KABUL, Dec 3: Factional fighting has prompted the United Nations to pull its international staff out of the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, a UN spokesman said on Monday, in the latest sign of worsening security in northern Afghanistan.

“We have observations of sporadic fighting and shooting in the city, we don’t have any information on who is fighting whom,” UN spokesman Khaled Mansour said at a news conference. “We have heard about factional fighting.”

The apparent outbreak of fighting between various Northern Alliance factions in Mazar-i-Sharif was the latest sign that long-held tensions within the grouping of warlords were beginning to show.

“The area around the city is very unstable,” Mansour said, adding that around three million civilians were dependent on aid provided by foreign agencies in the north of Afghanistan.

“We don’t have anyone in Mazar, our security officer left the city, I think yesterday,” he said.

Another UN official in Kabul said several concerns had prompted the pullout.

“There was a combination of looting, security threats to Western nationals and factional fighting. Several factions want control of the city,” the official said.

He said a similar situation existed in Jalalabad, on the road from Kabul to Peshawar. The UN has no expatriate staff in Jalalabad.

Four journalists, two from Reuters, were killed on the road from Kabul to Jalalabad on Nov 19 when armed men stopped their car and shot them. Four other journalists have been killed in two incidents in northern Afghanistan.

Mansour also said the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was concerned about reports of rising tension among the population in the NWFP.

The UNHCR is concerned about possible reprisals against ethnic Tajik and Uzbek refugees living in the mainly Pakhtoon area, following the killing of Taliban and foreign Al Qaeda fighters during a prison revolt.

An advance party of 40 French soldiers arrived at Mazar-i-Sharif airport, six kilmetres from the city, via Uzbekistan on Sunday to start operations to secure it for humanitarian aid deliveries.

Herve Fouilland, a force spokesman, said by telephone the soldiers had begun work with US sappers to clear mines and unexploded ordnance.—Reuters