UN aid agencies step up Iraq air service, help Iranian refugees go home

United Nations relief agencies have launched a full-scale humanitarian air service for the Iraq crisis and engineered the first repatriation of Iranian refugees from the country in nearly a year.

With the arrival this week of 60 UN staff on a Boeing 737 passenger jet in the northern Iraqi town of Erbil, the air service run by the World Food Programme (WFP), has entered full swing, agency officials said today. The jet – on the first of what will be a thrice-weekly run between Erbil, Amman, Jordan, Basra, in southern Iraq, and Kuwait – is the largest of five passenger and cargo planes dedicated to the needs of aid workers in Iraq and surrounding countries.

"Given the many pressing needs in Iraq, it is vital to have swift and timely dispatch of aid and personnel," WFP Country Director Torben Due said in Baghdad. "This air service will assist immeasurably in pushing the relief effort forward."

The service, scheduled to run for six months at a cost of $23 million, was launched by WFP's Aviation Unit in the agency's Rome headquarters.

Meanwhile, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) announced that a group of 180 Iranian refugees returned home yesterday in the first such repatriation in almost a year. The returnees had fled their settlements in eastern Iraq in early April because of insecurity and tensions with the local host community. They had camped at a makeshift site at Al Charani border crossing, hoping they would be allowed home.

UNHCR staff had worked closely with the Iranian Government to organize their return, and yesterday, Tehran opened the Al Charani crossing so that these anxious refugees could return home, spokesman Kris Janowski said in Geneva.

Hundreds of others refused to cross when Iranian authorities said their livestock would not be allowed in, a standard practice stemming from veterinary health concerns. Others, who had been waiting at the border for more than six weeks with their cars, tractors and other farm machinery, were also not allowed to cross.

"We are taking the matter up with the Tehran Government, trying to persuade it to allow farmers to bring their costly equipment and vehicles back to their homeland," Mr. Janowski said.

There are more than 23,000 Iranian refugees in Iraq, including some 4,500 who were cleared by Tehran to return home before the outbreak of war "so we expect many of these people to return," he added.