Afghanistan: UN agencies step up aid for 15,000 families displaced by fighting in south

United Nations agencies have launched a month long emergency operation to provide humanitarian aid to more than 15,000 Afghan families displaced by the insurgency in Kandahar province.

“We are glad to report that this operation is currently running smoothly and there have been no security or weather concerns so far,” UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) spokesman Aleem Siddique told a news briefing in Kabul, the capital, today.

The UN World Food Programme (WFP) is distributing nearly 1,500 tons of mixed foods including wheat, rice, cooking oil and pulses, while the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the intergovernmental International Organisation for Migration (IOM) are providing 4,000 blankets, 2,000 plastic sheets, and 2,000 family kits with cooking stoves, kerosene lamps and other cooking utensils.

Also today, UNHCR announced that, together with the Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation, it had helped over 1 million returned refugees to build their own homes since 2002, as part of initial reintegration efforts to help the most vulnerable returnees.

Since Afghan voluntary repatriation started in 2002, more than 160,000 returnee families have received UNHCR construction kits and have completed building their homes. Despite security constraints in the south and south-eastern provinces, UNHCR has provided more than 24,000 shelter units to build homes for nearly 170,000 Afghans. Some 18,000 shelters countrywide were completed ahead of winter in 2006 alone.

Overall some 4.7 million Afghans, who fled the country during more than two decades of Soviet occupation and subsequent factional fighting, have returned home since the ouster of the hard-line Taliban regime in 2001. There are still an estimated 3.5 million Afghan refugees in Iran and Pakistan.