NWFP humanitarian crisis intensifying: ICRC

ISLAMABAD: The International Committee of the Red Cross warned Thursday that a humanitarian crisis was intensifying in northwest Pakistan, where thousands have fled fighting between militants and troops.

The government in North West Frontier Province has said up to half a million could flee the Taliban flashpoint district of Swat and local officials said Wednesday that more than 40,000 left the main town of Mingora in 24 hours.

‘The humanitarian crisis in NWFP is intensifying,’ the ICRC said in a statement, adding it no longer had access to the areas most affected by the conflict and that precise statistics of the displaced were so far unverifiable.

‘We can no longer reach the areas most affected by the fighting on account of the volatile situation,’ Benno Kochner, who runs ICRC operations in NWFP from the provincial capital Peshawar, said in the statement.

‘The ICRC and the Pakistan Red Crescent Society are currently marshalling their resources to be able to provide 120,000 internally displaced people, affected by the fighting, with food and essential relief items,’ it said.

The ICRC said it hopes to provide basic health care for about 30,000 displaced people and that a 60-bed surgical hospital in Peshawar was ‘scaling up its capacity’ to be able to receive up to 100 wounded patients at a time.

Pascal Cuttat, head of the ICRC delegation in Islamabad, urged parties to the conflict ‘to comply with international humanitarian law — in particular to take all feasible precautions to minimise civilian casualties’.

Before fresh fighting erupted last week, the ICRC was already assisting up to 100,000 displaced people in NWFP and Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal areas, which are on the border with war-torn Afghanistan, the organisation said.