‘How much civilians are affected, we don’t know, and for that we need access,’ said Billi Bierling, spokeswoman for the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Pakistan.

Up to 250,000 people have fled the military’s major offensive, now into a third week in South Waziristan on the Afghan border, said Lt-Gen Nadeem Ahmad, chief of the state-run agency handling the displaced.

But no one knows the exact number of displaced people or those left in the conflict zone because foreign aid workers have not been able to enter the areas, the humanitarian workers say.

‘We... know that there are still civilians trapped in the areas where fighting’s taking place,’ said Sebastien Brack, spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Pakistan.

Normally about 300,000 people live in the part of South Waziristan which the military is seeking to clear of ‘terrorists’.

The district is part of a lawless tribal belt where US officials say Al Qaeda and their allies are plotting attacks on the West.

The military said that only one to two per cent of the population remained in the conflict zone.

‘These are people who have stayed back to take care of their properties,’ Ahmad told AFP.

But the ICRC warned that the numbers were likely higher because others could not afford the ‘extortionate’ rates charged by people offering transport for those fleeing.

‘The people who are left behind are often the poorest of the poor,’ he said.

Brack said the ICRC had tried unsuccessfully to gain access to South Waziristan to assist victims of fighting and to visit detainees, in accordance with its mandate.Although ICRC has no staff in the area, it has for months been sending medical supplies to assist eight clinics in Waziristan, Brack said.

Those clinics are each treating two to three patients injured in the fighting each day, he said, but ‘it’s getting more and more difficult to get medicine to them’.—AFP