Anarchy threatens Afghan aid effort

Five thousand refugees have fled the bombing in Kandahar

United Nations humanitarian agencies in Afghanistan have said their efforts are being increasingly threatened by the breakdown of law and order in the country.

Antonio Donini, the UN's deputy humanitarian co-ordinator in Afghanistan, said the agencies' ability to operate was diminishing daily as their offices were attacked and looted.

The United Nations' ability to keep operating is diminishing day by day

un spokesman Antonio Donini

And it was becoming more and more difficult to find truckers willing to transport food to areas of the country where aid was needed, he said.

Meanwhile refugees have been flooding out of Afghanistan in terror at the continued US strikes.

Around 5,000 Afghans poured into the Pakistani border town of Chaman on Friday and Saturday after fleeing heavy bombing in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, an aid agency official said.

Another 10,000 are thought to be still stuck on the other side of the border.

The UN said the refugees came with no food and no belongings - and they described the situation as chaotic.

Looting

The UN is now receiving almost daily reports about their own and other aid agencies' offices being looted.

The UN is trying to reach internal refugees

Earlier this week armed men broke into a UN office in Kabul, beat up guards and took three vehicles.

The UN's mine clearance programme has lost 80 vehicles altogether.

Mr Donini said staff around the country had been told to put themselves first and not to risk their lives to protect equipment.

He would not be drawn on whether the UN and other aid agencies were being targeted because of anti-Western feeling, or simply because they had property worth stealing.

Urgent help

On Friday, UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) chief Ruud Lubbers warned that hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees would need urgent help in the coming weeks.

The Taleban's role in the looting is unclear

The UN is painting an increasingly bleak picture of the fate of the refugees.

Many Afghans, they say, have not got money for food, let alone the journey to the border.

Refugees speak of people fleeing to rural areas - leaving behind half-empty cities and adding to the million people the UN estimated were already displaced within Afghanistan before the crisis.

In Pakistan

But even inside Pakistan, refugees face a grim future.

The Pakistani Government is only allowing new refugee camps to be built in the border area, a remote and inhospitable region.

Aid agencies have pleaded with the government to be allowed to build camps elsewhere.

They say their work is frequently hampered by attacks on their staff in an area that is notoriously insecure.