AMMAN, April 21: UN officials voiced disappointment on Monday at the “mysterious” refusal by US forces to grant them an air corridor to fly back much-needed international staff into Iraq, charging this was crippling aid effort.

UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq (UNHCI) Ramiro Lopes da Silva announced on April 12 in Jordan that 31 international UN staff would return to the northern governorates of Dohuk, Arbil and Sulaymaniyah two days later.

But the formal request he made on April 9, has fallen on deaf ears as coalition forces continue to deny international UN staff access to US-controlled northern Iraq, UNHCI spokesman in Amman David Wimhurst told AFP.

“Our team is on standby for more than a week, waiting to fly to the northern governorates. We’ve requested for more than a week an air corridor from the coalition forces and we did not get it,” Wimhurst said.

“We don’t know why because the situation on the ground is safe and there is no reason that we can ascertain why we’re being blocked access. It is a mystery,” he said.

UN international staff were pulled out of Iraq before the start of the war on March 20.

Wimhurst warned that the delay was “undermining the UN’s aid effort in Iraq” at a time when the first major UN food and medical convoys were making their way back to Baghdad from Jordan, a key regional humanitarian hub.

“As long as we are denied access it means that our staff can’t go back and start to really generate the support that we need. We are bringing in convoys of food and medicine and we need people there to receive them and to organise distributions,” Wimhurst said on the sidelines of an UN aid briefing.

Earlier a spokesman for the UN’s World Food Programme told the press the lack of security on the way to Baghdad and inside the Iraqi capital as well as the inability of WFP teams to secure warehouses was hurting the relief effort.

A 50-truck convoy carrying the first major food aid to Iraq arrived Sunday in Baghdad from Jordan, following a perilous four-day trip and reportedly coming under attack by unknown assailants on the road outside the Iraqi capital.

“A trip that should have taken only two days from Amman to Baghdad and back has taken four days due to the lack of security and the need to prepare a secured warehouse in the city,” WFP spokesman Khaled Mansur said.

“This convoy had only 1,400 tons. It is a lot of food enough for half the population of Baghdad but only for one day. We need to increase the amount of food we are bringing in from Jordan six times,” he said.

But Mansur insisted that this depended on “securing more warehouses, and ensuring that more mills and silos were functioning”, which in the long-term meant that UN staff needed to be deployed on the ground to organise this effort.

“Our real work should start in May when we start reactivating the food distribution system but a lot of work still needs to be done in the coming couple of weeks,” Mansur added.

The WFP has warned that most of Iraq’s 27.1 million population, who were largely depended on the UN-controlled oil-for-food programme, will run out of supplies by early May.

The return of international staff to northern Iraq, is the first step to dispatching more teams across the war-battered country and will help re-start the oil-for-food programme that has been suspended since the war broke out. —AFP