PESHAWAR, June 29: The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) will close eight Afghan refugee camps in the tribal areas and near Peshawar by the end of August, officials said.

"All the assistance for the inhabitants of the eight new refugee camps will be stopped after August 31," a UN official said here on Tuesday. He said that there would be no food, water, health and education for the refugees living in the eight camps near the Afghan border.

The stoppage of assistance would affect more than 65,000 people (10,935 families), who had escaped from their country after the US-led war on terror in Afghanistan to oust the Taliban government.

Out of these eight camps, three are in the Bajaur tribal region, four in the Kurram region and one camp is in Shamshatoo near Peshawar. An official in the Commissionerate for Afghan Refugees said that evacuation notices had been served on the inhabitants of the camps in Shamshatoo and Bajaur Agency a few days back, while the refugees in the Kurram region got notices on Tuesday.

The UNHCR chief, Ruud Lubbers, who visited Islamabad in April, announced that all the "new" camps near the Afghan border would be closed by September. The high commissioner, citing reasons for the closure of the new camps along the Afghan border, said that the forces opposing the government in Kabul could find sanctuary in the border camps.

The Afghan government also lodged a complaint that Al Qaeda and Taliban militants, along with their local supporters, were using the refugee camps as a launching pad against the government forces inside Afghanistan.

The UN agency and its partners are feeding only 65,000 refugees in Pakistan while assistance for other Afghans was suspended in 1995 who became an additional burden on the local population and resources.

Officials said that the government had no plan to relocate the residents of the eight camps to any other place. "The government has asked the refugees to start packing," an official said.

He said that those refugees who had been asked to leave the troubled South Waziristan region were going back to their country. Officials at the Commissionerate for Afghan Refugees said that since March 2004, about 130,086 people had left the NWFP for Afghanistan.

Pakistan, which still hosts around two million Afghan refugees, had planned to start a census of the refugees from September while under the tripartite agreement, all the refugees are to return to their country by the year 2005.