19 February 2005	Saturday	09 Muharram 1426

KABUL, Feb 18: Aid workers and officials sounded alarm bells over a looming humanitarian crisis in western Afghanistan on Friday saying they feared up to 1,000 children may have died during severe winter weather.

Cold, disease and malnutrition were the biggest killers and relief groups said they could not reach snowed-off areas to help after the poverty-stricken province of Ghor was hit by the harshest winter in a decade.

"Several hundred to a thousand would be a low estimate of the number of children that could have died," Paul Hicks, programme director western region Afghanistan for Catholic Relief Services said.

Mr Hicks said a 10-person team from his organization had hiked to 16 villages which had been snowed in and had found five children had died in each hamlet in Ghor's Sharack district.

"Eighty children died last month - most in the last 10 days or two weeks and what is getting them is the cold and lack of food, because they are already undernourished due to the drought," Mr Hicks said.

Mr Hicks said his team had reached only a fraction of the 250 villages in Sharack district alone and had not been able to get through to any others in neighbouring Tulak and Saghar districts.

Deputy Provincial Governor Ikramuddin Rezaie said that tens of thousands of people were facing a food shortage in remote villages. "It is a serious challenge - if not taken care of it will cause a human catastrophe," he said.

Mr Rezaie joined aid workers in calling for help in getting relief to some of the worst hit areas and said local authorities were struggling to clear roads and get relief to the isolated villages.

Geno Teofilo, communications manager for World Vision, which has seven clinics in the province, said 28,000 people were at risk in Ghor from the cold, disease and related health problems.

Because the roads have been blocked and daily efforts to clear routes are wiped away by heavy nightly snowfalls, food and other humanitarian aid is stranded with UN agencies in western Afghanistan's largest city of Herat.

"The most urgent need now is to get helicopters up to the most remote areas to determine how serious the situation is and provide relief where it's needed," Hicks said. -AFP