GENEVA, April 4: International aid convoys have started to trickle into southern Iraq, where an estimated 1.5 million people without water are the top target for assistance, UN agencies and the Red Cross said on Friday.
“We have reports that something like 1.5 million people across southern Iraq are without water,” Iain Simpson, a spokesman for the World Health Organization (WHO) told journalists.
“When water is cut off and temperatures start to rise to 30 degrees or more as they are now in Iraq, the health outlook is very poor,” Simpson warned.
“Unless people have access to clean safe water, there will be outbreaks of disease, and diarrhoeal diseases will be the first to come,” he added.
On Friday, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) sent two trucks from Kuwait with water containers and medical supplies for the city of Basra.
The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) continued convoys it started about two days ago, with ten trucks leaving Kuwait with 370,000 litres of water for three towns in coalition-held territory in southern Iraq.
Simpson said the issue of humanitarian access to cities in Iraq was now a matter of concern at “very high levels” in all aid agencies.
“Access on a humanitarian basis to the civilian populations of any city is absolutely vital, and at the moment none of the UN agencies are able to gain access and work with the affected civilian populations,” Simpson said.
Simpson highlighted ongoing problems in Basra, and the capital Baghdad, where there were growing problems with water supplies.
Two weeks ago, the main pumping station supplying Basra’s more than 1.2 million inhabitants was damaged during fighting, cutting off water supplies.
Although the pumping station has been partially repaired, there are still water supply problems in the southern city, according to the ICRC.
FOOD SUPPLIES: The population of Baghdad has only one month’s food supplies left, the representative in Iraq of the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF said here on Friday.
Carel De Rooy told a press conference more than 60 percent of Iraqis received only one food packet a month and this was low in protein.
Launching an appeal for funds to help Iraqi children during the next six months, De Rooy said the food packets were part of the UN “oil for food” aid programme for Iraq.
“Before the war started they would exceptionally receive two food baskets a month but many of them sold the extra food to buy other essentials,” he said.
UNICEF criticised the fact that there was substitute for mothers’ milk in the food packets with the result that only 30 percent of mothers were breast-feeding their children, making these yet more frail, De Rooy said.
Before the war started, a million Iraqi children under five years of age suffered from chronic malnutrition: UNICEF believes the figure has more than doubled since the conflict began two weeks ago. —AFP