December 5, 2001	Wednesday	Ramazan 19, 1422

CHAMAN, Dec 4: Refugees trying to flee the relentless US bombing in Kandahar city on the back of a tractor became victims of American warplanes themselves, a witness said Tuesday.

“Yesterday I saw two tractors towing trailers which were lying on their side,” said Hamdullah, who arrived here from Kandahar on Tuesday.

“They had both been carrying families of refugees who were trying to get away from the city. There were no survivors.”

The victims were killed on a road just outside Kandahar city, said Hamdullah.

The road between Kandahar and the border crossing into Pakistan at Spin Boldak was now severely bomb-damaged and unpassable in several places, according to Hamdullah.

“The road between Spin Boldak and Kandahar is now heavily bombed at several places,” said. “We have had to take alternative routes to get here.

“The bombing of Kandahar and the area around the city have been very heavy in the last two days and nights,” he added.

Evidence of civilian casualties from the US bombing was also to be seen at this border town, as a father brought his 13-year-old son for surgery for leg injuries from shrapnel.

Aminullah said his son Saifullah had been working in the fields on the outskirts of Kandahar at daybreak when a large bomb exploded in open ground close by.

A piece of shrapnel whistled through the air and struck the youngster as he toiled alongside his father.

“He was wounded in both legs and needs surgery (at Chaman hospital),” said Aminullah.

The US bombing of Kandahar has reached new heights in recent days as Washington attempts to flush out the Taliban from their last remaining stronghold.

CHILDREN AT RISK: The lives of tens of thousands of Afghan children are at stake due to insecurity which is preventing food aid from reaching key areas of north and south Afghanistan, UNICEF chief Carol Bellamy warned on Tuesday.

“Our first priority is keeping women and children alive this winter,” Bellamy told a news conference at the end of a five-day visit to Pakistan and Afghanistan, which took her to refugee camps on the Afghan-Pakistan frontier and to Kabul.

Even before the Sept 11 attacks, Bellamy said, the situation regarding the country’s women and children had been “serious”.

“It was a country with severe war, a country with severe drought, a country with one of the worst under-five mortality rates in the world, and about the worst maternal mortality rate,” she said.

“Add to this the fact that people have been leaving their homes in the past few months, and are now displaced and subject to exposure, and to unexploded landmines and ordnance, and there is still insecurity — right now the challenge is survival, and it’s a very, very serious challenge.”

The security situation on the ground, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) executive director added, “continues to hinder access to displaced and others in need. The lives of tens of thousands of children are at stake.”

UNICEF’s Afghanistan director, Eric Laroche, said it was “regrettable that most of the kids in need are in the north of Afghanistan. It is probably the region which will be the most problematic for the weeks to come.”

Apart from Mazar-i-Sharif, the northern city of Kunduz was also facing security problems, Laroche added.

Some 500,000 children in the region were at risk, he said. “This is going to be the major concern.

“Kandahar (in the south), plus Mazar and Kunduz are going to be the places which pose the greatest problems in terms of logistics and security,” Laroche added.

According to World Food Programme (WFP) representative in Islamabad, Lindsay Davies, six main roads from five neighbouring countries are being used to get food aid into Afghanistan.

She told the news conference that factional fighting at the northern Afghanistan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, however, was severely curtailing the delivery of food, with WFP only being able to reach about 15,000 of the 250,000 facing starvation.

She stressed that the activities of WFP and aid organisations in other parts of northern Afghanistan were not being affected.—AFP