Food aid reaches Baghdad, but US blocks relief in north

The first emergency shipment of food is due to reach Baghdad today as the United Nations significantly increases the scale of its aid to Iraq in an effort to avert an impending humanitarian disaster.

However, as the 100 trucks carrying supplies made their way to the Iraqi capital, the UN and international aid agencies accused the US military of deliberately hindering the relief programme by stopping relief flights from coming into northern Iraq.

Save the Children said it had been trying to land a plane in Arbil in northern Iraq with medical supplies to treat 40,000 people and emergency supplies for malnourished children.

The UN has 30 workers stuck in Larnaca, Cyprus, after failing to get security clearance from US military authorities for their own planned flight.

Rob MacGillivray, emergency programme manager of Save The Children, said: "The doctors we are trying to help in Mosul have been struggling against the odds for weeks to continue saving lives, but now the help we have promised them is being endlessly delayed."

Veronique Taveua, spokes-woman for the UN Office of the Humanitarain Coordinator in Iraq, said the delay meant the organisation could not oversee food, water, health care and de-mining programmes in the region.

She added: "This is slowing down the delivery of humanitarian aid. It's too long a process to return to an area where direct conflict did not occur."

Humanitarian agencies warned the situation is critical. The World Health Organisation said the main hospitals in the northern city of Mosul had been looted and were operating at about 50 per cent of capacity.

Khaled Mansour, a WFP spokesman said: "Time is running out for the 60 per cent of the Iraqi people who are entirely dependent on food handouts, and our goal is to restore the system by the beginning of May."

The Red Cross reported that while Baghdad continued to be a serious problem, it was gaining improved access to hospitals in the south and centre of the country, including the cities of Basra, Umm Qasr, Nasiriyah and Zubayr.

"There are 10 main hospitals in Baghdad and most of them were totally ruined," said a Red Cross spokeswoman, Tamara al-Rifai.

The first train loaded with aid pulled out of Umm Qasr port on the way to Basra yesterday, after British soldiers reopened the railway line between the two cities.

In the north, a US military spokesman insisted that while the area around Arbil was safe for military planes, which could defend themselves, civilian planes might be in danger.

The UN food convoy coming to Baghdad from Jordan will be carrying 1,400 tonnes of wheat flour. Another supply line has been established from Turkey for the north of the country with trucks bringing in 3,000 tonnes of food.

The WFP, which has said that some 480,000 tonnes of food will be required for Iraq each month, hopes to bring in 100 tonnes of vegetable oil from Iran. Unicef has also used the Iranian route to carry drinking water into southern Iraq from Iran, the first such cross-border operation between the two combatants of the Iran-Iraq war in 17 years.

Before the war, 60 per cent of Iraq's 26 million people depended directly on the UN-backed oil-for-food programme, which allowed proceeds from Iraq's oil to be used to buy food and medicine while the country was under international economic sanctions. The US has asked the UN to lift the 13-year-old sanctions now Saddam has fallen, but this is likely to take time as it raises issues over who controls Iraq's oil sales and thus who in effect runs the country.