ISLAMABAD: Several leading British aid agencies on Wednesday called for an immediate pause to the bombing in Afghanistan to allow for the urgent delivery of humanitarian aid before winter sets in next month. Oxfam International, Christian Aid and the charity Islamic Relief, said that the US attacks were making it impossible to distribute relief because labourers and truckers were afraid to unload food, or to stay overnight in Afghanistan.

On Wednesday, Oxfam confirmed the first starvation deaths inside Afghanistan since the military campaign began. John Fairhurst, Oxfam’s Afghanistan director, said that six people had died in the village of Jalai, in the northern province of Badghis. They included two old women and an old man, as well as three children aged under three. “In other places we are seeing starving people become so weak they eventually die from diarrhoea,” he said. “In many places people are eating wild plants. In some areas even the wild plants have run out.”

Aid distribution inside Afghanistan worsened two days ago when a US missile exploded close to a UN World Food Programme depot in Kabul, the agencies said. Afghan aid workers had been loading 250 tonnes of food into a convoy destined for Hazarajat, central Afghanistan. The convoy would have been the first since Sept 11 into Hazarajat. “The food never made it,” Nick Roseveare, an Oxfam spokesman, said. The agencies on Wednesday called on all sides in the conflict to suspend military action. There would be a “huge loss of life and unspeakable suffering through the winter” if the bombing continued, Oxfam said.

The UN estimates that at least 5.5 million Afghans are short of food, while two million people do not have enough food to last the winter. Half a million will be cut off when snows sweep into Afghanistan by mid-November. The UN has only 9,000 tonnes of food left inside the country - two weeks’ supply. The agencies said that millions of people were on the move in Afghanistan, with an exodus from cities to rural areas. But in other cases entire villages had decided to migrate after running out of food.

Dominic Nutt, of Christian Aid, said that the aid distribution system inside Afghanistan had virtually collapsed, with most local staff too afraid to work after American bombs hit the Red Cross building in Kabul two days ago. “There should be justice for the people of America. But the scales of justice cannot be balanced by the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Afghans,” he added.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.