing 17 tons of sanitation and water treatment equipment, including pumps and spare parts, as well as three four-wheel drive vehicles.
Water deliveries are already being trucked into the south, but much more is needed. ”The aid is getting there but it is the tip of the iceberg,” said Akkerhuys.
But security concerns in the south mean that Oxfam’s engineers have been unable even to reach Basra, Iraq’s second largest city, which is less than 30 miles from the border with Kuwait.
”All we can do is progress as and when we can. It is a very finely balanced situation,” she said. Looters tried to burn the chlorine factory in Zubayr and local Iraqi officials at the plant, which is vital for water treatment in the south, have said there is now only enough chlorine for another 15 days.
For the first time in more than 20 years an aid convoy crossed into Iraq from Iran yesterday, bringing more than 100 000 litres of drinking water supplied by Unicef. The trucks were heading for Faw, on the southern coast close to Basra.
Iran has kept its border closed since the latest conflict began, fearing a wave of refugees. – Guardian Unlimited Â